How to eat Arrosticini

Arrosticini are little skewers of grilled lamb meat. The meat has to

be cut into really tiny pieces to cook the right way, quickly, over coals.

Essentially, it's meat on a stick. Readers may remember my post from July 4 this year when we tried to make arrosticini back in Columbus.  Although a valiant effort, it was flawed because we didn't have the means to cut the meat to the correct and uniform dimensions.

Today we're in the spiritual home land of arrosticini, Abruzzo, and we're enjoying the real thing. As we were doing this, I came to remember the trouble that those poor Columbus-ites had trying to eat the meat on a stick, so I prepared this service as a guide.

Step 1: pick a nice restaurant. Outdoor, at night, is the best choice.

Step 2: Order your appetizers, arrosticini, beer, etc. We'll skip past all the preliminaries.  The arrosticini arrive:

Pick one up by the long end of the stick.

Step 3: bring to face.

Step 4: open mouth, insert meat between teeth and grab the last couple pieces of meat between your teeth. Clench.

Step 5: pull stick away from face, holding meat in teeth.

Step 6: Be amazed by the flavor and goodness. Don't need no stinking sauce, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, etc, they're best straight up!

Here's a better close up view of the arrosticini.

Now some do's and don'ts.

No sword play with your food.

Liquid refreshment, a lot of it, is a good thing.

Finally, save the sticks as you eat so that at the end you can count them and boast about how many arrosticini you ate!

Fare la scarpetta

Today we will explore the curious phrase "fare la scarpetta" or "doing the scarpetta".   What is "the scarpetta"?   Taken literally, it's a little shoe, but as the expression goes "doing the", we're probably not looking for a noun here, we're looking for an action.

But let's back off.   Imagine you sit down at meal time to a nice plate of spaghetti.  Like this one.  Ok, they're vermicelli, but no one will ever know the difference.

These vermicelli are in a sauce that was cooked with tomatoes and fish. You can just see some evidence of this in the lower left corner if you look close.




Let's say you've finished the plate, and let's say it was very good, and the sauce was very satisfying.  And let's pretend you've still got some bread left.

And so you look at the bread, and you look at the leftovers in the bottom of the pan, and you think to yourself "The bread is good, but it's dry.  The sauce is better, but it's inconvenient to eat by itself:  let me put 2 and 2 together and clean the bottom of the pan with the bread!"


With the help of my assistant the 2nd photo shows just such a thing.  He's dipping the bread down into the bottom of the pan to soak up some more sauce.

Before I could get another picture, however, he had eaten all of the sauce and all the leftover vermicelli as well.  He's fast, and insatiable.  It's an inherited trait in his family:  all the males in the family show this same habit.

So, the vermicelli and all the sauce are gone, but we get the idea:  we use the bread to clean the plate, then the cooking vessel.  It's an ageless tradition in Italy, and although it derives from the basest of roots, it's gotten enough of a reputation as a "good thing to do" that if you search Google for "scarpetta" the first few pages of hits will show you links to fine Italian restaurants all over North America instead of explaining to you what "scarpetta" really is.  If you search on Bing, you find links to people who were named "scarpetta";  Bing may be completely correct but they just don't get it.

If you search for "fare la scarpetta" on either one finally you get somewhere.  You'll find links that explain that a piece of bread, when deformed between your fingers, becomes long and flat, and in some way resembles a long thin shoe, something that could reasonably be called a "scarpetta"  (a little shoe.)

So, now we know that it gets the name from the shape of the bread, but how do you do it?  It's easy enough in the plate, but say the plate is already clean?  And the 5qt pan that had the vermicelli has been cleaned out too.  What can we do?

Say we have one of these things on the right.  It's the pan where the fish was cooked in the tomatoes. All the fish is gone, all the tomatoes are gone.  What, then, is left?   Flavour!

We can do something with this. It's perfect for demonstrating the technique because the sides are low and we can get a good picture.

Start with a small piece of bread between your thumb and forefinger.  You will have to experiment with the size to see what works for you.  Try to find good bread.  Here's a hint: if you crush the bread and it turns to sawdust and disappears, it's no good.  It must take the abuse and bounce back to it's original size.

Now dip the end of the bread into the pan, starting away from you.  Slowly, moving it left and right as needed, bring it towards you, soaking up flavor as you go.

Slowly!  Give it time to soak up the sauce.  If you've got good bread to work with it will take the abuse and remain solid.

If you see the bread is staying too dry move around in search of wetter spots.  If you see the bread is getting too wet, pull out before you lose chunks of bread.

When you get to the end of the run, tilt the bread, quickly up into the air, to catch what ever loose sauce is trapped on the end.

Now carry the bread back over to your plate.
Admire the work you did, and shove the whole thing right into your mouth!

So that's how you do "the scarpetta" at home, when you've got the cooking vessels to work with.  In a restaurant, it's not so easy:  the chef doesn't just let you walk into the kitchen.  So you make do with just cleaning the sauce on your plate.  Once in a while, with luck, you will be rewarded for your efforts, and the chef's mother will bring you out more sauce!  (Hey, it really did happen to me!)