COVER STORY : Mistress of the Black Cabbage

In the kitchen at Valentino Ristorante, a place where caviar and white truffles are the normal order of the day, chef Angelo Auriana is facing one of his sternest tests. Paola di Mauro, a visiting home cook from Italy, is making soup.

“Could I have some garlic?” she asks. Auriana fetches a jar filled with peeled cloves. Di Mauro, a motherly woman in a floral print dress, pulls a clove, rubs it between her fingers and smells it. “How long ago was this peeled?”

“A couple of days ago,” says Auriana. “We go through so much of it, we peel a lot at once.”

“No,” Di Mauro says. “This has no perfume. Look at it, it’s yellow and hard. Garlic must be white and glossy.”

“But we can’t peel garlic for every order when it comes in,” says Auriana.

“Better to do without it,” Di Mauro says. “Do you have some bay leaves?”

Auriana brightens. “Right here,” he says, handing her another jar.

Di Mauro pulls a leaf out, breaks it between her fingers and smells. “No,” she says again. “There is no perfume there. If it isn’t fresh, it’s better to do without.”

And she does. For her minestra di farro e lenticchie , she boils the beans in plain water with only celery, carrots and onions to flavor. The same with the cicerchia , an ancient Roman dried bean that somewhat resembles a fava, if favas came one bean to a pod.

At dinner, no one complains--of course not Piero Selvaggio, Valentino’s owner; not Mauro Vincenti, the owner of Downtown’s luxurious Rex Il Ristorante; not Tony May, owner of San Domenico, New York’s fanciest Italian restaurant; not Italian food expert Darrell Corti, nor any of the assembled winemakers and foodies from Italy who happen to be in town for Vincenti’s wedding.

Di Mauro may be a little difficult (Auriana, confides one Valentino insider, is now being called “Santo Angelo” for his diplomacy with Di Mauro) and she’s certainly picky, but there’s no arguing with her food. In a country filled with home cooks, it is to Di Mauro’s house in Marino, a small town just south of Rome, that some of America’s best restaurateurs head when they want a taste of the real thing.

Hers is a cooking based not on luxurious specialties and complicated techniques, but on carefully selected plain ingredients and painstaking preparations.

“Romans have been able to take poor food and make a great cuisine,” she says, offering as an example a soup made from black cabbage and dried codfish. “This zuppa di cavolichio is found only in Latri, nowhere else. It’s a dish of incredible poverty. Black cabbage is a perennial plant that grows near the vineyards. It doesn’t need water, it doesn’t need to be fed, it doesn’t need anything.

“Of course, you would always have some potatoes, and some tomatoes, dried bread, always oil,” she says. In Italian, the list is a litany of ingredients punctuated by a repeated “ C’e sempre “ (“That’s always there”). These ingredients she cooks with cut-up salt cod (not even soaked).

“The potatoes take away the salt of the baccala . And the salt turns the black cabbage a beautiful green like this,” she says, holding out her hand to display a ring set with a large emerald. “You slice the bread and put it in the bottom of the soup bowl, sprinkle with some chopped garlic, add the vegetables and the cabbage and then the baccala and pour over just a little oil.

“This is a dish based on supplies you have for life.”

While the ingredients may be plain, they’re lavished with a great deal of attention. Di Mauro has very definite opinions on everything from utensils to procedures. While she’s not one to lecture, in the course of talking about food, a hundred little tips come out. Hers is a tale told in recipes.

Something as simple as a cherry tomato sauce, for example, comes out like this: “ Pasta con pomodoretti ? Start with one kilo [a little more than two pounds] of cherry tomatoes, all cut in half. Add three tablespoons of bread crumbs, three tablespoons of pecorino cheese and a half glass [about 1/4 cup] of olive oil. Put everything in a shallow metal pan--not glass, it doesn’t heat up quickly enough so the juices won’t evaporate enough to make the sauce the right consistency. Cook everything in a 450-degree oven until the tomatoes begin to crackle, about 10 to 15 minutes. Serve it with any short pasta.”

In the middle of directions for a pappardelle alla finta caccia (“false hunter’s sauce,” named because its flavor is similar to game dishes), she breaks into riffs first on the alchemy of garlic, then on the nature of spoons, vinegar and cheese.

“Chop together three cloves of garlic, two sprigs of rosemary and one hot pepper. Cook very slowly with 1/2 cup oil. When cooking garlic, you have to be very careful, you never want to fry it. Add one kilo chopped peeled tomatoes and cook very quickly for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring it together with a wooden spoon.

“Always use wooden spoons, they don’t squish the tomatoes and don’t scratch the pots. When I cook, I put a plate in the middle of the stove and have four different wooden spoons--one for every dish. The sound of a metal spoon is like fingernails scratching on blackboard. Wood is smooth and good. You can see the color and consistency of the sauce better.

“After 10 to 15 minutes, add 1/2 glass of vinegar. What kind? Not balsamic, but either red or white is fine. It’s not important, as long as it’s very strong vinegar. Stir all that for one second and the sauce is ready. Serve it with pecorino sprinkled over.

“Always add the cheese off the fire. If you don’t, it melts and that changes the flavor and the consistency. Parmesan that is so delicate and so perfumed, if you cook it on the fire, it loses all of the flavor.”

While most Italian cooks are strictly regional (and it sometimes seems that region may be only a matter of several square blocks), Di Mauro is a one-woman Risorgimento. Her family, which owns one of the largest hardware stores in Rome, includes members from many regions. Her husband is Sicilian. They now live in a villa on the outskirts of Rome, where Di Mauro--now in her 60s--also supervises the small family winery, Colle Picchioni. (“Everyone says they’re visiting her to taste the wines,” says a friend. “What they really want is dinner.”)

“This is cucina casareccia ,” she says--traditional family cooking. “But in Italy there are thousands of family traditions.”

Consider the difference in the ways Romans and Sicilians cook fish, for example.

“ Calamaretti is a very traditional Roman dish,” she says. “You make it with squid, very small, about as big around as finger, but you can use bigger ones if you cut them small. Cook together oil, one kilo of calamaretti and four or five cherry tomatoes. It’s better if they’re a little green--with fish, you don’t want a red-red sauce, the tomato is too strong a taste. You only want to see the color, you don’t want to taste it.

“Cook this together with two cloves of whole garlic. Chopped garlic is too strong for fish; cook it whole and then remove it. Serve this with spaghetti and some finely chopped parsley. Don’t add white wine, either; fish is very delicate and you want the dish to taste just of fish.

“In Sicily, they cook fish differently. First of all, they have many fish we don’t have farther north. Swordfish, for example, they roll up in involtini with cheese. Oh, it’s wonderful.

“In Sicily the sky is very strong and the sea is very strong. The colors are very strong, so also the tastes are very strong. Sicilian cuisine is violent, just like the colors--the colors of Sicilian sun and the Sicilian sea. The tastes are in harmony with the colors and also with the character of the people, they’re very passionate, very warm.

“Roman cuisine is very pastoral, but with some elegance. The old Romans were shepherds. It’s poor people’s food. Of course, Roman cuisine is many cuisines: There was the cuisine of the emperors, where everything was served on gold plates. And there was the Pope’s cuisine, it too was very opulent. They used to send all over Italy looking for the best ingredients.

“But in between, there was always the people’s food and they cooked with what they could find. A minestra of pasta and beans is not a chef’s creation, but a dish of necessity.”

SPELT AND LENTIL SOUP (Minestra di Farro e Lenticchie) 1 pound lentils Water 1 stalk celery 1 carrot 1 bay leaf Salt 3/4 pound farro, or whole wheatberries Olive oil 2 cloves garlic 3 small tomatoes, peeled and chopped fine 1/2 teaspoon crushed dried chiles Coarsely ground black pepper This is Roman poverty cooking at its plainest. But it’s surprisingly good with the final addition of the olive oil and black pepper. The keys to success, says di Mauro, are: Use the smallest lentils you can find; keep both lentils and farro warm at all times (if they cool they get starchy), and if you need to add more water to the soup, make sure the water is boiling before adding it. Farro, or spelt, is available at some of Southern California’s better Italian groceries, but if you can’t find it you can get much the same effect with whole wheatberries from a health food store. * Rinse and sort lentils. Drain. Bring 2 quarts water to boil in soup pot with celery, carrot and bay leaf. When boiling, add lentils and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Reduce heat, partly cover and simmer until lentils are barely cooked, about 25 minutes. Watch carefully, lentils must not overcook. When barely cooked, set pot aside and keep warm. Bring another 1 1/2 quarts water to boil and add farro and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Reduce heat, partly cover and simmer until farro begins to soften, about 40 minutes. Set aside and keep warm. In another pot, cook together 1/4 cup olive oil, garlic, tomatoes and chiles over low heat just until mixture combines, about 5 to 10 minutes. Add cooked lentils with cooking liquid, discarding celery, carrot and bay leaf. Partly cover and and simmer, stirring with wooden spoon. About 15 minutes before serving, add farro and continue cooking another 10 minutes, stirring from time to time. Remove garlic cloves. Taste for salt and correct seasoning. Ladle into soup plates and sprinkle with coarsely ground black pepper to taste and top with thin stream of olive oil. Makes 10 to 12 servings. Each serving contains about: 321 calories; 74 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 7 grams fat; 52 grams carbohydrates; 17 grams protein; 3.39 grams fiber. *

DATE, ALMOND AND WALNUT TORTE (Torta di Datteri, Mandorle e Noci) 3 eggs 1 cup sugar 6 tablespoons butter, softened 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 cup chopped walnuts 1 cup chopped almonds 1 cup cut-up dates Whipped cream, optional This incredibly simple dessert is also incredibly delicious. The trick here is in using scissors to cut up the dates and then mixing the dates and the nuts together slowly to make sure the sticky fruit doesn’t clump together. Beat eggs with sugar in bowl. Add softened butter and vanilla extract and beat well to mix. Sift together flour and baking powder, add to egg mixture and stir to combine. Put walnuts and almonds in bowl and stir to combine. Add dates, little at time, stirring to mix very thoroughly. Add nut mixture to cake batter and fold very carefully and thoroughly. Line 9-inch round baking pan with parchment paper. Pour mixture into pan and bake at 300 degrees until wooden skewer stuck in middle comes out clean, about 30 to 35 minutes. Serve with whipped cream on side. Makes 8 to 10 servings. Each serving, without whipped cream, contains about: 512 calories; 169 mg sodium; 103 mg cholesterol; 29 grams fat; 59 grams carbohydrates; 9 grams protein; 2.08 grams fiber.

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Paola’s Principles of Cooking * No matter how humble, ingredients must be of the best quality. * Use water rather than broth for cooking vegetables and soups. “You want to taste the vegetables, not the liquid.” * Garlic must be used with care. It should never be browned. And in many recipes, the cloves should be cooked whole and then removed before serving. * Always use wooden spoons, and use different spoons for different dishes. Most especially, wooden spoons used for sweets and those used for savories must be kept strictly separate. * While Parmigiano-Reggiano may be the king of Italian cheeses, it is best used in delicate dishes-- with fish, with risotto, with some vegetables and some pasta sauces. For most recipes, it is better to use the saltier, more emphatic Pecorino Romano. * Fish must be treated with a gentle hand. Rarely add garlic, ripe tomatoes or even white wine. * The secret to picking good artichokes is to look for those with the fattest, straightest stems. The secret to cooking artichokes well is in the cleaning. “It’s like a sculpture,” di Mauro says, describing a technique that, essentially, peels the tough outer leaves and skin. * When cooking grains and legumes, make sure the only water added is boiling. Cold water sets the starch and makes the beans, lentils or farro gummy.