The Nosh #3: Who is Bringing What to the Potluck?
A standout collard greens recipe and reflections on Carmela Soprano's baked ziti.
In every family, biological or chosen, there are certain dishes that carry weight. The recipes are so rich with legacy that they are basically a mixture of geography, family history and personal preference stirred together in a pot of culture by a spoon made of identity. It may be the cheesy potatoes (with extra butter), the matzo ball soup, the collard greens or the eggplant parm with Sunday gravy. Some dishes are so sacred to their communities, entire festivals are dedicated to them. And there is usually a certain someone who owns the cooking of that dish for the family functions and community gatherings…this person has inherited both the honor and the pressure of ensuring the family is both fed and represented.
In this week’s Nosh, we are thinking about who is bringing what to the potluck, and what that responsibility means to different people. Jessie is bringing you a version of her family’s iconic greens recipe and Alexis is exploring the symbolism of America’s favorite mob wife’s baked ziti.
Today’s Menu:
Your Next Nosh: Make Your Collard Greens the Star of the Cookout, By Jessie
This Week in Culture: Carmela Soprano’s Ziti is Her Power, by Alexis
The Nosh Recommends: A few Black owned businesses and upcoming events to celebrate Juneteenth
Your Next Nosh: Make Your Collard Greens the Star of the Cookout
At the cookout, everyone has that thing they bring. Your Aunt Lisa might bring the potato salad, Cousin Kay might bring the ribs, nobody except Uncle Chris brings the mac and cheese, and Aunt Amanda.. well maybe she can pick some drinks. The more sacred and central the food to the gathering, the higher up you belong on the family food hierarchy (condolences to all the Aunt Amandas out there). There is no greater honor than being that person who brings the family’s favorite dish. In my family, my uncle's collard greens reign supreme.
In communal gatherings, the honor of bringing sacred dishes like my uncle’s greens often belongs to elders. Yet, like many millennials, I already feel like an elder. I would like to pass “Go” and enter directly into my Auntie Era. I want to own a supply of different matching tracksuits in an astonishing number of colors. I want to sashay down the street with bags that match my shoes, that match my notepad, that match my chapstick. I want to be so incredibly color coordinated that passersby wonder how I could have purchased so many things in the exact same shade. In short, I want someone to ask me to bring the greens to the cookout.
Ten years ago, my Uncle stood over my shoulder and taught me the secrets to his greens. Since then, I have continued to perfect my technique, working to solidify the flavors that will taste like home for my current community and the next generations. I added in some flavors my chosen family taught me (just ginger, don’t worry) and streamlined a process or two. All in all, I have to say, these greens are pretty damn good, and you should make them. They are smoky, silky, a tad spicy, pork free and adaptable to be vegetarian friendly (for all my co-op friends). Make them for your next cookout, add your own twist and begin the journey to your auntie era.
Recipe: Collard Greens
Jam: On my Own by Patty LaBelle
Outfit: A velour tracksuit or a breezy mumu
Time: This is an all day affair
Ingredients:
1 turkey leg OR 2+ teaspoons smoked salt
2 tbsp Canola or another neutral oil
1 inch knob of ginger, finely chopped
½ white onion diced into 1/4 inch pieces (About 3/4 cup)
½ green bell pepper finely diced into 1/4 inch pieces (about ½ cup)
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
4 cups chicken broth (or bullion with water) OR 4 cups veggie broth
2 cloves garlic thinly sliced
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar OR 1 Tablespoon distilled white vinegar for a less sweet taste
2 bunches Collard greens (around 2 pounds)
(Optional) Sugar to taste (1/4 tsp usually does the trick for me)
(Optional) 1 Tablespoon Niter Mantiera (I love this women owned Ethiopian Spice Company)
(optional) vinegary hot sauce or extra vinegar for serving
Instructions:
Ready your Ingredients:
Wash and pick your greens: carefully wash your greens (I like to triple wash to be sure) with a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in a big bowl for each rinse.
Dry greens thoroughly and cut into 1 inch squares. I like to stack my greens one on top of the other, roll them up hot-dog style and cut them into 1 inch ribbons and then again the opposite way to create little 1 inch squares of greens. Set aside.
Thinly dice your green pepper, white onions and ginger and slice your garlic. Set aside.
If using bullion, ready your broth.
Cook your Greens:
Heat your oil in a pan on medium and add your onions, ginger and bell pepper and let them sweat for 5 minutes until they soften, stirring occasionally, taking care to keep the heat not so hot that the veggies brown.
Add in your sliced garlic, red chili flakes and any other desired spices let cook in oil/ onion mix for 1 min.
Next, nestle the turkey leg down into this bed of deliciousness.
Now it's time for the greens! Add your greens in and evenly coat them in your oil veggie mixture. You may have to add greens in a few batches (and work around the leg). Room will open up as the greens cook down.
Add in your broth, and vinegar and let cook for 20 minutes, then taste your broth. Your greens will taste like your broth so now is a good time to adjust! You can add some more spices, some applewood salt for smokiness. Before going crazy with adjustments, I recommend spooning some broth out into a small bowl, adding your desired spice and seeing how it tastes before adding to the whole batch (save yourself some heartache if it's not the right move. Keep in mind flavors will mellow as they cook and you can always adjust more down the line).
Let the greens continue to simmer for at least 1 hour, or until tender. Taste frequently, and make tiny adjustments as necessary (I usually play with my vinegar/salt/spice ratio in ¼ tsp increments).
When the meat starts to fall off the bone of the turkey leg, remove from the pot and let cool before shredding the meat with a fork and setting aside.
30 minutes before serving taste again, make any last adjustments. Add the meat back in.
When all is done, ENJOY! I like to eat my greens with some rice (a very controversial move) to soak up all that juice.
Carmela Soprano’s Ziti is Her Power
If Carmela Soprano cooks you something, it’s for one of three reasons. One, she loves you and wants you to be well fed. Two, you are attending a gathering to which her baked ziti has been invited and is expected to attend. Or three, she is manipulating you.
For the uninitiated, Carmela Soprano is the long suffering wife of New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano of the HBO show, The Sopranos. Over the show’s six seasons, Carmela wrestles with her dependency on and complicity in Tony’s unsavory lifestyle (for more on Carmela’s complicity as a representation of white womanhood, read this excellent P.E. Moskowitz essay). This lifestyle is built on embezzlement, adultery, obfuscation and a whole lotta murder. But it also provides Carmela and her two kids, Meadow and A.J., with a McMansion in the North Jersey suburbs, a constantly replenishing supply of fur coats, and a whole lotta cash. Carmela and Tony struck an unspoken deal long before we meet them on screen, Tony will provide the resources and Carmela will hold down the house and not comment on or complain about what it takes to earn those resources.
I am Italian on my mom’s side, and I love many things about our culture: the food, the warmth, the inability to speak at a normal volume, THE FOOD. But it’s always been tricky for me to navigate the gender roles that are deeply entrenched in Italian-American life. Like in many other cultures, one of the most enduring expectations for Italian women is that we will take on the responsibility to make sure our families and our communities are well fed. Carmela Soprano is no exception. 85% of the time we see her on screen (a rough estimate), she is standing behind the U-shaped blond wood kitchen island that separates the ones doing the cooking from the ones doing the eating. Sometimes she is pulling a Tupperware of cold past’ out of the fridge to warm up for Tony, letting it spin in the microwave as she taps her French manicured acrylics on the marble countertops- lips pursed and eyes twitching across Tony’s face as she silently assesses which goomar he was with last night. Sometimes she’s stirring the Sunday gravy in one of her deliciously New Jersey of the early aughts outfits, while her mother twitters about behind her, grilling her about why Tony is late for dinner. Carmela’s onscreen moments of leisure usually feature her at a restaurant eating food she didn’t make with the other mob wives.
While Carmela’s kitchen duties have the potential to render her powerless, over the show’s six seasons we watch her come to understand that her food is also her power. And Carmela’s baked ziti is hands down her most powerful dish. Even on screen, it looks delicious. Fat, tubular pasta smothered in crimson marina, baked with so much mozzarell’ it drips in inches long strands when you raise a piece from the Pyrex. (The recipe is never divulged on screen, but people across the internet have been trying to recreate it for years). Carmela’s ziti is IT. People demand it, are dependent on it, and literally cuss when they don’t have it. It even summons a priest to her house on a rainy night.
Nowhere is the power of Carmela’s baked ziti more palpable than within the arc of her relationship with Father Phil Intintola. Father Phil is the first of a few men Carmela has an extra-marital flirtation with throughout the series, each of whom she mentally idealizes as the stable, loyal partner Tony could never be.
Father Phil is the priest at Carmela’s church, and throughout the first season of the show he frequently stops by the Soprano home to watch movies with Carmela. They spend these evenings cooing over on-screen romances, sipping Chianti and slurping Carmela’s pasta. In the fifth episode of the first season, Father Phil’s desire for Carmela’s home cooking is so strong, he braves a torrential downpour for some of its cheesy goodness. Carmela has spent the day at home battling a cold while Meadow and Tony visit colleges in Maine and A.J. is at a friend’s house.
After Carm welcomes Father Phil inside and relieves him of his soaking wet windbreaker to reveal his clerical collar, he gets right to the point, “I have a confession to make, Carm…I have a jones for your baked ziti.” Carmela reassures him that she has some in the freezer (because she ALWAYS has some in the freezer!!) and that she can reheat it, calling out “It’s so much better that way isn’t it… the mozzarell’ gets all nice and chewy…” as she breezes from the foyer into the kitchen. We cut to Father Phil in the kitchen where he tosses the salad and asks Carmela if she thinks he’s a schnorrer, a Yiddish term for somebody who “comes around just in time for free grub.” Her answer is saturated in the expectations she’s spent a lifetime absorbing, “you’re a man… you like to eat.”
The evening moves on to find them both sitting cross legged on the floor in front of the fireplace, their mouths hovering over the coffee table and hoovering saucy ziti into their mouths while they debate the merits of casting Willen Dafoe as Jesus. In between bites of pasta, Father Phil reveals the unique ingredient that makes Carm’s ziti so special: “These red pepper flakes make all the difference… mmm spicy.” Carmela blushes into her Chianti.
Father Phil ends up spending the night on the couch after a late night viewing Remains of the Day. The next morning is a classic Morning After, Father Phil stumbles from the living room into the kitchen in an anxious stupor, panicking that some other members of the congregation would have seen his car parked out front the Soprano residence overnight- tarnishing their night together with his regret. Carmela, eyes still locked on the morning Star Ledger., with a shrug of her shoulders responds, “Is there a commandment against eating ziti?”
Shortly after Father Phil hurries out the door, Tony arrives home from Maine and instinctively beelines to the fridge. He swings the freezer door open, his face wrinkling in confusion at the empty shelf, “Any cold past?’”, he calls to Carmela. “There was some ziti but it got eaten,” she responds, voice dripping with a “sucks to be you” sentiment. Tony’s jaw drops in shock, “The whole tray? Father Jughead was here wasn’t he? What’d you guys do for 12 hours, play Name that Pope?” Tony’s sarcasm belies a rare display of jealousy and insecurity from the New Jersey mob boss. Not only was another man in his marital house, but he had eaten his marital ziti.
Eight episodes later, in the season one finale, Carmela goes down to the church with a Pyrex of fresh ziti for Father Phil. She confidently passes through the church doors, her stacked heels clicking on the tile, the container of pasta balanced expertly on her palm. As she crosses through the foyer into the belly of the church, she sees Father Phil brushing knees with Rosalie Aprile- a widowed mob wife and Carmela’s closest confidante. In Phil’s hand is a bowl of Rosalie’s ziti. He shovels it in his mouth with the same satisfied moans Carmela thought were only reserved for her version. Rosalie dabs sauce from Father Phil’s chin as he commends the unique ingredient that makes HER ziti so special, “The fresh basil really adds to it.”
Carmela wordlessly walks out of the church, turning back a few times to double check that she has just seen what she just saw. She marches out the church doors and straight to a trash can on the sidewalk. She slides the lid off the glass container in her hands and dumps its entire contents in the trash. Pain dances across her face as she turns on her heel and walks away, with both her Pyrex and her dignity.
Oddly enough, out of all the violence and psychological warfare that is the backbone of The Sopranos- THIS is one of the series’ most controversial scenes. To this day, there are still Reddit threads and YouTube comments dedicated to viewer’s disbelief that Carmela would toss an entire tray of perfectly delicious pasta. Some say it was a waste of food. Others say she should have given it to her kids. Many are worried how Tony would feel seeing his wife’s beloved baked ziti be unceremoniously trashed.
I completely disagree with these sentiments. Sure, we should never waste food… but why should Carmela share her coveted baked ziti with a priest Goldilocksing the mob wives pasta dishes? And is she obligated to share it with a husband who pays her bills but breaks her heart? The answer to those questions may be in the eye of the beholder. What IS certain is that Carmela’s baked ziti is her signature dish that men continue to demand, and she’s earned the power to select who she feeds it to.
Reflecting on and rewatching Carmela for this essay led to some novel, personal revelations about my own relationship with cooking for others and the power dynamics that relationship is attempting to subvert. I am going to return to these reflections in an upcoming issue of the newsletter, as I think I’ve given you enough to Nosh on for today.
The Nosh Recommends:
In the next issue of the Nosh, we will be celebrating Juneteenth. In the meantime, here are some businesses and local events we recommend supporting this year.
You Support: Some Black owned businesses, including those listed in that hyperlink and favorites like Palette Pots for stylish, vibrant new homes for your beloved plant babies, BKYLNBARSOAP for a deliciously decadent new soap named after iconic Black women like Erykah, Lauryn and Nina, and support this black-owned bookstore Marcus Books founded in 1960; an institution for black books and authors.
You Go To: The Juneteenth Food Festival at the Weeksville Heritage Center if you’re in Brooklyn this weekend.
To Nosh On: Each issue, we will pose a question to the community… because Noshing is better with a group!
What dish are you assigned, or wish you were assigned, to bring to the potluck? Tell us in the comments below.
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