QUANTO BASTA

In cooking and in life, how do you know when enough is enough?

Fine-tuning the art of quanto basta is essential to replicating the dishes you fall in love with at the table in Italy

The primary form of measurement in Italy is quanto basta, or qb. as it’s often abbreviated, which means “as much as you need.” Italians always seem to know just how much that is.  Acquiring the art of quanto basta has been the challenge of my life. It's a genetically determined form of creativity that the rest of us, not born and bred on that glorious peninsula, can only struggle to learn.

Food was not on my mind the first time I went to Italy in 1992. I was in search of those Baroque and Renaissance giants I had studied in college… you know, Caravaggio, Bernini, and Botticelli, those guys.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were incidental to my well-planned museum-focused itinerary.

But you have to eat, and so it was in Rome at Hostaria Costanza, in the appropriately named Piazza del Paradiso, that I sat down to my first meal in bell’Italia to be overcome by the most sensual (culinarily speaking) experience of my life. What I consumed, one forkful after another, had nothing to do with Italian food in America—not in my grandmother’s kitchen, not in any restaurant in New York or Boston or St. Louis. I sat at that table and devoured multiple edibles - not that kind of edible -with mysterious names and unknown (to me) ingredients, and since then my life has never been the same.

Today after nearly 60 return visits to the land of my ancestors, my shelves at home buckle under the weight of all the cookbooks from Venice to Sicily. My desk drawers are stuffed with file folders of hand-written and printed recipes from my Italian culinary mentors, those chefs, waiters, and home cooks whom I’ve obnoxiously pestered with questions over the years. A list of ingredients and sometimes basic instructions is generally easy to come by, but when it gets down to how much of this or that to add, the answer is usually “quanto basta,” —sometimes delivered with a shrug or a smirk. As if to say, “what a stupid question—quanto basta! That’s how much!” Impossible to take the question any further. You have to figure it out all by your pathetically inexperienced self.

A recipe calls for one onion—a big one, how big? Qb. How many tomatoes? And do you mean the little piennoli from the base of Mt. Vesuvius or those bigger ones shaped like hearts I’ve seen in the markets in Bologna? Some basil—a quarter cup, a whole cup? Again, qb. The juice of one lemon. Hmmm.

The lemons here in Florida are the size of little eggs.

Amalfi lemons—more the size of a little chicken.

And so it goes until I finally reach my own decision as to how much is enough for the dish. For me. For that one time. Quanto basta.

It was in this spirit that I attempted to create an antipasto from a restaurant (now closed) in Fumone, a medieval town south of Rome that I visited often for a few years—that’s another story for another time. I loved this dish but have no memory of how it was described on the menu. The main ingredients, I was told by the owner, were zucchini, smoked provola, and salmon. From there, I was on my own, which is where it got challenging: I can't find smoked provola where I live, and of the 3 or more times I'd ordered this creation, sometimes the salmon was fresh, and other times it was smoked. The zucchini was the easy part.

Here's what I did:

*Slice zucchini in 1/3 inch rounds, place on lightly greased cookie sheet in 350 degree oven for about 5 minutes. Zucchini should be slightly soft but still firm.

*Arrange each portion like this: create a flower-like shape by over-lapping zucchini rounds, top with large circle of smoked mozzarella (unless you can find smoked provola), top that with salmon, either fresh or smoked (I used smoked).

*Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and finely chopped parsley.

*Place under broiler - not too close - for about 5 minutes, or until cheese melts and slightly browns.

*You can top with a little cherry tomato or not. I prefer more parsley.

And that's it!

Success! With nary a measuring cup or spoon and only quanto basta as my guide, it all worked out.

But don’t many things in life come down to quanto basta? Sometimes it’s hard to know how much we need of a good thing, of anything. How many children to have? That one was easy: two daughters was it for me. Very happy with that. How much money for retirement, for that trip to Australia next year? How much love do we need to give, to receive, to show our pets, our children, our spouses? How much water does that succulent on the windowsill need to survive? How many pairs of shoes do I really need? Let’s just skip over that one.

When it comes to writing a book, quanto basta plagues me in a different way. How much of my childhood needs to go in? Do I include that day of the epic snowstorm when my father built me an igloo in our backyard? The time my mother abruptly took me out of my third-grade classroom and ushered me into a cab because we were leaving my father? Or how about the time during my divorce when I ruined my new computer by banging my hands down on the keyboard over and over again as though that cold object of metal and plastic could feel pain? Should I put that in? Is it too much? Quanto basta! It never ends.

After all these years, I still love those old masters of the art world and seek them out whenever I return to Rome or Florence or Messina. But nothing compares to the enduring and fanatical love for the food of Italy that I’ve carried with me ever since that first dinner in Paradise. It’s taken some time, but I’ve learned how to figure it out now when qb shows up in a recipe.

If music is the food of love as someone wrote centuries ago, then I believe that quanto basta can be the tool by which we measure the ingredients in our salads and in our lives.

And we can leave the shoes out of it.