In 2002, Mario Batali published “The Babbo Cookbook,” a guide to the cooking at his flagship restaurant in Manhattan, and within two years I had made every recipe in it at least once.
I worked carefully, using the cookbook’s photographs as blueprints. I made the dishes exactly as they were depicted on the page, as if I were expecting the chef himself to check my work before allowing the food to leave my kitchen.
I ran my little fake-o Babbo well. One night my mother came to dinner. I served the restaurant’s braised short ribs with horseradish gremolata, arranging the food on individual plates. I might have been building model airplanes. It took a little while. Perhaps the dishes cooled a little by the time we all sat to eat.
“At truly elegant homes,” my mother said, “the food is served on platters, en famille.”
There is much to be said for passing warm china around a table filled with family and friends, serving one another. But there is also something magical about bringing the aesthetics of restaurant food into the home, offering to those same people the joy of a perfectly balanced plate, each ingredient placed just so, to marvelous effect.
Cooking for iPad This is particularly the case with the dish that follows, which started out at Babbo as black bass served in a lemony capon stock, with Hubbard squash and delicate shell-on bay scallops from Taylor Shellfish Farms in Washington State. On a platter, it would be a soupy disaster. But in wide soup bowls, with each guest receiving a scattering of squash and scallops, a scant cup of broth to surround them and a crisp portion of fish placed delicately on top, every bite reveals a new and exciting layer of texture and flavor.
There is no need to make the dish with black bass, Hubbard squash or Taylor bay scallops, much less capon broth. I made it with striped bass until stocks of that fish began to slide; with the porgies some know as scup; and most effectively with the Northeastern bottom fish known as fluke. You could use red snapper or any firm-fleshed white fish. Hubbard squash is a dream, but butternut squash works beautifully in its stead. As does chicken stock instead of the capon. And swapping out the farmed bay scallops for the deeper salinity of wild ones, or for small ocean scallops, is no crime.
The key to success is to cook serially, allowing the dish to come together seamlessly at the end. You make a kind of uncooked lemon jam, bright with oregano, and swirl it into stock and wine. You sauté cubes of squash. You fry your fish, hard on one side and then barely on the other. And, while the fish is cooking, you poach the scallops in the broth, making it a kind of brodetto, or Adriatic fish soup. Spoon the squash into warm bowls, followed by the scallops and the brodetto. Top with the fish and a scattering of scallions.
Forget the platters. It’s romantic, Ma.