Crostata

It’s a damn pie folks. In Corleone the Andolini call it coppi because we’re stuck up snobs who desire to live closer to an active volcano. The only thing complicated is the crust. My Auntie Mame has the gift, I cheat by using exotic ingredients like ice cubes and Vodka and hiding (and eating) my failures in shame. If you want to experiment the local grocery has very acceptable pie shells either as chilled tubes in the dairy aisle or frozen next to the ice cream you’ll want to accompany it (oh, don’t try to tell me you make your own ice cream, it’s an impossible hassle and did you milk the cow too?). The canned fillings are pretty ok also.

Meat Sweats
By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
Jul 11, 2017

The knock on the door was barely audible over the pounding midnight rain. I shook off a deep doze and opened the door to find a bedraggled pile of reddish-gold fur and a pair of soulful eyes. In its mouth, it held a long stick. At the end of the stick was a handkerchief containing all of its earthly possessions.

Come on in, I said. Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned for photo op purposes by New York Times columnist David Brooks, stood dripping and shivering in my foyer. I half-filled his dog bowl with Jameson and he took it down in several big gulps.

“I had to get out,” he said. “It was starting to get crazy down there. Master’s off the rails and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. He walks around, day and night, mumbling to himself, saying weird stuff about community and prosciutto. People are starting to wonder. Douthat, the former houseboy, jumps into closets now when he sees him coming and Stephens, the new one, hides behind the sofa. Nobody wants to listen to 15 minutes on how Edmund Burke’s Reflections warned us against radicalism and balsamic vinegar. I mean, OK, hear it once and it’s interesting but around the third time, you want to talk about hockey.”

I was horrified. I’d never seen him like this, even on the days when he’d sneak me into the Young Fogies Club through the kitchen door at the top of the fire escape. There was great despair in his eyes and bits of Milk Bones in his teeth.
…
While we were talking, my morning Times thumped through the mail slot and into the foyer behind him.

“Go ahead,” Moral Hazard said. “See if I’m lying.”

I turned to the op-ed page.
…
“You see?” Moral Hazard said. “Then he goes off talking about class barriers and doesn’t even mention, you know, money—who has it and how they got it and what they do to protect it. He talks about zoning and elite colleges, but not about the tax code and deregulated American business. He’s worried about a lot of “invisible” stuff. If I talked like that, they’d send me “up to the farm,” if you know what I mean, and I think you do because you watched Old Yeller a couple of times when you were a kid.”

He was shivering and dripping and now he was all worked up. I showed him to the back porch.

Sleep here tonight, I told him. You’ll feel better over breakfast.

“What are you having?” he asked.

A friend from Naples sent me a box of crostata, I told him. Then he bit me on the ankle and went off in a huff. I thought that was fairly rude and made plans to speak to him in the morning, but he was gone before I woke up.

Coppi! If it came from Napoli it’s coppi!

Philistines!