Try the Braciole

I was a weirdly picky eater as a kid, though in my defense, I spent the first three years of my life on a strict diet of soymilk and bananas – not optimal for developing an adventurous palate. My mother says that once I was allowed to eat other foods, I dove in with enthusiasm and tried everything. Some things I loved, like green olives, clams on the half shell, spinach, and peanut butter and jelly. Other things, like any variation on ground beef, ham, and all cheeses – nope. I remember many nights spent staring hopelessly at the slab of meatloaf or the dreaded ham on my plate, knowing I couldn’t possibly eat it and also knowing that I’d have to sit at the dinner table until bedtime for refusing. Even my capacity for great, teary drama failed to budge my mother. The deal was, eat your dinner, or stare at it – your choice. To this day I can’t eat a burger without piling it with pickles, meatloaf is a hard pass, and ham is something I’m okay with only in small doses and preferably hiding under something else in a sandwich.

Needless to say, I missed out on some incredibly great food. Gave guacamole the side-eye until after college. Didn’t discover the glories of mac and cheese till 2009. Wouldn’t risk a casserole of any kind until I had two toddlers running around and discovered that a person can choke down just about anything if she’s tired enough. Probably the most glorious dish I missed and can now never, ever, ever experience is my grandmother’s homemade braciole.

Braciole (say bruh-jhzholl) is deceptively simple. Take a piece of beef (top round, flank), or pork (tenderloin), butterfly and pound till thin. In a bowl, combine fresh breadcrumbs, fresh minced garlic, freshly grated Pecorino Romano cheese, fresh parsley, salt and pepper. Spread this mixture evenly across meat. Roll into tight log, tie with kitchen twine (in an elaborate knot arrangement that my Gram took to the grave, I’m sorry to report), submerge in homemade tomato sauce aka gravy, and cook low and slow all day long. To serve, lift the meat out of the sauce, carefully remove the twine, slice into pinwheels and serve with pasta.

Braciole is divine. It’s meltingly tender, super rich, and redolent of the kind of sunbaked old country that you’ve seen in The Godfather. It’s also a complicated and labor-intensive dish, the kind that takes up an entire Sunday and destroys your kitchen. My Gram, though, could whip it up with one eye on her stories, a Merit Gold dangling from her lips, and the handset of the phone cradled on her shoulder. When people tell you that sweet old Italian ladies are really witches, believe them. What those women can do with a handful of ingredients and a crappy little black-and-white TV playing Days of Our Lives is straight-up supernatural.

I wouldn’t even taste it. Would. Not. No one argued with me, since that meant more for everyone else. I thought braciole was creepy mystery meat and you can have it, thanks very much. It was a good ten years after my grandmother died that I tried it for the first time. Not willingly, but I was a guest at someone’s home and had been brought up to politely eat whatever was served. Lucky for me, my first taste of braciole was at the hands of another Italian grandmother – when she saw how much I liked it, off she went to pack a Tupperware container for me to take home. (Pro tip: if you are ever invited to a Nona’s house for Sunday dinner, cancel everything and go.)

Braciole is something I’ve never made. In part because my own children were/are also weirdly picky and my husband will actually eat and enjoy Chef Boyardee Spaghettios if I’m not looking. Braciole is a lot of work for that kind of audience. But there is a little Italian market not far from my daughter’s dance studio that sells real-deal ingredients. Emerald-bright castelvetrano olives, biscotti, homemade pastas and sauces, all sorts of cured meats and freshly ground sausages, cheeses, cannoli to make you cry, and yes, braciole. Braciole rolled and tied and ready to cook, and braciole already simmered in sauce and ready to reheat. My plan was to grab something out of the cooler – I’d had oral surgery a few days prior and was tired of soup and Jell-O – when I spotted the braciole. Game on.

“What’s that?” asked my husband.

“Think of it as a big meat log that’s easy to chew”, I replied.

His response to that is not repeatable. But his response to his first taste of braciole? Yes, please! He even ate the leftovers for breakfast the next morning. I felt certain that my Gram, smiling down from Heaven, forgave him a whole lot of Chef Boyardee for that. I know I won’t get off that easy. Pretty sure she’s still holding a grudge for all those years that I would not try even a single bite. “Sher,” she would say, shaking her head sadly, “you don’t know what’s good.” And, as always, she was right.

Since I don’t have her recipe to share, here are two worth checking out. The first, from the New York Times, incorporates grated provolone cheese (another food I flatly refused to consider in childhood), and is made with pork cutlets. If you can’t find those, use pork tenderloin. These kinds of Italian recipes are pretty forgiving of improvisation and also, the occasional sprinkle of dropped cigarette ashes. This recipe also calls for baking the braciole, which is a whole lot less effort than simmering it all day on the stove. The second recipe is made with beef and Genoa salami and can be done in a slow cooker. Both options give you more time to drink wine and watch your stories. Enjoy!

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/8922-frankies-spuntino-pork-braciole
https://www.mygourmetconnection.com/slow-cooker-braciole/

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