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An Arctic cold snap certainly inspires one to rethink the traditional all-day hickory-smoked approach to barbecued ribs, especially with a 10°F wind chill outside and football and a roaring fire inside. Saucy Asian-style Rooster Riblets were named when we first made them for Chinese New Year, then the Year of the Rooster. Rename them annually, throw them in the oven, set the timer, and relocate your cooking post to the recliner. Even better, cook them a couple days in advance. Before serving, reheat the ribs with their sauce for a few minutes in the oven, on a grill, or under the broiler to add a little crust. Chinese ribs aren’t a good match for the usual baked beans, potato salad, and creamy slaw. If you’re up for it, serve pan-fried dumplings (find them in the grocery freezer section) or rice and an icy rice vinegar–cucumber salad (page 153).

Like fried chicken and good corn bread, oven drums are all about the crust. The key to Hot-Oven Drums is to get the skin working for you. Hot-Oven Drums are inspired by Nashville’s cultish hot pan-fried chicken that’s dusted-to-dredged in cayenne pepper. Proceed with caution! Here the skillet meets the oven. The bread crumbs, dry rub, and oil keep the Hot-Oven Drums crisp and the cayenne pepper, added right before cooking, lets you control the heat. Serve the drums just like chicken wings with ranch or blue cheese dressing and celery and carrot sticks. Eat them on your feet with a beer in the other hand and no worries about the red mess all over your face and hands.

A heavy little cast-iron hibachi is R. B.’s favorite outdoor grill for fast and efficient high-heat cooking. Indoors, that efficiency is called the broiler. Both tools use direct high heat to sear tender cuts of meat hot and fast. It’s just that the broiler heats from above, the grill from below. Even better, the broiler gets burning hot in minutes with the turn of a knob. Quick Sticks are a very loose version of Thai satay—thin cuts of chicken and steak rubbed with curry, threaded onto skewers, and quickly broiled. The dipping sauce is first-class cheating—barbecue sauce with some chopped peanuts thrown in. Icy Q-Cumbers (page 153) are a Quick Sticks must.

The game birds called grive that are the Sards’ quarry in the macchia are too small to cook over the open fire, hence they are often poached in white wine, then laid to cool on a palette of myrtle leaves and twigs, with a coverlet of yet more of the leaves, all of them scenting the flesh with soft perfumes, a reprise of the machinations of the old bracconiere (page 226). Yet another cunning Sard prescription is to tuck the birds inside a paper or cloth sack fitted with the herbs. By fastening the sack securely, one creates a vaporous chamber in which they rest and cool, breathing in the sweet steam. Lacking myrtle bushes, use whole branches of rosemary and thyme, fat leaves of sage, and the fronds of wild or cultivated fennel as lush surrogate bedding for the little birds. A few cloves of barely crushed garlic seem to invigorate the herbs. Luscious to carry on a picnic, one might prepare the quail—or game hens, a chicken, or a fat capon, adjusting the poaching times accordingly—the evening before, and next day carry along the sack of birds readied for lunch.

The swineherd, like the shepherd, conducts his life significantly all’ aria aperta—out-of-doors. It is there that he naps and forages, tends to his fires, capriciously bathing himself and one part or another of his clothing in an often swift and single maneuver. He might also cook up some wonderfully scented stew of wild mushrooms or one of dried beans and just-gathered grasses and herbs, as supplement to his staples of cheese, honey, bread, and wine. More than once, though, we took note of purposeful midday couriers visiting a swineherd in the pasture, carrying a basket full of components for him to cook a fine feast of a lunch midst his charges and under the sun. We learned, too, that, once in a while, the swineherd cooks for his family, his friends. Here follows a version of a dish as it is prepared by a young Sard herdsman when he slaughters a pig for market. Staging a torchlit supper in his meadow, he braises a haunch of the animal for his neighbors. Its formula was told to us by his wife, she having cooked it for us on the farm where we stayed near Sassari.

A tiny place where once lived the paladins of Sardegna is Orgosolo. Only a decade or so ago did they think it prudent, finally, to wander about the steep, tortured alleyways of their mountain village unadorned with a rifle. Orgosolo is the historic lair of Sard banditismo—banditry. Perhaps the businesses of thieving and buccaneering seem more gainful in Calabria, for now, the only rapscallions left in Orgosolo are the political artists whose bullying, bitter-sermoned murals irritate walls, housefronts, mountain faces. Too, icons are chafed, gastronomically, in Orgosolo, as they are here in this dish, which asks for bottarga as well as pecorino, upsetting the proscription, for a moment, against the mingling of fish and cheese.

A dish old as the ages, one that pungently depicts the Sards’ seminal appetite for the long bathing of fish or game in some puckerish sauce is burrida. Traditionally prepared with gattucci di mare—sea catfish—the sauce is enriched with the pounded raw livers of the fish. Here follows a version using orata—red snapper—or coda di rospo—monkfish—though river catfish can also be called upon with fine result. Present the burrida as an antipasto or a main course to savvy, unshy palates.

There is an ancient and savage imperviousness about la barbagia—the high, central plateaux in the Gennargentu Mountains. The Romans named it barbaria—barbarian—they having muddled all campaigns to vanquish the rough Sard clans who lived there, who live there still. And so it was with all who braved ingress onto their wild moors, into their Mesolithic woods. Of ungenerous earth fit only to pasture sheep and goats, these barbagianesi live simply but somehow not poorly, their uninjured traditions nourishing them as much as the fruits of their hunting and foraging. Too, they are primitive artisans, building, weaving, carving objects of rustic beauty and comfort, enriching their homes and villages, themselves, with a most tender spirit. And riding the thin, tortured roads that thread through the mountains, one is carried back into their unfrayed present. Seeming to seep from the pith of the mountains is the village called Desulo, and there one is greeted by citizens dressed—as they dress always, as they have dressed always—in ancestral costumes of handwoven cloth tinged in the reds and blues and yellows of their allegria, of their perpetual, quiet festival of life. And, too, one might be invited to sit at a family table to eat mutton boiled with wild bay leaves and wrapped in warm, thin breads baked over embers. But this after a great bowl of malloreddus—vitellini—little calves, for which Desulo is famed. Not calves at all but tiny, plump, hand-rolled, saffroned pasta that, to the Sards, resemble fat little heifers.

Cutlets or chops of veal are pressed with oregano, garlic, and bread crumbs, then sautéed or grilled and proffered throughout the island as the fish-phobic’s Sicilian supper. One is likely to be presented with a fibrous little cutlet that makes one long to be supping somewhere else. This version, though, inspired by Osteria ai Cascinari in Palermo, begs the rubbing of a good, thick chop with a paste of herbs before giving it a quilt of crumbs mixed with pecorino and sesame seeds and, finally, a brief sauté and a splash of white wine. It makes for a fine dish, especially when accompanied with a bit of pesto di pistacchi e olive (page 193).

A rather sad and barren bit of sand in a Mediterranean archipelago 17 kilometers off the coast of Trapani and 120 kilometers from the brow of North Africa, the island of Favignana is the last of the tonnare—tuna fishing ports—in Sicilia. And it is Gioachino Cataldo who is il rais—“the king,” in Arab dialect—of the rite of la mattanza— the ritual slaughtering of migrating tuna practiced first by the Phoenicians and later by the Saracens. La mattanza remains the most powerful spiritual ceremony in the life of the islanders, as it has for a thousand years. And from then until now, its writs are these. Fifteen huge wooden, black-varnished, motorless, sail-less boats are tugged out into the formation of a great quadrangle around the muciara—the boat of il rais that sits at the square’s center. Ten kilometers of net are laid in the form of a pouch into which the tuna swim. The great fish migrate from the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibralter to spawn, the Mediterranean being warmer and saltier and, hence, a kinder ambience for reproduction. As the pouch—called the camera della morte, the death chamber—becomes full, il rais gives the command to his fifty-seven soldiers to lift the net. The men bear up the nets by hand, hoisting them and the tuna up to a height at which the fish can be speared and hauled up into the bellies of the boats. The rite remains Arab to its core. Arab are the songs that the tonnaroti—those fishermen who hunt only tuna—sing as they wait for the nets to fill, as are the incantations they chant as they are heaving up the fish and, finally, Arab are the screams the tonnaroti scream as they kill them. We saw them take two hundred tuna in two hours—the fish averaging about seventy kilograms. Those the tonnaroti did not keep for themselves were ferried to Marsala for processing. A black-bearded colossus is Gioachino, his face crinkled by the Mediterranean sun, his enormous hands scraggy as an unsharp blade, of a family who, for twelve generations, has birthed men chosen by the Favignanesi to be il rais. The islanders bequeath the post on merit. The credentials, said Favignana’s mayor, are: courage, skill, strength, dignity, and honor. And it is the king himself who determines the duration of his reign. Gioachino told us he would remain il rais “finchè le mie forze mi sosterranno”—“while my forces remain uninjured.” In these last ninety-eight years, Gioachino is only the eighth rais of Favignana. This is the simple way he cooked tuna for us, the way he thinks it best. He always uses flesh from the female fish—hence, tunnina—for its more delicate savor, he told us. Il rais harvested the capers for the fish in his garden while we sipped at cold moscato.

One departs Italy—and the European continent—for the journey to Sicilia through the narrow Straits of Messina. The city is an unlovely place, the ravages and wrecks of her face so corrected that she seems benign, with few of her old graces. Snugged inside the tumult of her port sit a few humble houses still dispatching, to the fishermen and the local citizenry, the stews and broths from the old tomes. And it was at one table there where we ate a most luscious rendition of swordfish. A dish typical of Messina, and now of the whole island, it seems, this one was extraordinary for the rich elements of its stuffing, but more for the divine splash of Malvasia in its little sauce.

Glorious Selinunte was raised up seven centuries before Christ and named by the Greeks after the wild, celerylike plant selinon, which then blanketed its riparian hills that fell to the sea. For us, the rests at Selinunte, more than any of the other Greek evidences, are the masterworks transcendent on Sicilia. There one can enter the great temples rather than stay, dutifully, achingly, behind a cordon. Hence, the temples there seem more familiar. One can remain, for a while, in the company of the old gods, to see the light change or to watch four chestnut horses, a newly foaled colt, and a fat, fluffy-haired donkey roaming over the fallow of broken marbles as though it were some ordinary meadow. One can eavesdrop on the discourse between two white doves until the silence comes—piano, pianissimo, save only the whisperings of wings. Some of the people we met who live in Castelvetrano, near Selinunte, spoke to us of a soup they remembered their grandmothers and aunts having made from a selinon-like plant that grew along the coast. They remembered it being smooth and cold, with a strong, almost bitter sort of celery flavor. Alas, neither selinon nor other wild grasses of its ilk are to be found. But prompted by our friends’ taste memories and our own sweet keepsakes of Selinunte, we fashioned this satiny, soothing soup to be offered on the warmest of days.

Daughter-of-the-wind is her name in Arabic—Bent el-Rhia—the gorgeous island of Pantelleria sits seventy kilometers from Tunisia in the Egadian Archipelago. She is full of sea caves and strange, vaporous grottoes. She wears Neolithic ruins among her palms and oleander. And in the contrada, neighborhood, called Favarotta, we ate swordfish—thin steaks of it cut from the center of the just-caught fish, first rubbed with olive oil and then quickly roasted over a red-sparking grapevine fire. The fisherman/cook laid them over a cool tomato jam and we feasted. Too, we ate yellow-crumbed semolina bread roasted over the then quieter fire, and when its heat was nearly spent, we skewered figs—green ones and the first of the summer—onto grapevine twigs and held them near the fire until their juices were warmed and we ate them with the last sips of Pantelleria’s luscious moscato.

Harvests from the great, silent fields of sun-bronzed wheat result in more bread than pasta for la tavola siciliana, yet there is a trio of pasta dishes that is cooked throughout the island. One of them dresses pasta in eggplant and tomatoes perfumed with wild mint and basil, the whole dusted with grated, salted ewe’s milk ricotta. Called often pasta alla Norma in celebration of Catanian son Vincenzo Bellini it can be a gorgeous dish. Then there is pasta chi vrocculi arriminati—dialect for a dish that calls for a paste of cauliflower and salt anchovies studded with raisins and pine nuts. Although it is luscious, it cannot compete with the glories of the island’s pasta con le sarde. A dish full of extravagant Arab timbres, it employs fresh, sweet sardines, salt anchovies, wild fennel, and a splash of saffroned tomato. One presents the pasta cool, as though heat would be violence against its sensuousness. Wild fennel grows abundantly on the lower shanks of Sicily’s mountains and, too, along the craggy paths of some of her islands. I used to collect wild fennel along the banks of the Sacramento River and I’ve heard tell of great clumps of its yellow lace heads bobbing along country roads in America’s Northeast. Now I find it a few kilometers from our home in thickets against the pasture fences along the Via Cassia on the road to Rome. Though the scent and the savor of cultivated fennel is sweeter, it behaves well in collaboration with these other elements and yields a still-sumptuous dish.