The Feast of San Lorenzo

We had a chance to display the qualities of Juicy Dish Catering for friends here in Buffalo recently with a menu that’s intrigued us for years. Or should we say, menus. In The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook from 1982, there are two picnic menus, one inspired by Elizabeth David, and we decided to combine the two so that there was even greater variety of things to eat. The main item—the protein—was Grilled Chicken Wings marinated with Lemon Slices, Garlic, and Black Pepper. We bought a box of 125 chicken wings and to the box added a dozen lemons sliced as thin as we could make them with a knife. We added copious amounts of crushed garlic cloves, and lots of ground and whole black pepper. The craziest part of the entire meal was having to toss the wings around every hour or so. We were up to our elbows in chicken wings—literally—pulling the ones at the bottom of the storage box to the top and pushing the ones on top to the bottom. The grilling operation took about three hours total, using one gas and one electric grill. Apparently the aromas from our grill spread throughout the neighborhood, making several people wonder where they could get something to eat.

We made a “slaw” of shaved fennel and red onion with a simple red wine vinaigrette, a platter of roasted red bell peppers with a touch of anchovy and lots of fresh basil, a few dozen hard-cooked fresh quail eggs. Quail eggs are pretty to look at, but once they are hard-cooked they are incredibly difficult to peel. Next time, we’ll do the right thing and peel the eggs before service (we won’t, however, capitulate and buy them canned, as we were tempted at first to do). The most labor-intensive dish besides the chicken wings and the several dozen handmade biscotti—they were studded with sultanas (golden raisins) and almonds and delicately flavored with anise—was a salad of lentils with goat cheese. Prepping the requisite fine (and we do mean fine) dice of carrots, celery and red onion was the most time-consuming and nerve-wracking job of the entire menu, but it was worth the trouble because once the legumes were cooked and cooled and tossed with a chive-garlic-parsley dressing and fresh goat cheese, the result was a a delicious, Middle Eastern-flavored lentil salad. We sent “care packages” of it home with more than one guest.
One of the best—and most deluxe—dishes we prepared was a potato salad like no other. One of us made it back in the mid-Nineties for a party for Super Bowl XXIV; we don’t remember how the dish was received, but we do remember that the San Francisco Forty-Niners beat the San Diego Chargers, 49-26. For the salad, we cooked 14 pounds of red and white creamer potatoes just to the point of doneness, let them cool, and sliced them into quarter-inch rounds. When they were completely cool, we shaved two fresh black truffles over the slices and mixed them in thoroughly, letting the whole thing sit for most of the day (we used double-layers of basic kitchen garbage bags for several of these dishes) so that the heady truffle aroma permeated the potatoes as thoroughly as possible. We finished the salad with a simple shallot-red wine vinaigrette and corrected its seasoning; many of the guests never had fresh black truffles before, and asked about the dish.

The rest of the menu included simple things like fresh baguettes with parsley butter, nectarines, purple grapes, pears, and Niҫoise olives. We really made a concerted effort to select fruits that would be as close to the peak of ripeness the night of the party, and one of the guests remarked on that very fact, so we were especially gratified that our efforts to be choosy paid off for at least one person. Most importantly, it paid off for us, because we were the hosts of the event. It was the warmest and clearest night of what until that point had been a consistently soggy summer, and the party—a middle-of-August celebration of the Sign of Leo, the Perseid meteor shower, and the Feast of Saint Lawrence. We were privately inspired by one of our favorite movies, the Taviani Brothers’ dazzling La Notte di San Lorenzo (English trans., "The Night of the Shooting Stars") but as one guest remarked, Saint Lawrence is the patron saint of barbeques because he was grilled to death. Unlike, we fervently hope, our well-marinated chicken wings...