Ossobuco-inspired ravioli at Osteria Morini. | La Collina
Pasta lovers know there’s no such thing as too much pasta. Whether a craving calls for spaghetti, gnocchi, cacio e pepe, or a little bit of everything in between, the quest for the perfect plate of pasta is a never-ending journey. Luckily, the D.C. area is filled with plenty of options for getting that pasta fix, from cozy neighborhood eateries to traditional osterias.
For this latest map update, we add: La Collina and Grazie Nonna, while now-shuttered Modena comes off the map.
Below, find the top Italian restaurants for pasta in D.C., and get all sorts of culinary inspiration for that upcoming date night or family outing. And for D.C.’s best pizza places, go here.
The following is an interview with Katie DeFonzo, a Reference Librarian in the Hispanic Reading Room
We’re back with Katie DeFonzo for the final post in the “Sampling of Cookbooks and Recipes” series where she tries a new recipe and shares her experience making it.
Please tell us which recipe you chose.
This time, manifesting that the weather would soon feel more authentically like fall, I chose a soup dish. This final recipe is taken from Buen Provecho: 500 Years of Hispanic Cuisine, a publication by the New Jersey Chapter of the Hispanic Association of AT&T Employees (HISPA). This cookbook is a carefully compiled collection of recipes from many different countries and parts of the United States, and this recipe for meatball soup (caldo de albóndigas) was contributed by Steve Colyer.
Caldo de Albóndigas, ready to eat! Photo by Katie DeFonzo
Why did you choose this recipe?
This recipe includes plenty of protein as well as some of the same quintessential autumn vegetables that have been found in the previous recipes I attempted as part of this series. I often watched my Dad and Grandmother prepare meatballs for dinners during the holiday season, and this recipe similarly called for making meatballs from scratch. That the meatballs in this recipe include pimiento was a twist that I was excited to try.
Tell us more.
While attempting this recipe, I was reminded of the importance of avoiding – or at least minimizing – multitasking. Because I was tending to a few other things in the kitchen as I began to prepare the soup, I let too much of the broth boil off initially and needed to add more. The recipe does specify that the pimiento should be chopped, and if I were to make this soup a second time, I would chop the pimiento much more finely. I believe this would have made the very soft mixture easier to work with as I prepared the meatballs. The sliced pimiento halves were too large to incorporate effectively into the mixture, and the meatballs broke apart quickly as I continue to tend the soup. The pimiento became in effect another vegetable included in the soup. It might be preferable to cook the meatballs in an air fryer before adding to the beef broth and continuing with the remaining steps. I made a few small modifications to the recipe: for instance, I chose not to add cabbage to the soup and tended to add slightly less of the vegetables than the recipe demanded. I also used garlic powder in place of garlic cloves and dried coriander rather than chopped cilantro. While this soup was not particularly hearty (I would recommend a chili or a creamy soup on the coldest winter days), it was certainly a delicious and flavorful option that could easily serve a larger group of dinner guests.
Stirring the soup as it simmered. Photo by Katie DeFonzo
Sampling these different recipes has inspired me to continue trying new recipes from these books throughout the rest of the year. And I am grateful that the Library of Congress has so many of these kinds of cookbooks representing countries from throughout Latin America. There will be no shortage of recipes to choose from. Which new recipes are you hoping to try?
Thanks again, Katie, for selecting the recipes and sharing your experience making them!
If you’re interested in this recipe or the others in this series, please submit your request through Ask-a-Librarian.
We occasionally discuss Biblical cruxes (e.g., Daughter of Greed), and there’s a good one at Poemas del río Wang; the post begins:
I introduced the Jewish epilogue of the post on Saint Martin and his geese with this image, which, with its depiction of a goose-like bird and a signature unmistakably Jewish, proved perfect to illustrate the peculiar story of the Jews who delivered roast geese to the Habsburg emperor on Saint Martin’s Day.
But what exactly is this bird with that enormous egg?
The inscription only reads: זה עוף שקורין אותו בר יוכני zeh ʿof she-qorin oto Bar Yochnei, that is, “This is the bird called Bar Yochnei.”
All that remains is to figure out which bird is called Bar Yochnei.
1.
This name appears in the Babylonian Talmud. Tractate Bekhorot 57b amidst tales of wondrous animals and plants, mentions:
“Once an egg of the bird called bar yokhani (=the son of the nest) fell, and the contents of the egg drowned sixty cities and broke three hundred cedar trees.”
The colossal bird also shows up in Bava Batra 73b, in the adventures of Rabbah bar bar Hana whose travels and miraculous encounters would eventually find their way into Sinbad-style tales:
Once we were traveling in a ship and we saw a certain bird that was standing with water up to its ankles [kartzuleih] and its head was in the sky. And we said to ourselves that there is no deep water here, and we wanted to go down to cool ourselves off. And a Divine Voice emerged and said to us: Do not go down here, as the ax of a carpenter fell into it seven years ago and it has still not reached the bottom. […] Rav Ashi said: And that bird is called ziz sadai, as it is written: “I know all the fowls of the mountains; and the ziz sadai is Mine” (Psalms 50:11).
The mere existence of such a bird is miraculous enough—but two of them? That would be an even greater miracle. Later Talmudic commentators—implicitly the medieval Yalkut Shimoni, explicitly the Maharsha (1555–1631) of Poland in his commentary on Bekhorot 57b—identified the two as one and the same.
2.
We have thus learned that Bar Yochnei and the ziz sadai are one and the same. But what is the ziz sadai?
The post goes on to cite Psalm 50, Rashi (“who derived ziz from the verb zuz, meaning ‘to move about’”), and other early commentators, saying:
Thus, the three creatures—Behemoth, Leviathan, and the ziz sadai—form a coherent triad. They are three gigantic, wondrous beings, far beyond human dimensions, yet Adonai maintains dominion over them. According to Talmudic commentators, Behemoth is the wonder of the land, Leviathan the wonder of the sea, and Ziz Sadai the wonder of the air, as it is a colossal bird.
As for Leviathan, we have already noted that it originates from ancient Near Eastern creation myths, well known to the Jews living in Babylonian exile, and woven into their own mythology. During the Second Temple period, the strict priestly editors purged these myths from the Torah in its officially compiled form, yet traces remained in poetic or anecdotal texts, such as the Psalms or the Book of Job.
The central theme of these creation narratives is that the god or gods—Elil, or later Marduk, who replaced him—must first subdue chaos and its rebellious rulers, primarily in the waters, but also on land and in the air. […]
That Anzu indeed made it into the psalm, surviving there for three thousand years under the name ziz sadai, is further confirmed by the fact that the word saday—a hapax legomenon appearing only here in the Bible, with an uncertain meaning—derives from Anzu/Imdugud’s original Akkadian epithet šadû, meaning “mountain.” For Mesopotamia, mountains were the threatening unknown, the source of attackers and storms, whose deity was Anzu.
There’s much more at the link, including the usual glorious images.
Born in 1837 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, Draper grew up wealthy. His father was got a job teaching at NYU and was the kind of scientist figure that dabbled in everything, which was hardly uncommon in the first half of the nineteenth century. His mother had been the daughter of the Brazilian emperor’s personal physician. So it was that kind of wealth. Unsurprisingly, Draper trained to be a doctor. He graduated from the NYU School of Medicine in 1857. Sure he was 20, but it’s not like medicine actually worked yet, or at least not much. The advances over Draper’s life would be astounding, but his training took place just as this was beginning and knowledge of the body was still quite limited. He did his Civil War service too, sawing off limbs in horrific conditions on battlefields while with the 12th New York Infantry, which fought at many of the largest battles of the war.
Draper, like his father, was a jack of many scientific trades. He got super interested in astronomy. In 1857, Draper visited Ireland. While there, he visited the Earl of Rosse, who showed him his six foot telescope. This blew Draper’s mind. He came home and wanted toys like this of his own. He began to mix more in scientific circles. As such, he met a woman named Mary Anna Palmer, who was rich socialite also interested in the stars.
Palmer was born in 1839 in Stonington, Connecticut and her father had made a ton of money in real estate. They married in 1867, at which time Draper was working as a chemistry and physiology professor at NYU. They would make a powerful team in the growing field of astronomy. As per usual, it was his name first in all the conversations because she was placed into the kind of secondary “assistant” role even though she was doing at least as much work as he was. Such remains common today (see Robert Caro completely relying on his wife for everything but her not getting credit on the books, for a contemporary example).
What really made the Drapers legendary was their use of new technologies to create images of space. First, they had to expand the technology of telescopes. Draper had built his own on his father’s estate, but then the mirror split on a cold winter night. So he created a new type of mirror that got the secretary of the Smithsonian, Joseph Henry, interested. Henry convinced Draper to write about it and this got him more attention. Now, the Drapers didn’t exactly invent astrophotography, but they advanced its use in massive ways and effectively are the parents of the idea. Now, Draper’s father actually took the first daguerrotype of the moon in 1840 and naturally people were taking pictures of the sun and moon the best they could. But what Draper did was take the first picture of a star that showed absorption lines, which meant he was taking real photographs of deep space.
He was so excited about this–and thanks to Mary didn’t need the money–that he resigned from active teaching in 1873 to focus on this new research. He soon would photograph Venus as it passed between the Sun and Earth. Then he pioneering photographing the Orion nebula. By 1880, he was photographing the spectrum of Jupiter. In 1882, his work on Orion succeeded and using a 137 minute exposure, he managed to take the greatest picture of the stars ever done to that point. Check it out!
Naturally, Draper was not doing this from his home in the city. He built a special observatory out of town, up in Hastings-on-Hudson. He got what passed for federal funding for science at the time and received a ton of honors for his advances. Unfortunately, Draper was a pretty sick guy. In 1882, he died from pleurisy. He was only 45 years old. This is not the kind of thing likely to kill you today, but back then, death at a younger age was more common.
This left Mary Anna a widow. But she wasn’t one to just while away the years. She wanted to advance science the best she could and her best ability to do this was her money. She soon donated most of his equipment to Harvard. She then gave enormous sums of money to advance his work on astronomy. She stopped doing active research herself, but she frequently visited the institutions where she gave the money to see what they were doing with it.
She made connections with Edward Pickering, the Harvard scientist who was following in Draper’s footsteps. In 1885, he started doing photographic spectroscopy, which of course Draper had pioneered. So she funded a lot of this on one condition–it would be named for her husband. This stuck and much later, the astronomic star catalogue that would be published between 1918 and 1924 would be known as the Henry Draper Catalogue. It has continued over the years and now has well over 300,000 stars classified.
Some of this was also specifically for women astronomers. That’s just so incredibly rare in the late 19th century. But some it was because the women in Draper’s family were also interested in science and her niece Antonia Maury was to be one of the next generation of great astronomers, later being the first person to discover a spectroscopic binary. Women were certainly not treated equally at Harvard when they became clustered there working on astronomy and there was a lot of anger over the years at Pickering, who sounds pretty awful personally. But without Mary Anna Draper, they wouldn’t have been there at all, so that was an important step.
Other things Mary Anna Draper did with the money included creating the Henry Draper Medal at the National Academy of Sciences, which is awarded every four years for someone investigating “astronomical physics.” When scientists needed money to found the Mount Wilson Observatory, they came to Draper and she funded it. Being super rich, she also used her money to develop enormous collections of antiquities, including Egyptian art, as well as tapestries. When she died, she left all that to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mary Anna Draper died in 1914. She was 75 years old.
Henry and Mary Anna Draper are buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.
If you would like this series to visit other astronomers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Henrietta Swan Leavitt is in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Carl Sagan is in Ithaca, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
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