GREAT HOME COOKS : ‘I Spilled a Lot of Soup on a Lot of Nice People’

To Paul Mantee, the phrase “Italian cook” is redundant. All Italians cook.

But if you are an actor who has yet to achieve superstar status and if your grandfather and father owned a landmark Italian restaurant, you really cook. Oh, my, do you cook.

“The secret of good Italian cooking is you have to be adventuresome,” says Mantee, standing in his postage-stamp-size kitchen in Malibu. “Good Italian cooking is really simple. Very often it’s simply a matter of improvising.

“You look in the fridge and you say, ‘Well, we got a tomato, we got a lemon, we got a little fish,’ and you try to make something from it. And you don’t follow a recipe and you don’t write it down, so sometimes the best dishes, you’ll never duplicate them again.”

As a teen-ager, Mantee worked as a busboy in his family’s restaurant, Fior d’Italia, in San Francisco’s North Beach (“I spilled a lot of soup on a lot of nice people”). There he observed the bustle of the chefs in the kitchen.

“The reason we were so successful was that none of the chefs were very careful, and that’s the essence of good cooking,” he says. “Cooking Italian food is a very sensual experience. I’ll never forget the chef, whose name was Leo Quattrin. I can see him now as he would walk by the salt bin and en passant he’d toss a handful of salt at the stove and hit the pot. No recipes.”

Mantee’s grandfather, Armido Marianetti, and father, George, worked at the Fior d’Italia until they bought the place in 1931. They ran it for 46 years before selling it, and in the early years Mantee gleaned dozens of tricks. He says that what he does is nothing but traditional Italian peasant cooking, nothing fancy.

“Cooking was a way of life for me when I was a kid,” says Mantee. “And it wasn’t this ‘new wave’ stuff. If I were to make lobster-filled ravioli, or pumpkin pasta, my grandfather would turn over in his grave.”

Mantee eventually left the restaurant business. Handsome and chisel-faced (not unlike a lean Brian Donlevy), Mantee got into acting. At the time, he says, “It wasn’t fashionable to be Italian, so they changed my name from Marianetti to Mantee, after Duke Mantee (the character in “Petrified Forest” played on stage and in film by Humphrey Bogart).

“A couple of years later, a guy named Tony Franciosa proved that you could have an Italian name and make it in acting,” he says.

Mantee eventually got work, typecast as a heavy. (“If you’re Italian and 35 and wear a blue suit, they give you a gun.”) But acting didn’t provide steady work, so he took other jobs--filling cones at an ice cream parlor, moving furniture, typing. “And when you’re not making a load of money, you cook,” he points out, so he went back to his roots.

Before long, he was getting roles in such films as “Onionhead,” “Robinson Crusoe on Mars,” “A Man Called Dagger” and “The Great Santini,” and later on TV series, including “Cagney and Lacey,” “Hunter” and “Reasonable Doubts.”

But, still, he was more in demand as a cook than an actor. His small apartment in Malibu is often the scene of Italian dinners for Mantee and his friends, and he frequently serves his legendary 22-ingredient ravioli, so time-consuming to produce that he occasionally asks a local restaurant to make it for him. In fact, Mantee’s first novel, “In Search of the Perfect Ravioli” (Ballantine), published a year ago, features the recipe.

As we stand in his kitchen, Mantee chops garlic with a huge chef’s knife his father gave him. As he is transferring the chopped garlic to a saute pan, he drops a tiny piece.

“My father always said, if he dropped a piece of garlic on the floor, he felt it was the essential piece of garlic, so he’d pick it up,” he says. “Now, if there was company around, he’d rinse it off before he tossed it in the pan. He once lost a cigar in a chicken saute sec. Never found it, but it was the best chicken saute sec I ever ate.”

The basic salsa Napoli that is the heart of so many of Mantee’s recipes calls for few ingredients, but it does require careful cooking of the garlic. It is chopped fine, using almost enough to cover the bottom of a large saucepan. Enough olive oil is added to just cover the garlic. Then the heat is turned on.

“You have to watch the garlic so it just browns,” he says. “If you don’t cook it enough you don’t get the right flavor, too much and it burns and gets bitter.”

Then Mantee adds tomatoes and tomato sauce, red pepper flakes and mushrooms. The recipe is infinitely flexible; you can also add oregano, parsley, or capers.

Mantee just finished shooting “Amber Waves” with Rae Dawn Chong, to be released this month, and is completing his second novel, set in Hollywood.

PESCE MARINATA (Pickled Fish)

1/4 cup flour

Salt, pepper

1 pound halibut, skinned and cut into 2- or 3-inch chunks

2 1/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons olive oil

2 1/2 cups red wine vinegar

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 tablespoon rosemary

5 dried chile peppers

Combine flour with salt and pepper to taste. Press fish into mixture. Shake off excess. Fry in skillet with just enough olive oil to cover bottom, about 3 tablespoons. When fish is about 2/3 cooked, remove fish and place in glass or ceramic crock or large bowl to cool.

In separate bowl pour vinegar and 2 cups olive oil and set aside.

In second skillet, about 3 inches high, add enough olive oil to cover bottom, about 3 tablespoons. Add garlic, rosemary and chile peppers. For spicier sauce, break 2 or 3 chiles in half. Saute over low heat. When garlic is golden brown, turn heat as high as possible and carefully pour in oil-vinegar mixture. Bring to rolling boil. Immediately pour into crock, covering all fish pieces. Cover crock. Cool. Refrigerate 24 hours. Makes 6 appetizer servings.

Mantee says: “The tomatoes and sauce need to sizzle big time when they hit the pan. Call it a marriage.”

SALSA NAPOLI

3 cloves garlic, chopped fine

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 (14 1/2-ounce) can tomatoes, chopped and drained with liquid reserved

1 (15-ounce) can tomato sauce

Salt

Dash dried red pepper flakes

1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms, optional

Place garlic in skillet and add enough oil to cover bottom of pan, about 3 tablespoons. Saute on low heat. When garlic is golden brown, turn heat very high and add chopped tomatoes and tomato sauce. Cook over high heat 10 minutes. Season to taste with salt and red pepper flakes. Add mushrooms. If necessary, add reserved liquid from tomatoes or water to make desired consistency. Lower heat and cook 10 more minutes. Serve over cooked pasta. Makes 4 servings.

Variation:

Brown either veal chops, chicken pieces or steak strips in olive oil. Saute chopped garlic and finish recipe as above. (When using veal chops, because of chop thickness, remove before sauteing garlic, then return with whatever juice gathered when sauce is done, cover and simmer 10 minutes.)

This is a variation on an old-time San Francisco restaurant specialty. The recipe calls for jar-preserved artichoke hearts, though Mantee usually uses canned artichoke hearts packed in water or fresh artichokes in season.

CHICKEN SAUTE SEC WITH ARTICHOKE HEARTS

3 tablespoons olive oil

14 chicken wing drumettes

3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped or smashed

1 tablespoon chopped rosemary

1/2 ounce dried porcini mushrooms, soaked, squeezed dry and chopped

1 (14 3/4-ounce) jar preserved artichoke hearts, drained

1/4 cup dry white wine

Salt, pepper

Pour enough olive oil into skillet to cover bottom, about 3 tablespoons, and heat over high heat. Saute chicken until browned all over. Turn off heat. Add garlic, rosemary and mushrooms.

Saute over low heat until garlic appears golden brown. Turn heat to high. Add artichokes and white wine. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Makes 6 appetizer servings.

Note: If small fresh artichokes are available, they may be substituted. Trim, halve and steam 15 minutes.