From Rome With Love

When I want to show people that I appreciate them, I give them an inch of an intensely flavored blend of crushed hot peppers and herbs that I bring back from Italy every summer in a textbook-sized plastic bag. I learned about it several years ago when a friend insisted I check out a spice outlet in Rome’s historic Campo dei Fiori district. The problem was she couldn’t remember the name or how to orient us to its location, and neglected to point out that seemingly every shop in the cramped Campo dei Fiori piazza sells something to eat. Also, it was our last night in Italy and we had 30 minutes before our hotel shuttle bus left for the Rome airport Hilton.

After a frantic jog around the perimeter, we also realized our friend didn’t mention that the spice man’s “store” wasn’t necessarily the brick and mortar variety. Finally, amid the flowers, vegetables, fish and fruit vendors in the square’s dense open-air market, we found several folding tables holding dozens of plastic bags stuffed with seasonings piled so that they looked like a field of soft-edged pyramids. This had to be it.

Though I was ready with my euros, the balding merchant felt the need for a little promotional build-up, insisting that I flip through his do-it-yourself press kit, a thick scrapbook of articles that had been written about him. It is part of the spice-hunt legend that in the scant time left, my husband and I still managed to grab a proscuitto and arugula panini and a slice of squash blossom pizza and not miss our ride.

Like the hand-printed sign on the spice mound, I always call the blend an “arrabiata” mix and heed the chatty salesman’s strict instructions about the pasta topping: “Two teaspoons per person, no more.” I tell people that these oily, brick-red shreds of chile have more ergs than the bleached-out flakes you find in shaker jars at your local Italian restaurant. One of my regular gift recipients--a cousin who is a serious cook of Mexican food--disagrees, insisting that the mixture is tasty but lacks firepower, and that he uses it by the handful. Secretly I think: What a waste to deplete something so difficult to replace because he wants to prove his pepper-tolerance bona fides. Next time we have this dispute, I plan to use Evan Kleiman, chef-owner of Angeli Caffe and host of KCRW’s “Good Food,” as part of my rebuttal.

“It’s hot,” says Kleiman after putting a few flecks on her tongue. Using the tip of her finger, she spreads out the blend on the cardboard top of a to-go container and identifies the ingredients: peperoncino, pale chile seeds, fat dehydrated slices of garlic and tiny crumbles of dried green parsley. Instantly, she begins talking about how great it would taste sprinkled on pizza or even as the beginnings of a tomato-based Indian curry (“You already have the garlic and chile. You just add to that.”) She also issues a cease-and-desist order regarding my use of the term arrabiata. The real thing involves fresh everything except the tomatoes, which should be canned, says Kleiman, because the just-picked kind are too sweet. OK, so I have to come up with a new name. (“Aren’t-biata?” my husband suggests.)

Meanwhile, Gino Angelini, chef-owner of Angelini Osteria and La Terza restaurant, has a theory about what demographic Mr. Campo dei Fiori was targeting when he dreamed up the concoction. “This is maybe for the working person, easy to make. Some people put this on top of the pasta with the tomato and you have the arrabiata in two seconds,” says Angelini, also guessing that the high-quality chiles were grown in Calabria, a part of southern Italy known for its searing temperatures.

No one would argue that 6,353 miles, each way, is quite a distance to travel to pick up a year’s supply of--if Gino Angelini is correct--something straight out of the Roman equivalent of “Pasta For Dummies.” “There’s nothing unusual in here,” says Michele Hornstein, a manager at Penzeys Spices in Torrance. Then she combines two kinds of Penzeys crushed red pepper, a generous pinch of minced garlic granules and some Turkish oregano. It’s pretty good. In fact, if I ever ran out of Aren’t-biatta before my feet landed in Rome, I would use Hornstein’s knock-off. But, truth be told, it’s missing a certain smoky quality. Plus it shouldn’t contain oregano.

I find this out when I give the spice purveyor’s fluorescent yellow business card, which bears a defunct e-mail address and a pair of lapsed phone numbers, to my Florence-born friend Gabriele. As he commences calling every Mauro Berardi in the Rome phone book, Gabriele gets the right one on the line. As it turns out, the 45-year-old Berardi is a third-generation Campo dei Fiori merchant who started selling herbs and spices at the age of 21 after his uncle offered him a small scrap of piazza real estate and the challenge to create an offshoot of the family’s fruit and vegetable business. “He decided to try dried fruit and a few spices,” Gabriele relays, recounting how Berardi followed his own mad scientist whims, mixing and testing the blends he sells according to whatever satisfies his own palate. As it turns out, Berardi doesn’t mind sharing recipes. My favorite contains chile, garlic and parsley. That’s it.

Apparently Berardi has plans for expansion, albeit the virtual kind. Currently his website (www.mauroberardi.com) features only staff pictures, but the next item on his To Do list is shipping product to America. I greet this with mixed feelings. On one hand, I happily offer a toast to his making the spices a mouse click away for everyone. On the other, I would miss making my annual summer vacation detour. And let’s be immodestly honest here: Isn’t your taste for something enhanced when you consider the rigmarole it took to get it?