Napolitano

Eastside Road, August 13, 2012—

SO OFTEN IN THESE posts I've simply said Sausage, as if Franco Dunn, who is one of the great geniuses of Sonoma county, made only one kind of sausage. Big, good-natured, modest, he presides over his stand in the second aisle of the Healdsburg Farm Market, a stand as big as any, I suppose eight feet square: and on his table, usually three or if you're lucky (and early) perhaps four kinds of sausage, all of them cased, all selling for a reasonable circa ten bucks for four.

On Saturday we had to choose among four, of which at the moment I only remember two: Chorizo and Napolitano. We chose the latter. (The other two were just as good, but milder, French-type sausages, and it's hot weather, we're in the mood for something spicier.)

"Napolitano" turn out to be what a supermarket would call Italian Hot, with a judicious amount of red pepper among the herbs and pork. I've made sausage once or twice. It's not difficult: it only requires a good many carefully chosen ingredients, a supply of casing, some kind of machine to do the stuffing and casing, patience — and, if you're doing it commercially, discipline and constancy. Those last two matters tend to elude me.

Not Franco. His sausage is marvelous. Lindsey simply broiled it in the oven, and served it with chard she'd chopped and cooked with garlic and olive oil and that quarter lemon. Afterward. some cherry tomatoes, and then a nice Charentais melon. Ah, summertime.

Guadagni red, Preston of Dry Creek, 2011; cheap Pinot grigio