The Puzzle of Peppered with Indecision

Dear Tamar,

I have a beautiful bag of Jimmy Nardello peppers and want to do them justice, but I simply don't know how to approach them. They feel so precious! Do I roast? Marinate? Pickle?

-Peppered with indecision

Dear Peppered,

The restaurant where I worked in Athens, Georgia was attached to a farm; the restaurant was called, colloquially, The Farm. (Its official name was Farm 255, in keeping with the early aughts habit of including a place’s address in its title.) We were intimate with the soil where our vegetables and animals grew; we had many named ingredients—Sugarloaf chicory, Muscadine grapes, Hakurei turnips. We had Berkshire pork and Hereford beef. But the Jimmy Nardello pepper—to which I eagerly looked forward as weather warmed—was our only ingredient with a surname.

I always wondered how a pepper acquired or retained a last name, when most other plants and animals were more like Cher, or Rihanna, or Sting. Your question gave me occasion to find out. It seems the pepper’s seeds were brought to the U.S. from Ruoti, Basilicata, Italy by Giuseppe and Angella Nardiello in 1887. The Nardiellos’ fourth son (of eleven), Jimmy, was an avid gardener and built terraced gardens, like those in mountainous Basilicata, where he grew peppers—lipstick red, thin skinned, curved like horns, and sugar sweet—from his parents’ stowaway seeds.

Jimmy Nardello peppers (the name shed an “i” at some point, suggesting perhaps a conversion to Buddhism…) possess a number of qualities that make their seeds worth saving. They fruit early for the Northeast—they’re usually the first ripe peppers at farm stands. They’re fecund as rabbits, their plants budding vigorously, and bearing enough long twisted peppers that their stems bend with the profusion as the summer wears on. They’re thin skinned—a quality to be scorned in humans, but admired in peppers. They look spicy—dangerously twisted and hot—but are gentle as lambs, entirely free of capsaicin, the compound which makes chilies spicy.

My point is…nothing you don’t already know, except perhaps that Jimmy Nardellos are such remarkable peppers that whoever was in charge of labeling their seed packets may have decided a vegetable of such quality deserved to keep its last name. If the labeler had a particularly good Jimmy Nardello in the recent past, they may have even considered appending an honorific like: His majesty Jimmy Nardello, or the Excellency Jimmy Nardello, or at least Signore Jimmy Nardello in homage to its mother land. From this flourish, anyway, they were dissuaded.

A particularly good Jimmy Nardello is what you seek. (Or sought! Did I get to this letter in time to truly help with the decision making? Only you know…) Cal Peternell, with whom I cooked at Chez Panisse, made the only great pepper salads I’ve ever tasted, and instructed me in making them, too. Cal’s salads were of very thinly sliced Jimmy Nardellos, mixed with salt, a sprinkle of very good red wine vinegar, a little pounded garlic, chopped parsley, and the best possible olive oil. He served these with brash confidence that never stopped amazing me—on toasted peasant bread with ricotta, beside a leg of wood-oven roast chicken, over sliced ribeye.

I’ve read what sounds like an almost ludicrously fussy recipe for roasting then slitting Jimmy Nardellos and stuffing them with a combination of Pecorino, mascarpone, herbs, garlic, and breadcrumbs, then roasting them again. I’m sure these are almost alarmingly delicious—the consummate gilded lily, which I’d love to be served once but wouldn’t spend the time to make.

If I had a beautiful bag of Jimmy Nardellos, I would do one of two things: I would make make peperonata, which involves a minimum of knife work—slicing the peppers into swatches, combining them with an equal quantity of sliced onions and a few sliced garlic cloves, and stewing them in profane quantities of olive oil until they’re melted and sweet as spun sugar. Here’s the peperonata recipe from my most recent book The Everlasting Meal Cookbook:

Peperonata (1 hr) This recipe is written per bell pepper, so that it can expand and contract according to your need. You don’t really need a whole garlic clove for each pepper. Use your discretion.

Per pepper: ½ onion, 1 clove garlic (see above) olive oil, salt. Slice the pepper(s) into vertical strips about ¾ inch wide. Slice onions into vertical half moons about half that wide. Thinly slice the garlic. Heat a heavy bottomed saute pan or frying pan. Add ¼ inch olive oil. Cook the peppers and onions together, salting well, over medium low heat, covering and uncovering as needed, until they are softened and a little sizzly. Add garlic and more oil. Cover and uncover and worry occasionally, cooking until they are truly melted into the oil and tender but not mushy, 45 minutes to an hour.

Or I would do less, leaving the peppers whole, tossing them with a lot of olive oil and salt, and then roasting them in a cast iron pan, with even more olive oil and a lot of careful turning, until they were sunken and blistered. I’d do this in batches—with so little to do, one has the luxury of being finicky. Once these were off the heat, I’d add a drizzle of vinegar or lemon juice, flaky salt, and another stream of cool olive oil, which always tastes different then oil which has been cooked.

Dear cook, my answer to how to approach them is: with delicacy. Do as little as possible. As is often the case with ingredients bred for taste, rather than for shelf stability or long distance travel, so much has been done by generations before ours—in the peppers’ cultivation, in the saving of their seed, in its annual planting, that anything but applying salt and heat risks amounting to overkill. Be no longer peppered with indecision. Leave it all to The Right Honorable Signore Jimmy Nardello.