Pimientos is what they’re called in dictionaries, in seed catalogs. But in Brooklyn, they’re known as cherry peppers, just as they are in most places where Italian-Americans gather and eat. Small and pumpkin-shaped, like miniature bell peppers, they can be found in deli cases stuffed with cubes of provolone and wisps of prosciutto, on antipasto platters at weddings and funerals or suspended in vinegar in big jars at the sub shop, hot and sweet at once, with a zing of sour acidity that makes them an ideal topping for a sandwich of cured meats and salty cheese. Sometimes I pair pickled hot cherry peppers with fried eggplant and mozzarella on a sesame hero with a swipe of mayonnaise. I like them with chunks of Parmesan, with raw clams, with coins of soppressata.
I like pickled cherry peppers most, however, when they’re used in sauce and ladled onto meat: spicy and fragrant and slightly syrupy, what the Italians call agrodolce. I’ve had versions of the sauce with the pan-roasted pork chops at Bamonte’s in Brooklyn, and with the oven-roasted stuffed ones at Patsy’s in Midtown Manhattan. A similar sauce accompanies the grilled veal at Rao’s in East Harlem. You can find it at Dominick’s on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, and at DeLuca’s on Staten Island. Steak with “vinegar peppers” at the Italian steakhouse with the red-checked tablecloths, at the pizzeria on the boardwalk, at your mother-in-law’s on a Sunday afternoon with family? You’ve had this sauce!
At Carbone, on Thompson Street in Manhattan, the chefs Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi use pickled cherry peppers in many, many more recipes than you might imagine. They’re in the glaze on the restaurant’s pork ribs, shiny and piquant, with just a hint of fire. They’re in the creamy sauce for the fried calamari. They’re in the mignonette for the oysters too. Carbone and I stood in the restaurant’s kitchen during a lunch rush eating all the variations, talking butter and brine. Earlier, Torrisi told me about a hot-smoked rib-eye steak he cooked and served with a sauce made of ham stock and the pickle juice from the cherry peppers. “The smoky fat really likes the B&G fire,” he said, referring to the brand of cherry peppers he and Carbone have been cooking with since their early days at Torrisi Italian Specialties in Little Italy. (B&G isn’t an Italian specialty; the company was named for the Bloch and Guggenheimer families, pickle merchants in New York since 1889.)
Carbone and Torrisi are serious, technical chefs who execute complicated, exacting recipes at their restaurants and charge big money for the experience of eating them. They clued me in to a beautiful secret, though: Cherry-pepper sauce is easy to make, and forgiving too. You can set it up quickly, with sautéed garlic and diced peppers, a splash of wine. You can make it slowly, with whole peppers and a lot of the pickling juice cooked down into gloss. You can serve it with pork, with veal, with steak: grilled, roasted or seared in a pan.
The Italians have a saying about how to play particular pieces of music, and how to prepare certain dishes as well. “A piacere,” they say, meaning “as you like it,” or literally, “at pleasure.” Cherry-pepper sauce with a chop is absolutely an a piacere situation: You can make the sauce, and the protein that accompanies it, entirely as you like. For myself, I liked it first as a Bamonte’s-style pan sauce with diced peppers and later as a plusher, long-cooked version that I found terrific with pork and brilliant with veal — seeded peppers and stock and brine, with a little butter thrown in at the end for body and shine. That is the recipe that follows here, but you can regard it as merely a suggestion, a place to begin. It may leave you feeling as if you’ve opened your own little Rao’s, a bootleg Carbone. That is a good feeling, as it happens.
“It’s a flavor that’s purely Italian-American,” Carbone told me when we were standing in his kitchen, slurping some cherry-pepper sauce off plastic spoons. He laughed and signaled for some more calamari, and half a dozen oysters. “You won’t find it in Italy — no way.”
Recipe: Veal Chops in Cherry Pepper Sauce | Pork Chops in Cherry-Pepper Sauce
