By Jason Sheehan

The following is an excerpt, for the full article click here.

At the bar, Laura and I are eating salumi — Frasca’s antipasti ploughman’s platter, so simple and yet so perfect in its simplicity. Paper-thin slices of salty, stiff-fatty prosciutto di San Daniele (the best in the world, and from Friuli) are fanned alongside even thinner Italian speck, even thinner cured Oldani Filsette salami sourced through St. Louis, that undisputed culinary capital of the Midwest. Lying across the plate are grissini, long, skinny breadsticks that we’re supposed to use as edible utensils, wrapping the meat around them with our fingers and then running them through the white smear of horseradish rafano. On the side, we have a bowl of spiced almonds and cashews and peanuts — each nut differently spiced, ideally spiced, like bridge mix for the obsessive-compulsive — and a stack of frico tuilles, discs of baked and hardened sheep- and cow’s-milk cheese.