The way they cook, more or less

PALERMO, Italy -- At 9 p.m. on a mild spring night, we are among the first diners to arrive at Trattoria Tipica Altri Tempi, a modest, unadorned restaurant here. Once seated, we realize we can't read a word of the menu -- actually our placemat -- because it's written entirely in Sicilian dialect, rather than Italian. (Most of us are fluent in at least restaurant Italian.) When the waiter sees us stumbling, he asks if he should just bring us dinner. We nod enthusiastically.

What appears is a delightful succession of small courses, tastes of cured meats and hard sheep's milk cheeses, pasta tossed with sardines, spaghetti with cauliflower, and then a large piece of bony meat. It sits on a platter with a few potatoes around it, and comes with a sharp knife.

This curious presentation turns out to be a plump pork shank, and when sliced off the bone, it has that melting quality that comes from a long, slow braise in wine. The meat looks familiar, and I remember that this is ''stinco" (Italian for shank), a dish I ate years ago at the late Julia Child's house in Cambridge. On that occasion, New York restaurateur Lidia Bastianich was launching her first public television show, ''Lidia's Italian Table," and Child invited her to cook something from the series. Bastianich used veal shanks, the cuts usually sliced by butchers to make the rounds for osso bucco.

The Sicilian stinco stayed with me, not just for the rustic manner in which the large joint was set on the table without comment or instruction, but also because it was such a splendid dish -- hardly seasoned, barely winey, a spoonful of boiled potatoes the only garnish. And how could a dish with such an appealing aroma be saddled in translation with such a dreadful name?

Bastianich calls it an example of ''languages in collision," while Michele Topor, an Italian cooking expert who leads tours of her North End neighborhood, says the name is ''just crazy."

''Any American who goes over there says, 'What is this?' " Topor says. Although stinco is made in both Sicily and Sardinia, she adds, the dish is northern, a specialty of the Piedmont, Veneto, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

Of course even with a better moniker, stinco might still be a hard sell in this country. After all, lamb shanks don't fly out of the meat case, largely because consumers don't know what to do with them. Butcher John Dewar explains that the shank comes from the hind legs of the animal, ''as opposed to the fore shanks, which have interconnective sinew and gristle. Hind shank muscles are longer and a lot smoother."

Dewar, who sells meat to restaurants around the city and retails his products at stores in Newton Centre and Wellesley, rarely gets a retail call for whole pork or veal shanks. His veal shanks weigh about 3 pounds each; they cost $9.99 per pound and each serves two. If, by the way, you ask the butcher to trim the shanks and cut them into the classic thick slabs for osso bucco, you're looking at $15.99 a pound. Pork shanks weigh 1 1/2 pounds and cost $4.99 a pound.

In her childhood home in Istria, then part of Italy, Bastianich's family made veal or pork and served the roast on a cutting board, ''sliced but left somewhat on the bone," she writes in an e-mail from New York. ''It is served with patate in tecia, dialect for mashed and caramelized home fries with onion."

Josh Ziskind, chef and owner of La Morra in Brookline Village, buys veal shanks whole, and after braising, doesn't serve them Neanderthal-style on the bone, but rather slices them into thick hunks and lays the meat and its juices on saffron risotto. The dish, at $22, ''is one of the most popular risotto dishes on the menu." Ziskin adds the classic osso bucco garnish, gremolata, to the cooking broth. Gremolata, a mixture of finely chopped lemon rind, garlic, and parsley, is typically sprinkled onto the cooked meat just before it's served.

Until recently, Jimmy Burke was serving pork shanks at Riva in Scituate. ''As a matter of fact, it just came off the menu," he says, as he's looking toward lighter fare. The 20-ounce ''beautiful pork shanks," says the restaurant owner, were braised in red wine, pork stock, and rosemary, and sent to the table -- standing bone up. ''We sold a lot of it." Often, he says, what customers didn't eat went home in two doggie bags: ''One for their dog for the bone. And one for them."

Italian cookbook author Fred Plotkin, who travels often between New York and Italy, laments the fact that there are no doggie bags in Italy. He writes in ''La Terra Fortunata: The Splendid Food and Wine of Friuli-Venezia Giulia" that at the restaurant La Subida in Cormons, he always insists that someone in his party order stinco. ''I find it unthinkable to travel all that way and not taste it again," he writes. The cooked meat arrives at the table ''on a trolley, where it is proudly sliced and served (the meat must be cut parallel to the bone)." His heart sinks when the trolley rolls away.

Plotkin cooks his veal shank with onion, carrot, pancetta, fresh sage, and dried marjoram, and advises not skimming the fat from the cooking juices. ''Enjoy this dish in all of its glory," he writes.

Instead of spooning over cooking juices, you can present the shank with a more refined sauce. Cooking teacher and writer Giuliano Bugialli braises veal legs with plenty of porcini mushrooms, carrots, celery, basil, and white wine. After the shank is cooked -- in ''Bugialli's Italy" he recommends nearly two hours in a hot rather than low oven -- he works the juices in the pan with the vegetables through a food mill and serves the meat and its sauce with cannellini or borlotti beans (speckled and similar to pinto or cranberry beans). Or, he says, you can toss pasta with the vegetable sauce and offer it as a first course before the meat.

Years ago in the Piedmont region of Italy, Burke, the Scituate restaurateur, had dinner at a winemaker's house and a whole veal shank came to the table. ''It was fairly big," he says. ''It wasn't served individually. We helped ourselves family-style."

Family-style is what Bastianich had in mind at Child's house in Cambridge in 1998, when she presented a platter of five ample veal shanks, bone ends pointing up, while the French Chef repeated the word ''stinco" in that famous voice and nearly sent guests running from the kitchen in fits of giggles.