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Italy

Town by town Italian cooking with Stanley Tucci

Posted on February 20, 2021February 20, 2021 by Pat and David

Like a lot of Americans, we're watching Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy on CNN. It airs on Sunday nights, though we confess to watching it on a weekend afternoon, thanks to the magic of a DVR. Now that football season is over, it's our excuse to slack off for part of the day with the excuse that we're working, right? (This blog post is supposed to make us feel less guilty.) Tucci's schtick in the series is that food tells the story of place, and that each place is unique. We wrote something to that effect ourselves some years ago in the PBS series companion book, The Meaning of Food. Episode 1 was devoted to Naples (pizza), Ischia (rabbit in tomato sauce), and the Amalfi...Read More

San Marzano DOP tomatoes to the rescue

Posted on November 13, 2020November 13, 2020 by Pat and David

When our garden was hit with the first killing frost (and four inches of snow) on Halloween, we were lucky. We had harvested all our green tomatoes and a bucket of partially ripe cherry tomatoes before the mercury plunged. So we will still be cooking with fresh tomatoes for another week or so. But end-of-the-season tomatoes can't hold a candle to the sweet, juicy beauties of summer. Ditto the greenhouse tomatoes that we buy over the winter. Every year we talk ourselves into their virtues and overlook their faults. At some point great canned tomatoes are superior to just okay fresh ones. Finding the best canned tomatoes in the world We look for cans labeled ‶Pomodoro San Marzano dell'Agro Sarnese-Nocerino DOP.″ Sometimes it's a subtitle...Read More

World on a Plate: Caino’s coffee-dusted cacio e pepe

Posted on November 6, 2020November 5, 2020 by Pat and David

Sometimes culinary genius reveals itself in a brilliant gesture rather than in profound technical flourishes. This tangle of pasta demonstrates the genius of restraint. It also embodies the taste and imagination of Valeria Piccini. Piccini simply calls the dish spaghettone cacio, pepe, e caffè. She frequently offers it as a pasta course at her family restaurant. Il Ristorante Caino (Via Canonica, 3, Montemerano; +39 0564 692 817; dacaino.it) is hidden away in a tiny medieval mountain village in Tuscany's Maremma. But Piccini's cooking draws admirers from all over Italy to the 13th century hamlet where sheep and goats may outnumber the 400 human inhabitants. Da Caino earned its first Michelin star in 1991, and has held two since 1999. The dining public and Michelin's inspectors...Read More

World on a Plate: carciofi alla giudia

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Pat and David

‶Jewish-style artichokes″ is what the Romans call this most Roman of fried dishes. The vegetable—really the flower of a thistle—is transfigured by its dual bath in hot olive oil. The ‶Jewish″ part of the name is a tip-off that it's a fried dish, as Jews introduced deep-frying to Italian cuisine during their confinement in the Roman ghetto in the 16th–19th centuries. The photo above shows a classic example from Da Teo (facebook.com/Trattoria.da.TEO/), a trattoría in the Trastevere neighborhood that recently reopened with social distancing. A few years back, we rented an apartment just down the street and ate there as often as we could. We almost always started with the artichokes as an appetizer. What we didn't appreciate at the time was that the giant...Read More

World on a plate: Gangemi gelato in Trieste

Posted on July 24, 2020July 20, 2020 by Pat and David

The first time either of us ever visited Trieste was with a group of American and Italian chefs. Coming from the ancient city of Aquileia, we drove nearly an hour out of our way to hit the seaside town at the head of the Adriatic. The leader of our group lined us all up for a photo on the main plaza overlooking the sea and then let us free for 20 minutes. The smart ones followed him to Gangemi at the juncture of Piazza della Borsa and Piazza d'Unita. ‶This is the best gelato in Italy,″ he pronounced, which was saying something coming from a Neapolitan who only grudgingly swooned over pistachio gelato in Sicily. Now that it's midsummer and we are stranded 5,000 miles...Read More

World on a Plate: When in Rome…

Posted on June 19, 2020June 21, 2020 by Pat and David

While nothing quite compares with eating big plates of pasta at an al fresco table with the Pantheon in the background, we remain eternally grateful to the chefs at Ristorante-Caffe di Rienzo (Piazza del Pantheon 8/9, 06-686-9097, www.ristorantedirienzo.it) for teaching us two of the basic Roman dishes made with dried pasta. They are both in the photo at right—bucatini all’amatriciana in the foreground, and cacio e pepe behind it. In fact, we can almost hear the light jazz of the street musicians on the Piazza del Pantheon. If you'd like the recipes for the two dishes as the DiRienzo chefs taught us, see these two posts: hungrytravelers.com/learning-roman-pastas-1/ and hungrytravelers.com/and-then-there-was-amatriciana/. Both dishes remain among our favorites that we turn to when need a delicious but quick...Read More

Pasta fazool, for the immigrants we have all become

Posted on April 15, 2020April 15, 2020 by Pat and David

We've never eaten pasta e fagioli in Italy. We've never even seen it on a menu there, though a reliable source (Michele Sciocolone) tells us it is Neapolitan. (That's why we posted the Neapolitan chef and food vendor miniatures above. They're masked for Carnavale and sold on the same street as Christmas creche figures.) The dish—‶pasta fazool″ in the Neapolitan dialect—has an Italian-flavored familiarity that marks it as real comfort food. Turns out that it's known mainly in Italian-American cuisine. It's from that branch of cooking born when immigrants made do with canned and dried commodities rather than the fresh ingredients they knew in the old country. We're all immigrants now to the world of social distancing and staying indoors. We're making do with canned...Read More

Boccaccio’s ‘Decamaron’ and the solace of stories and wine

Posted on March 21, 2020 by David

The news from Italy, especially in the north, is nothing short of horrific. So quickly has the COVID-19 pandemic moved that everything was transformed in a manner of weeks. As I write this post in mid-March, it's hard to believe that just three weeks ago (February 25), a few hundred representatives of mostly northern Italian wineries were in Boston for the annual Slow Wine presentation. That's the irrepressible Roberto Bava of Cocchi (cocchi.it) in the Piedmont at the top of the post. Italy has seen such horrors before. The Decamaron by Giovanni Boccaccio is one of the foundational books of Italian literature. The frame story is set in the summer of 1348 as the bubonic plague was ravaging Europe. Three young men and seven young...Read More

Canned tomatoes from Europe recall the taste of summer

Posted on February 11, 2020February 10, 2020 by Pat and David

This time of year we really start pining for summer tomatoes. Even the best hothouse tomatoes don't measure up. They're not as sweet or as acid and even the ripe ones are usually far too firm. Mind you, we always have some homemade marinara sauce in the pantry, but cooked sauces are no substitute for fresh vegetables. We've tried using any number of U.S. canned tomato products, and they too fall short. But the same isn't true for certain European canned tomatoes—especially those grown and packed in Italy. And, more to the point, those grown and packed in southern Italy and packed without added calcium chloride or preservatives. This may not be immediately obvious, since the front of the labels don't carry the European geographical...Read More

Lunch with class and style on Trieste’s Piazza della Borsa

Posted on December 19, 2019December 18, 2019 by Pat and David

Certain dishes taste their best in special surroundings—prosecco and potato chips on Venice's Piazza San Marco, for example. Our latest pairing of plate and place is pumpkin and sausage risotto on the glorious Piazza della Borsa in Trieste. In case you don't know the city, it's just barely in Italy, sitting on the Slovenian border a few kilometers from Croatia. In fact, it's only been Italian since 1919. For hundreds of years, it was the chief shipping port for the Austrian empire. Most significantly, it was the chief importer of coffee for all of Mitteleuropa. Without Trieste, there would be no such thing as “Vienna roast.” To this day, its citizens drink nearly twice as much coffee as the average Italian. But we digress. The...Read More