Meat

Italy #6 – Grilled Montasio, prosciutto, and fig

Posted on by David
All good things must come to an end, and so too our cache of world-class cheese and ham from the Legends from Europe consortium. We had one 4-ounce piece of Montasio cheese remaining, along with four slices of prosciutto di Parma. And it was time for lunch. We found a jar of fig jam and some slices of whole wheat sandwich bread in the pantry. Drawing on inspiration closer to home (the fig, prosciutto, and Gorgonzola pizza from Todd English's original Olives, now Figs), we had the makings of a terrific grilled sandwich. If it were Italy and we had a panini press, it would have been a prosciutto and cheese panino and we might have skipped the fig jam. Whatever you want to call...Read More

Remembering Italy #2 with pear and prosciutto salad

Posted on by David
The Legends from Europe folks passed along a packet of prosciutto di Parma, the most familiar of the Italian raw hams seen in the U.S. and the one most imitated by American and South American producers. To qualify for the PDO label as prosciutto di Parma, the ham must come from pigs fed a special diet and raised in a defined north-central region of Italy. Additionally, the ham must be cured in the countryside near Parma in Emilia-Romagna. Much of the intense flavor comes from applying just enough salt to keep the ham “sweet” and then aging it at least 400 days. (The photo above shows whole hams hanging in a chilled aging room in Italy.) Parma prosciutto is the most intense of the Italian...Read More

Six things to bring home from New Hampshire

Posted on by Pat and David
In our last post, we mentioned six items we like to bring home from trips to Vermont. Since Food Lovers' Guide to Vermont & New Hampshire has about the same number of entries from each state, it seems only fair to mention some of our favorite foods to bring back from the Granite State. Flag Hill Winery & Distillery (297 North River Rd., Lee, N.H.; 603-659-2949; flaghill.com) doesn't need our imprimatur to sell their immensely popular, often sweet wines made from berries and apples as well as first-generation French-American hybrid grapes. Our preference goes to products from the artisanal distillery. The barrel-aged apple brandy is a classic American applejack, and the neutral spirit, a vodka triple-distilled from apples, is smooth and sultry. It's named for...Read More

Montreal bargain lunches

Posted on by Pat and David
Of all the guidebook series we work on, the research for the Food Lovers' series may be the most fun. Our most recent published volume was on Montreal, but we didn't spend all our time eating foie gras or dining at innovative contemporary restaurants. We're always on the lookout for good values, and we found 10 great lunches for about $10 where we could tap into various strains of Montreal culture. We recently published that roundup in the Boston Globe. You'll find the results as a pair of PDFs on our Sample Articles page. We are just about finished writing our next volume, Food Lovers' Guide to Vermont & New Hampshire, and have a refrigerator full of artisanal cheese, cured pork products, and storage vegetables...Read More

And then there was amatriciana

Posted on by Pat and David
While Tsatsu Nicholas Awuku was teaching us to make bucatini cacio e pepe (see below), Alessandro Sillani, the chef of Ristorante-Caffe di Rienzo (Piazza del Pantheon 8/9, 06-686-9097, www.ristorantedirienzo.it), demonstrated the equally popular and almost as simple sauce for bucatini all'amatriciana. Tradition holds that this sugo (sauce) originated in Amatrice, a town in the mountains of Lazio on the border with Abruzzo. Many families from the region settled in Rome, adding this dish to the capital's own cuisine. Sillani heated olive oil in a large frying pan, sautéed sliced onion until it was soft, and then added a thick pinch of hot pepper flakes and a handful of diced guanciale -- cured pork cheek that is similar to pancetta but typically leaner. He kept cooking...Read More

Why we are not foodies after all

Posted on by Pat and David
Ever since the Atlantic Monthly published contributing editor B.R. Myers' screed ''The Moral Crusade Against Foodies'' in the March issue, insults and calumnies have been flying back and forth on the Web like mashed potatoes in a cafeteria food fight. The gist of Myers' argument is that to be a foodie is to be a glutton. When he insists that foodies have ''a littleness of soul,'' he reminds us of the New Yorker who went deer hunting in Maine, shot a farmer's cow, and pronounced that he preferred beef anyway. Myers picked some easy targets (Anthony Bourdain's ''oafishness,'' Michael Pollan's ''sanctimony'') and knocked them over—but so what? Even Bourdain, Pollan, et al. should be pleased. Myers' excoriation might even sell a few more books. We...Read More

Poutine, pâté chinois, and Quebecois comfort food

Posted on by Pat and David
In the three decades that we have been visiting Montreal, the dining scene has never been in so much flux—and we mean that in a good way. One development is a resurgent pride in old-fashioned Quebecois cooking. Dishes that many Montreal foodies had considered guilty pleasures are now celebrated in fine restaurants. Back in 2007, Montreal's leading French-language newspaper Le Devoir even surveyed 500 people to determine the ''national plate of Quebec.'' (In Quebec, one always describes a province-wide phenomenon as ''national.'') We were surprised to learn that it was not poutine (French fries, cheese curds, and brown gravy), but rather pâté chinois, sometimes inelegantly translated on English menus as ''Quebec shepherd's pie.'' Keep watching this spot because we will publish an updated recipe for...Read More

Super Bowl arroz con pollo

Posted on by Pat and David
We were surprised to read recently that Super Bowl Sunday is the second biggest eating holiday in the U.S., close on the heels of Thanksgiving. Since our own team, the New England Patriots, is not part of the action this year, it's a diminished holiday for us. But we thought we could console ourselves with a good meal, and realized that the one dish we've probably eaten most often while watching football is arroz con pollo. Of course, the football in question is what we Americans call soccer, but the Spaniards are every bit as obsessive about it. As in the U.S., tickets to the games are expensive, and the matches are typically broadcast on premium cable. If you want to see a match in...Read More

Meeting the master of meat

Posted on by David
Bruno Bassetto of Treviso, Italy, knows meat. The 61-year-old butcher set a Guinness World Record in October by crafting a salamella—a kind of fresh pork sausage—more than 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) long. I had the good fortune to watch him trim a piece of round and make steak tartare in seconds with a pair of huge knives. But beyond his obvious showmanship, Bassetto is also a master of charcuterie. In addition to fresh meat, his butcher shop (via Mantiero 22, Treviso; 011-39-0422-231-945, www.brunobassettocarni.it) also carries fresh and cured sausages, which range from slender little pepperoni to a great expression of the local Veneto sopressa (a soft, cured sausage about 3 inches in diameter). In late fall and winter, he also makes a cooked pork sausage...Read More