A year of Italian cooking

[Kevin72]

Thanks! My wife, when we first started dating, claimed not to like duck, particularly the seared duck breast dishes, but she was pretty crazy about this version. I got a grill with a burner attachment this past summer and it burns much hotter and higher than any of my household burners do; it often scorched my pans when I put them on there outside. I decided to give the cast-iron skillet a whirl out there and it worked beautifully. I had to stand over it with a flashlight and closely inspect the meat though since it was already dark when I started cooking.

[Anna N]

Thanks!  My wife, when we first started dating, claimed not to like duck, particularly the seared duck breast dishes, but she was pretty crazy about this version.  I got a grill with a burner attachment this past summer and it burns much hotter and higher than any of my household burners do; it often scorched my pans when I put them on there outside.  I decided to give the cast-iron skillet a whirl out there and it worked beautifully.  I had to stand over it with a flashlight and closely inspect the meat though since it was already dark when I started cooking.

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Ah ah! Next time I find duck breasts I will try them on my newly-acquired table-top butane burner, a cast iron pan, and see how that works. Thanks for the idea.

[FoodMan]

Two things. I also tried the cabbage dish since I had a half head of green cabbage I needed to use and I added some fresh thynme into the mix as well. how did I not make this before? It was very very good, sweet and pungent with olive oil and garlic. Oh, I also added a small splash of red wine vinegar after it was cooked. It worked out very well.

I got a copy of the Splendid Table from Half Price books a few days ago. What a splendid book it is! I am already more than halfway through reading it. The pasta chapters alone are worth the $9 price tag . Thanks Kevin (and the rest of you) for recommending it. they also had Kasper's "Italian Country Table". Is that worth picking up as well?

Well I guess I have three points today. Kevin, I though E-R will take us to the end of the year (2 months). Didn't you say that when you started working on it?

[Kevin72]

Country Table, while it doesn't have the singular regional focus of Splendid Table, is fairly underrated and gets eclipsed by its more famous predecessor. I like it because it's highly rustic, give a good sampling of different regional country traditions throughout Italy, and offers some unique recipes; it was one of the big books that piqued my interest in Pugliese cuisine. I actually got it before ST. I've used it a number of times throughout this year of cooking. Definitely worth a buy.

Try the cabbage without the vinegar next time; the whole pleasure of the dish is its uniform, smooth, comforting taste.

Though I could easily cook another three months in E-R, I didn't mean to give an impression that it was going to take up the last two months of the year. Too much other ground to cover!

Edited December 1, 2005 by Kevin72 (log)

[FoodMan]

Well Kevin, I am sure I am not alone in saying. This thread -or should I say updates to this thread- will be sorely missed come January.

[hathor]

Kevin, you can't just abandon Italian cooking!! What would we all do?? What about going super regional? As in picking specific cities? Could be fun. Could make you insane. Hard to say.

Where are we gonna be for December?? And the Capo d'Anno meal better be a good one!!!!!!!!

[albiston]

Kevin, you can't just abandon Italian cooking!! What would we all do??

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Time for someone else picking up where Kevin leaves it, after all there are a few regions missing.

Who's up for a new New Year resolution ?

Edited December 1, 2005 by albiston (log)

[hathor]

What about a group resolution? What if Kevin picks a region and we cook along? Just a thought....

[Pan]

[...]The condimento was basically mushrooms trifolati style, that is, sautéed in garlic-scented olive oil and parsley.[...]

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Ah, that's something I cook! I use the recipe in Adda Boni's Il Talismano della Cucina, though not slavishly. I always use plenty of lemon juice in funghi trifolati. Try that some time. It's probably a recipe from another region, but the combination of lemon juice, olive oil, parsley, pepper, and garlic with the mushrooms is delicious. And I find that even with regular mushrooms, this dish always pleases. Another ingredient I use when it's around at the time I decide to cook the dish is some anchovy paste. I think it's listed as "optional" in the recipe (which is in an English translation put out by Ronzoni), but it really improves the dish. Mushrooms are great, aren't they?

I do not add cheese to funghi trifolati, by the way. The cheese goes with some other dish I would make, such as a pasta with tomato sauce.

[Kevin72]

Ah, that's something I cook! I use the recipe in Adda Boni's Il Talismano della Cucina, though not slavishly. I always use plenty of lemon juice in funghi trifolati. Try that some time. It's probably a recipe from another region, but the combination of lemon juice, olive oil, parsley, pepper, and garlic with the mushrooms is delicious. And I find that even with regular mushrooms, this dish always pleases. Another ingredient I use when it's around at the time I decide to cook the dish is some anchovy paste. I think it's listed as "optional" in the recipe (which is in an English translation put out by Ronzoni), but it really improves the dish. Mushrooms are great, aren't they?

I do not add cheese to funghi trifolati, by the way. The cheese goes with some other dish I would make, such as a pasta with tomato sauce.

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Is Ada Buoni's book in Italian? Do you have her other book that goes region by region or is that it? I don't recall ever seeing her stuff in stores here.

I really like the mixture of anchovies and mushrooms, even ordinary cremini 'shrooms get elevated that way. And lemon and mushrooms are good too; really wakes up those flavors.

[Kevin72]

What about a group resolution? What if Kevin picks a region and we cook along? Just a thought....

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Hmm, that is a thought. But the year's not over yet!

[Kevin72]

The penultimate month of cooking will be the festive, vibrant cooking of Campania, dominated by the city of Naples and the scenic Amalfi Coast.

This should be an interesting and appropriate counterpoint to Emilia-Romagna, as Campania/Naples has its own fair share of “classic” and famous Italian dishes and products that have originated there: pizza, the Southern Italian (and to most Americans, the more familiar) Lasagne, spaghetti with a range of tomato sauces, bracciole, meatballs, spaghetti with clams, mozzarella/fior di latte . . .

I chose to do Campania in December as opposed to the more seasonally-appropriate summer months almost exclusively because of La Vigilia, the famous “Feast of the Fishes”. This is a procession of dishes served on Christmas Eve all over Italy and whose exact number (7, 9, or 13 are the most common variants) is up for debate; each variation has specific familial and especially religious significance. After much lobbying with my parents, and after they heard about it in detail last year when I cooked for my wife’s family, they’ve agreed to let me give it a spin on Christmas Eve and already my wife and I are drawing up a plan of attack. So there’s that to look forward to.

Furthermore, I stretch out the Vigilia a little and do “teaser” meals throughout the month for friends, so it looks like this will be a seafood and feast-intensive month, which, while not completely representative of its traditional cooking styles, Campania seems perfectly suited for.

Southern Italian cooking in general, and specifically, the cooking of Campania, have been a strong influence on my cooking at this time of the year for a while now, so this is a natural leap. Thus, two of the main influences for this month are both Holiday (and Campania)-influenced: Mario Batali’s Holiday Food and Michele Scicolone’s Italian Holiday Cooking books. I have a sentimental attachment to Batali’s book as I have now ritualistically dug it out every year at this time and read through it for ideas, but it is almost criminally short and only covers Christmas to New Year’s (besides, a sizable portion of those recipes are now recycled into Molto Italiano) Sciccolone’s book is far more comprehensive and touches on numerous other Italian holidays, including some not widely known about here in the U.S. She also runs the gambit of different regions so it’s a good, all-purpose tool. In fact I just now realized that I was going to use it as a reference for some specific Holidays this past year but got sidetracked.

The other major resource is Arthur Schwartz’s Naples at Table, a recent acquisition and actually I haven’t quite made it all the way through yet. I will say that it is another stunningly in depth book and gives such a major cuisine its appropriate due in much the same way that Splendid Table does for Emilia-Romagna. Again, stories, history, and personal anecdotes abound, drawing you in. Thoroughly underrated.

That should cover it. I’d like to do some “fasting” dishes as well, though, and am tinkering with the idea of doing maybe a little vegetarian or nearly vegetarian stretch the week before Christmas Eve. Too bad we don’t have a prominent poster on these boards that comes from Campania who can weigh in and offer advice and direction, though, hmmm . . .

[azureus]

What about a group resolution? What if Kevin picks a region and we cook along? Just a thought....

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Hmm, that is a thought. But the year's not over yet!

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I'd like to add my vote for a group resolution. It might be one that I actually keep in the coming year!

My second idea for a cooking resolution would be "A Year of Italian Desserts", but that would need to be followed by "A Year of Bread and Water and Ruthless Exercising".

April

[FoodMan]

What about a group resolution? What if Kevin picks a region and we cook along? Just a thought....

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Hmm, that is a thought. But the year's not over yet!

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Oh yeah...I like this very much too! Then we all need to have access to Kevin's nice book collection though . Mine is not nearly as good.

[Chufi]

What about a group resolution? What if Kevin picks a region and we cook along? Just a thought....

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Hmm, that is a thought. But the year's not over yet!

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Oh, yes, please!! I'd love to cook along!

Kevin, I'm excited about this next region. I spent a sundrenched, food-filled vacation once on the Amalfi coast.. It's so stunningly beautiful there.. Looking forward to the food!

Edited December 2, 2005 by Chufi (log)

[Pan]

Ah, that's something I cook! I use the recipe in Adda Boni's Il Talismano della Cucina, though not slavishly. I always use plenty of lemon juice in funghi trifolati. Try that some time. It's probably a recipe from another region, but the combination of lemon juice, olive oil, parsley, pepper, and garlic with the mushrooms is delicious. And I find that even with regular mushrooms, this dish always pleases. Another ingredient I use when it's around at the time I decide to cook the dish is some anchovy paste. I think it's listed as "optional" in the recipe (which is in an English translation put out by Ronzoni), but it really improves the dish. Mushrooms are great, aren't they?

I do not add cheese to funghi trifolati, by the way. The cheese goes with some other dish I would make, such as a pasta with tomato sauce.

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Is Ada Buoni's book in Italian? Do you have her other book that goes region by region or is that it? I don't recall ever seeing her stuff in stores here.

I really like the mixture of anchovies and mushrooms, even ordinary cremini 'shrooms get elevated that way. And lemon and mushrooms are good too; really wakes up those flavors.

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Hi, Kevin. I was misspelling her name. It's Ada Boni with one "d." I did an amazon.com search under that name and found the following title:

The Talisman Italian Cookbook : Italy's bestselling cookbook adapted for American kitchens (Hardcover) by Ada Boni

# Hardcover: 320 pages

# Publisher: Crown (December 13, 1950)

# Language: English

# ISBN: 0517503875

# Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches

I'd post a link, but I suspect my link might not work.

Here's the beginning of the "Editorial Review":

Il Talismano is and has been for over 50 years the one great standard Italian cookbook. It is to Italians what Joy of Cooking is to Americans. Containing in simple and clear form the best recipes for all the foods that we associate with Italian cuisine, it covers all the regional variations of Italian cooking: Milanese, Bolognese, Venetian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Veronese, and Florentine.

The reviews are mixed, with praise that this is cucina della nonna and criticism that many of the substitutions made to adapt it for American kitchens are no longer necessary.

The Italian title turns out to be not Il Talismano della Cucina, as I always thought, but Il Talismano della Felicità. Here are some used copies of the full and small versions in Italian for sale.

[Kevin72]

Pizza Party!

We went over to some good friends’ house Saturday night and had a procession of pizzas, each of the four of us getting to chose one with the chef getting to pick two. The two men cooked while the women got to watch TV and sip cocktails.

The pizzas were:

White Pizza topped with Ricotta, Mozzarella (fair warning: I will slip many times this month and call fior di Latte mozzarella, as I just did, so get used to it), parmigiano, and pecorino.

The Classic “Margherita” with mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil.

Roasted peppers, olives, and capers

Prosciutto and chaunterelles (my favorite)

Sausage and, just out of the oven, some slivered arugula over the top to wilt into it.

I did quite a bit of research on the crust, including going to eG poster Pizza Napoletana’s site, rereading Alberto's Recent Trip Threadfor the breakout discussion on pizza, and combing through five of my cookbooks. I wanted to try to make it with “Tipo 00” flour as Pizza Napoletana has directed, and as Jeffery Steingarten implies in his pizza chapter in It Must’ve Been Something I Ate, and so off I went on a last-minute shopping excursion to downtown Dallas on Friday night. We have, or had, an Italian-style grocery store here that gets very well-stocked for the Holidays and is the only source I could find for 00 flour. A little over a year ago, though, they had a fire and were forced to close up shop. Several months later, they started operating out of a liquor and wine retailer nearby, and recently announced plans to re-open their original location. So, I headed off to the satellite location. The plan was to stock up for the coming onslaught of cooking, including the giant cans of tomatoes they sell, unique pasta shapes, this flour, and cotechino. Unfortunately, they were no longer there. Then I went to the original location hoping against hope they’d somehow re-opened, even though fellow eGer Richard Kilgore is keeping tabs on them and told me they hadn’t progressed far after the announcement. And indeed they hadn’t, though frustratingly I could see through the window that the store looked pretty well stocked so far. So I returned, empty-handed, and forgot to try to track down cake flour and mix it with regular flour. This is all a roundabout way of offering advanced apologies for not being as authentic to traditional recipes in the coming month that I’d like to be.

So reluctantly I went ahead with making the dough with all-purpose flour, as all of my other sources direct. I also “aged” the dough overnight in the fridge, as I learned from Alberto’s thread. The dough for each pizza was a piece weighing about 7 ounces. I couldn’t get them too terribly thin or stretched out; each was a little smaller than a standard dinner plate. Everyone really enjoyed the crust, but I was wistful about what could have been and still want to take a stab at it with 00 flour, even though that still won’t get me there without a wood-burning stove and 800F temps to cook it with. [Jeffery Steingarten embarks on a similar quest with amusing results in the same pizza chapter I referenced above in It Must’ve Been Something I Ate.]

Dessert was the inaugural batch of Holiday cookies my wife and I take turns at making. These are hazelnut baci, little sandwiches more traditionally made with ground almond cookie dough and chocolate icing holding them together; I go with ground hazelnut meal and nutella instead.

[Kevin72]

We’ve taken to doing food gift baskets to our friends and family for Christmas and one of the things I submit is a container of ragu Bolognese and another container of my version of tomato sauce. While I’m not claiming any authenticity to Campanian traditions, here’s how I make it:

Wilt diced red and yellow onion in olive oil and cook it, covered until it has nearly collapsed and melted into the oil. Don’t let it caramelize. Then add garlic and stir through just to get fragrant:

Then come the tomatoes. I use big cans of whole tomatoes (Cento is my go-to brand), not even the famed San Marzanos. I used to laboriously drain them, split them open, and seed them, but one time I forgot to do this step and found next to no difference in the finished product. So now I just crush them all up by hand and toss ‘em in. Many recipes for a basic tomato sauce call for diced or shredded carrot and celery to tame the acidic element of the canned tomatoes and add a little sweetness. I don’t like all those extra “chunks” in there and besides, this is a tomato sauce, not a vegetable sauce! So I add whole peeled carrots and celery too cook in the sauce and give up their flavors. The sauce is basically done when the vegetables are soft enough to break up:

Off the heat, stir in fresh herbs like oregano and/or basil and you’re done.

In a complete anathema to Campania and the rest of the South, I really prefer fresh, homemade spaghettini to go with this sauce instead of dried. I just like the texture in the pasta and the way the two meld together to make something more than the sum.

[Kevin72]

Sunday night’s meal: Ragu Napoletano, the Campanian counterpart to Ragu Bolognese, fortuitously coinciding with the direction the Italian Ragu thread has taken. The chief difference in style is that in the Neapolitan-style Ragu, (as it is in much of Southern Italy) a large cut of meat, or several different cuts, are braised in a tomato sauce, and then the sauce is served over pasta while the meat is reserved for the main. Using Arthur Schwartz’s technique and basic ingredients for Ragu Napoletano in Naples At Table, I made a version with a pork “bracciolona”, a cut of shoulder meat butterflied, flattened, then layered with spicy salami, raisins, pine nuts, cheese, and currants.

Looks like a zampone!

Schwartz mentions numerous times throughout his book that by in large, the Campanians do not like to cook both onion and garlic together as an aromatic base, only one or the other. So, resisting every urge I had otherwise, the sole other aromatic in this dish was onion. I even stopped myself from adding bay leaves. Red wine was also used, as was a good pinch of chilies to spike things up. He directs you to brown the meat and the onions together, but I can’t ever get that technique right and find that either the aromatics throw off too much liquid to brown the meat effectively, or that the aromatics wind up getting scorched in the long, slow process of browning the meat. So I do them separately, or nearly so, with the onion going in just during the last part of browning the meat.

We kicked off the meal with mozzarella in carozza, sandwiches with mozzarella that are dipped in egg wash and then fried. To go with them we had a Sorrento cocktail from a Molto Mario episode: vodka, limoncello, campari, and orange juice.

The other major reason for my fruitless foray to find the Italian deli was to find “true” ziti, as long as a standard piece of spaghetti. Alberto, on the Italian ragu thread, gives a very evocative description of how that is the best pasta to serve the ragu over after breaking it up by hand first. (I actually was given a package of true ziti a few years ago, and cooked and sauced it whole, then was perplexed on how to eat it!). So, now without that type of ziti, I bought the standard, pre-cut ziti about the length of your pinkie. But now I know why the pasta package calls it “ziti cut”, something I could never figure out.

So, the ziti were served with the sauce and a mixture of pecorino and parmigiano cheeses. I like the interplay of the two for the dish and find that one or the other alone seems to throw the whole thing out of balance.

The bracciolona:

The contorno was braised broccoli with lemon. This is not the “smothered” broccoli rabe or “soffritto” style that Neapolitans dote on; that comes later. Instead, this was the standard broccoli with garlic and then enlivened with a little lemon juice at the end.

[Kevin72]

One of the dishes I’ve come to make each year at the start of December and to really kick off festive Holiday cooking is gatto, a savory “cake” of potato, cheeses, and salami. Schwartz says that it makes an elaborate primo to precede a plain roasted meat or chicken, but I like it to be the star player with just a nice tart salad afterwards, which is how we did it Monday night.

This sounds ridiculous, but one of the very best lessons I’ve learned in traveling to Italy is how to make the perfect salad. And it’s not even something you have to go there to learn, if I’d just opened my damned eyes and read the countless instructions by countless authors on how to do it: spritz the leaves with great-quality olive oil, then season with salt to get it to adhere to the leaves, then add the vinegar. My old approach was to emulsify the oil, vinegar, and seasoning together, then glop over the salad. But getting salt on each leaf of the greens really wakes up their flavor and everything tastes so vibrant afterwards.

[Kevin72]

Pan, thanks for looking up the Buoni book for me. I definitely want to get a few of her books, particularly the regional cooking book mentioned here, to contrast with the Waverly Root book.

[Pontormo]

Kevin:

Everything on this "page" is gorgeous, especially the potato cake which is completely unknown to me.

Living in an Italian-American neighborhood in New Haven (THE pizza street), I was accustomed to individually scaled braciole, but not the larger version you prepare.

Final comment regarding the spectacular pizza: there is a place outside of Florence that bakes pizza with only a tomato sauce. When it comes OUT of the oven, it is draped generously with prosciutto, large curls of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a generous handful of arugula that invites a drizzle of olive oil.

[Kevin72]

Sunday night’s meal was one of the previously mentioned all-seafood Vigilia “teasers”.

For a cocktail we had tangerine, Campari, and soda from Mario’s Holiday Food cookbook, something I’ve really grown attached to during the Christmas season.

Our antipasto was calamari alla Luciana:

Normally, this is cooked with octopus but I haven’t been able to track any down here in Dallas lately. So instead I used calamari heads/tentacles. Braise calamari with crushed tomatoes, chilies, and garlic. The calamari throws off enough liquid to account for the remaining liquid to cook in; apparently, according to Schwartz, there’s even a saying in Italian about an octopus cooking in its own juices, akin to the English proverb “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it”. To mop up the juices, I made a couple loaves of bread with finely minced roasted peppers added to the dough, giving it an orange-ish hue.

The primo was a repeat of a pasta meal made way back last winter when I did the Veneto: linguine alle vongole. This time, chilies added a little punch to the dish instead of the ample ground black pepper I used back then. I said it then and I’ll say it now: one of my all-time favorite pastas. Once I read Schwartz’s rhapsodic writings on the dish as a Neapolitan mainstay I knew I had to dig it out one more time.

The secondo were grilled skewers of monkfish and peppers, marinated in lemon juice and oil before cooking and then, off the grill, doused with a second marinade of olive oil, fresh chilies, mint, and limoncello.

Dessert was another batch of sweets for the holidays: struffoli, little fried puffs of dough that are doused in citrus-scented honey while still hot out of the oil.

That's one whole recipe's batch by the way. I looked at three different recipes and all gave similar ingredient measurements. I guess it's good that they didn't last beyond the meal; I find they get too stale and dried out even after 24 hours sitting out.

[Kevin72]

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these: Monday night we did a collection of Neapolitan antipasti:

In the foreground is “winter Caprese”, versions of which appear in both Mario Batali’s new cookbook Molto Italiano and Erica de Mane’s Flavors of Southern Italy. Lacking the ingredients indicated in their recipes, I simply slivered some sundried tomatoes, then sprinkled them over mozzarella and added shredded basil, then spritzed the whole with olive oil. Certainly no substitute for juicy, almost spicy height-of-summer tomatoes and mozzarella but this was an interesting variation and certainly something more Italian-style restaurants should consider doing here instead of cottony hothouse tomatoes out of season.

Next in the center up are crostini Napoletani, crostini topped with “ricotta” (the homemade, not-really-ricotta kind) and minced anchovies, then broiled until sizzling.

In the yellow serving dish are meatballs with lemons and capers from Naples at Table using pork instead of the veal directed in the recipe.

Finally in the blue bowl in the back is insalata rinforzo, a salad of pickled cauliflower, carrots, and peppers. Served during Christmastime, the idea is to keep “reinforcing” it with subsequent leftovers from whatever other vegetable dish you make each night and then dousing it with more vinegar to preserve it.

[Kevin72]

Kevin: 

Everything on this "page" is gorgeous, especially the potato cake which is completely unknown to me.

Living in an Italian-American neighborhood in New Haven (THE pizza street), I was accustomed to individually scaled braciole, but not the larger version you prepare. 

Final comment regarding the spectacular pizza: there is a place outside of Florence that bakes pizza with only a tomato sauce.  When it comes OUT of the oven, it is draped generously with prosciutto,  large curls of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a generous handful of arugula that invites a drizzle of olive oil.

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Thanks for the compliments! The larger braciolona is based on a recipe from Batali's Holiday Food and based more on what I had on-hand than anything else.

That pizza sounds incredible. I'd heard of the technique before but decided to do it in the oven because a) my wife isn't so big on raw prosciutto and b) my oven doesn't get as hot as real kind, so it wouldn't get the pizza hot enough to wilt the prosciutto right into it out of the oven.