A year of Italian cooking

[hathor]

Uh-oh... I may have passed along my baccalau problems to you... sorry!

But Vigilla looked absolutely lovely!! And what a pretty pussy cat!

The braised squid looked especially good.

Tell me more about that shrimp saor. I've only done sardines in saor with a recipe that calls for a few days of marinating. Hmmm....wonder if its too late to make some for New Years day....

I think your family was very lucky to have you cooking for them, complimenti!!

[Chufi]

When I was a kid (okay, fourteen or fifteen), we were living next door to an Italian family.  One year on Christmas Eve, my family was sitting around to our “traditional” dinner of a cheese and cracker plate followed by a choice of either Onion Soup or Clam Chowder, and we got to talking about traditions.  My mom then related how the family next door was eating a huge seafood feast, like five or six dishes, and among them were fried squid, mussel soup, and stewed eels.  I didn’t even know you could eat these things, much less that they were part of the Italian repertoire!  I was horrified and yet deeply fascinated all at once.  Surely it was just “their” tradition, right?  But how did they come by such weird things to eat?  Mom answered that Italians everywhere always ate a huge seafood meal on Christmas Eve, that there had to be seafood in everything they ate, and that it was usually four or more courses.  I glanced next door through their window and saw the four of them just sitting down to their dinner.  I found myself privately wishing I was there to try some of this exotic stuff.  My culinary world got a little larger that night, but at the same time my own family’s traditional Christmas Eve dinner seemed a little smaller by comparison. I think my fascination with Italian food can be traced to that one incident. 

←

What a wonderful story.

I love your writing almost as much as your cooking

I am so sad that the year is almost over. This thread has been a joy to read and a great inspiration. Please don't stop cooking - and keep showing us your work!

[Behemoth]

Great photos, but now I am very hungry. We've been living on leberkase, pretzels and beer until the stove gets hooked up but munich as a huge italian population with lots of nice food stores for once I get cooking again. Will have to look through the thread again for inspiration. Happy new year!

[Nathan P.]

Well let me be the first to congratulate you on this amazing year long project. While I love Italian cuisine and do a fair bit of reading on it, this blog really made me realize how much I mix dishes and ideas from different regions in addition to the changes I make for personal preference and necessary ingredient substitution. Your food looked amazing and I loved the flow of the dishes as you returned to obvious favorites you had mastered and tried new things. I also loved the honesty of your obvious excitement when you nailed a dish and your dissapointement at the few dishes that did not come together.

One of the best threads on eGullet.

What dishes or regions surprised you the most?

[Kevin72]

Fittingly, 2006 marks the beginning of my 10th year of true, full-on cooking as a hobby/obsession. I had tried some cooking in college, but for the most part, that is best left unmentioned. This phase of interest in cooking was kicked off by the 1996 film Big Night by Stanley Tucci. I had always gravitated to Italian cooking in previous exploits but really didn’t have a firm grasp on it and thought that it was mostly variations on pasta with tomato sauce. Then I saw Big Night, and was introduced to risotto, porchetta, crostini . . . things I had never heard of. I couldn’t shake that movie afterwards. That was when Mom pulled out for me her copy of Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cook Book and I was off! I read it, cover to cover, twice, and spent the next two years cooking almost exclusively from that source. Sunday nights became my cooking night and I would take over the kitchen for the afternoon with one ambitious experiment or another.

The signature scene in Big Night is, of course, the making and then the serving of Timpano, an elaborate affair of tube pasta, meatballs, sausage, tomato sauce, eggs, and ham that is then wrapped in pastry and baked in a large pot of the same name. When I saw this in the theaters, the audience as one moaned simultaneously when they cut and lifted a piece out. A study was later done that showed a sharp spike in local Italian restaurants after the movie would let out.

Timpano has over time become the traditional dish I serve on New Year’s Eve, something at last to look forward to on a night this homebody has rarely enjoyed in the past. Some shortcuts though: I use phyllo instead of pastry. I did try a pastry variation a couple years ago but didn’t like it; it was too thick and distracted from the rest of the ingredients. No béchamel: I find it too heavy and use mozzarella instead for a binding layer and mix the whole with eggs to keep it in one piece. No whole hardboiled boiled eggs, those go in Torta Pasqualina. Finally, for ease of serving, it’s baked in a springform pan instead of a drumlike pot: it kept sticking and falling apart when I tried it that way in the first few iterations of this dish.

For all the elaborate meals done lately, this is a pretty straightforward dinner, with an appetizer and dessert bookending the main event. We actually watched Big Night with some guests beforehand to really set the mood.

Mid-Afternoon Snack: Bruschetta “da Zaccaria”:

Shrimp simmered with garlic, chilies, and then finished with limoncello. The briny flavor of the shrimp, the sweet, citrusy glaze of limoncello, and the jolt of chilies running through the whole thing makes for a memorable antipasto. We had some friends of my wife’s in town for the New Year’s and I had made this once before for one of them. She mentioned how much she liked it when we were out the night before, and so this was added as a last-minute addition.

Cocktail: Champagne, tangerine juice, limoncello, and bitters.

Ugh, looks like Sunkist in wine goblets. We've broken all of our champagne flutes.

Antipasto: Calzoncielli; pockets of leavened dough folded over a filling of ricotta, mozzarella, and anchovies.

Apparently, the Dutch aren't the only ones who like fried things on New Year's Eve!

The four of us, spurred on by cocktails, polished off the whole platter.

The Timpano:

Dessert: Sanguinaccio, traditionally a sweetened blood pudding which Mario Batali converts into a densely chocolate dessert in Holiday Food.

[Kevin72]

Campania comes to an end with our New Year’s Day brunch. We started with some very tasty Bloody Marys from Batali’s Holiday Food to clear the fog from the night before:

Then, it was eggs in purgatory: eggs poached over a spicy tomato sauce. I couldn’t resist some Tex-Mex urges and omit the olives and capers in the traditional recipe, add in some bacon for a good layer of grease to coat the alcohol-abused stomach with, and then Cholulah, a spicy chili condiment similar to Tobasco with a wooden knob for a top. The eggs are then poached over this sauce:

New Year’s Day dinner has evolved over time into cotechino with lentils (actually I guess this should be served the night before), and so here we are, full circle, to where the year began. .

[Kevin72]

I’m not through beating this horse yet!

As I speculated at the beginning of the year, I am extending the project by one additional month to incorporate a final twofer: the rich, noble cooking of Piemonte, and a brief, one or two-meal foray into neighboring Val d’Aosta.

When planning out the year, this was the region that I really cringed to leave out. Per ECR’s direction, I have indeed tracked down A Passion for Piedmont by Matt Kramer and have found sufficient inspiration to fill the month with. Furthermore, the Christmas load also brought me two more regional cookbooks: Claudia Roden's The Food of Italy: Region by Region and Ada Boni's Italian Regional Cooking.

This will also serve as a bridge to the new thread, a more collaborative effort, I hope, wherein anyone is invited to share a dish. I will be starting that one in the next few days.

[Kevin72]

Sorry to hear about the salt cod Kevin, what a bugger. I had a similar thing happen on the Christmas meal on a dish I practiced all year, so if you are like me you have similar mixed feelings of loathing, but wanting to make it 'right' some time soon.

←

You know me too well. Witness the equally botched re-attempt shortly after we got back. I still have one fillet left to try something on.

Uh-oh... I may have passed along my baccalau problems to you... sorry! 

But Vigilla looked absolutely lovely!! And what a pretty pussy cat!

The braised squid looked especially good.

Tell me more about that shrimp saor. I've only done sardines in saor with a recipe that calls for a few days of marinating. Hmmm....wonder if its too late to make some for New Years day....

I think your family was very lucky to have you cooking for them, complimenti!!

←

Thanks! I did actually think of you after both of the baccala dishes didn't work out. I usually serve the shrimp the day I make them. Not to be too self-congratulatory, but this is my favorite of the saor preparations; I find the rich shrimp flesh is a perfect counterpoint with the tart vinegar marinade. Sorry for the delay in getting the recipe to you; maybe give it a spin on Superbowl Sunday . . . .?

This is a wonderful series and a labor of love. Thanks so much for all your hard but loving work.

←

What a wonderful story.

I love your writing almost as much as your cooking 

I am so sad that the year is almost over. This thread has been a joy to read and a great inspiration. Please don't stop cooking - and keep showing us your work!

←

Well let me be the first to congratulate you on this amazing year long project.  While I love Italian cuisine and do a fair bit of reading on it, this blog really made me realize how much I mix dishes and ideas from different regions in addition to the changes I make for personal preference and necessary ingredient substitution.  Your food looked amazing and I loved the flow of the dishes as you returned to obvious favorites you had mastered and tried new things.  I also loved the honesty of your obvious excitement when you nailed a dish and your dissapointement at the few dishes that did not come together. 

One of the best threads on eGullet.

What dishes or regions surprised you the most?

←

Well, I guess the close-out gets delayed at least one more month. I'll be down a proper wrapup at the end of January then, and will get to your question at that time, Nathan. Thank you all for the kind words and encouragement.

Edited January 2, 2006 by Kevin72 (log)

[Adam Balic]

Happy new year Kevin, may this years project be as inspirational as the last (a tall order I know).

Now that you have done this project, what do you think the "Pan-Italian" aspects of the cuisine are, if indeed they exist at all?

[Chufi]

I am extending the project by one additional month to incorporate a final twofer: the rich, noble cooking of Piemonte, and a brief, one or two-meal foray into neighboring Val d’Aosta.

←

I'm so glad

Happy New Year Kevin, thanks so much for all the work you put into this. I know it's hard work to take pics of everything, upload, write, post..

I made the olive oil garlic cabbage (for lack of a better description) again over Christmas, everybody thought it was delicious, and I was thinking (again) how the best ideas are often the simplest. This is a dish that would never have caught my eye on seeing it in a cookbook.

I have a word-file titled Ideas from Kevins thread and I hope to be cooking a lot from that next year!

[Pontormo]

:the two fingers closest to thumb stretching mouth wide open while making a loud whistle of encouragement:

So glad to hear it is not time to see you bow and to clap!

[hathor]

Buon'anno Kevin and tutti!

Your Capo d'anno looks just wonderful. That flaky pasta Timbano (sp??) looks like a real tour de fource.

And none of us have any regrets as we head off to Piedmonte. Woo-hoo! Get out the butter and eggs!

Adam, what an interesting question about Pan-italian cooking. The Italians are so fiercely regional, perhaps its only the straneri who can be Pan about it?

[Adam Balic]

The Italians are so fiercely regional, perhaps its only the straneri who can be Pan about it?

←

I would say that Italians are fiercely "micro-regional" (see the Ragu thread ).

But there are plenty of collections of 'Italian cuisine' - written by Italians. Given the shuffling of borders on in N-E of Italy, I wonder how you would define the food on on side of the line as 'Italian' and the food on the other as 'other'.

[Kevin72]

Happy new year Kevin, may this years project be as inspirational as the last (a tall order I know).

←

It'll be as good as everyone else makes it!

Now that you have done this project, what do you think the "Pan-Italian" aspects of the cuisine are, if indeed they exist at all?

←

The Italians are so fiercely regional, perhaps its only the straneri who can be Pan about it?

←

I would say that Italians are fiercely "micro-regional" (see the Ragu thread ).

But there are plenty of collections of 'Italian cuisine' - written by Italians. Given the shuffling of borders on in N-E of Italy, I wonder how you would define the food on on side of the line as 'Italian' and the food on the other as 'other'.

←

This, I think, would make a great thread in its own right, as certainly the Italy natives on the board would have much more to contribute than I do. However much I know about Italian, I know that much less about other European cooking styles and customs, so I'm fairly tentative on what differentiates it from surrounding regions.

Trentino-Alto-Adige, a fairly recent addition to Italy, has now twice been described as too "Germanic" or "Austrian" in two cookbooks. Marlena de Blasi is one author and I think the other was Waverly Root.

[Adam Balic]

Would it be possible to pin this thread to the top of the board? Yes it isn't dining etc, and not usual practice, but I think that Kevin's thread is exceptional and something that has and will inspire people on the topic of Italian food culture, more so then most cookbooks or breakdowns of dining experiences. It would be a great waste to see it drop of the bottom of the page.

[helenjp]

I second that - it's a fine record and a fine resource.

[Kevin72]

In Passion for Piedmont, Matt Kramer relates that there are basically only two fresh pastas traditional to Piemonte: tajarin and agnolotti, and that the locals there are content with just the two to eat almost daily. Friday night I decided to try out tajarin, a ribbon pasta that is a dialectization of tagliatelle. Never ones to be outdone in richness by Emilia-Romagna, in Piemonte the tradition is to make their fresh pasta with egg yolks instead of eggs. This results in a richer, more supple dough. 12 yolks for 3 cups of flour went into this batch:

The height of Piemontese elegance is then sauce the tajarin with melted butter, parmigiano, and mounds of shaved white truffle. I considered, briefly, trying it with fresh black truffle, but when I went to our local market, they were exponentially more expensive than they have been in the past: $700/lb! Instead, I fell back on using a jar of robiola cream sauce with ground truffles, another souvenir my parents bought for me on their trip to Italy:

If this is Italy’s equivalent of Kraft cheese spread in a jar, please don’t tell me.

So I mixed about half the jar of the cheese with melted butter and Parmigiano, then tossed the pasta in:

Excellent. The robiola with truffles kicked up a powerful, garlicky aroma (so powerful, in fact, that I’m quite sure that some garlic of some kind or another was used to augment the truffle flavor). It took quite a bit of willpower not to prevent leftovers.

As for the pasta itself, well, like Swiss_Chef, and as you can see in the photo above, for all the egg yolks that went into the pasta it didn’t turn out that bright, vibrant golden yellow that the true product reputedly has. I used organic egg yolks, an organish-yellow color even, and it just didn’t carry through.

[Kevin72]

Sunday night was the Piemontese warhorse, brassato al vino rosso. Normally of course, the beef is braised in their native Barolo (brassato al barolo), but no way I’m splurging for a bottle of that only to cook it. Kramer gives a good write up of the recipe and is quite permissive of twists on the tradition: use brisket instead of the normally called for shoulder or round, and just find a good bottle of Cabernet. I went a step further and just looked for a really bold red wine, lots of tannins, little oak, and found a bottle of Don Rodolfo Tannat, from Argentina. The label description sounded like it was everything I was after, and hey, it was grown way up in the mountains, like Barolo, maybe? So I bought one bottle to cook with and a second to drink.

The beef was browned in butter and lard, then set aside. I then drained off all but a few tablespoons of fat, caramelized the aromatics (onion, celery, carrot), and returned the meat to the pot. I poured in the wine, a few cloves of garlic, a few cloves, bay leaves, a pinch of cinnamon, and rosemary, then popped it in the oven and cooked it at 275 overnight, about 10 hours. I checked it the next day and was somewhat dismayed to find that most of the wine had evaporated. I had even used the butcher paper under the lid trick, but forgot to crumple it up beforehand, which I think is what prevents the evaporation? I resisted the urge to augment the juices with the stock I was making, and instead just kept adding wine throughout the day, keeping the pot in a low oven and replenishing it from time to time.

So, the meal itself: we started with garlic soup:

A whole head’s worth of garlic is simmered with stock, sage, a dash of cayenne (Kramer’s recipe calls for a cut in half chili pepper pod) and parsley, then pureed. I added a touch of cream instead of the milk and olive oil that are called for. For so few ingredients, the soup was very complex flavored, and the sweet, slow-cooked garlic flavor predominated the dish, but not in the overpowering manner that oven-roasted garlic sometimes does.

The dinner spread:

There’s the beef in the lower right-hand corner (didn’t get a closeup to show you the “threads”, Chufi! ), in the dish on the left are vermouth glazed carrots, a contorno that is in honor of Piemonte being the home of vermouth. In the top part of the photo is Piemontese gnocchi from Ada Boni’s Italian Regional Cooking cookbook, baked rather than fried as she calls for. Normally, these gnocchi are of course a primo, but I’ve come to like serving them alongside the main as they sop up some of the spare juices from the meat.

The sauce itself for the brassato (I forgot to get a pic), came out nearly black after all the additions of wine. The essence of the big red I used at the beginning remained and permeated the meat nicely, and of course being able to sip the wine it was cooked in alongside the meal really capped things off well. The wine was quite intense, concentrated, lots of berry. Try to track it down.

I know I will get next to no sympathy for this, but the only thing missing from the meal itself was a blustery winter day outside. Our warm weather has continued to bounce back after a series of cold fronts, and yesterday we were in the low 80s. The real capper is that there’s been no significant rain since Halloween.

Dessert was zabaglione, the custard made from egg yolks and sugar whipped together in a double boiler, then plumped with a dash of cloves and some marsala. I topped it with a raspberry puree, but that sank immediately to the bottom of the dish (guess I didn’t cook the zabaglione enough).

[Kevin72]

Owing to a surprising number of relatively “light” salads and soups in Matt Kramer’s A Passion for Piedmont, I’m even going Piemontese for lunches. For dinner one night last week, and then lunch the next day, we had a salad of steamed trout and artichokes:

For all the rich buttery dishes so typical of Piemonte, there is also a strong tradition of tart, vinegary salads and pickled vegetables, maybe to cut the heavier main courses. Also, the Piemontese are quite fond of anchovies, and use them in a number of dishes. Here, the dressing for the salad was made of pureed anchovies, vinegar, olive oil, and mustard (my addition).

Lunches this week will be cauliflower soup:

The soup is thickened with cooked pureed Arborio rice and a little bit of cream. It’s supposed to be chunkier but I got a little overzealous with my immersion blender.

[kanljung]

Excellent.  The robiola with truffles kicked up a powerful, garlicky aroma (so powerful, in fact, that I’m quite sure that some garlic of some kind or another was used to augment the truffle flavor).  It took quite a bit of willpower not to prevent leftovers. 

As for the pasta itself, well, like Swiss_Chef, and as you can see in the photo above, for all the egg yolks that went into the pasta it didn’t turn out that bright, vibrant golden yellow that the true product reputedly has.  I used organic egg yolks, an organish-yellow color even, and it just didn’t carry through.

←

Kevin, that looks excellent! I agree that they don't look as yellow as the piemontese tajarin. I've read in one place that the eggs used for tajarin sometimes comes from hens that have been given carotene enriched fodder. I'm unsure whether this is widely practiced or not.

How wide did you cut your tajarin? The tajarin that I've eaten have been cut rather narrow, like tagliarini, maybe about 5 mm when cooked.

[Kevin72]

I fell back to using my pasta roller for this operation and so used the stock "fettucine cut" attachment for them.

[hathor]

As for the pasta itself, well, like Swiss_Chef, and as you can see in the photo above, for all the egg yolks that went into the pasta it didn’t turn out that bright, vibrant golden yellow that the true product reputedly has.  I used organic egg yolks, an organish-yellow color even, and it just didn’t carry through.

←

Kevin, your pasta looks beautiful. You are never going to get that gorgeous saffron color. US eggs just never have that almost red tint to them that you will find in European eggs. Although I'm told some of that may be due to using dyes!

Did you find the pasta difficult to work with? I remember it being a stiff bear because of all the yokes.

[Kevin72]

Well, heh, that's the joys of having a KitchenAid at your disposal to beat the tar out of the dough. I made it that morning and then let it sit all day before rolling it out for dinner that night.

[Nathan P.]

If this is Italy’s equivalent of Kraft cheese spread in a jar, please don’t tell me.

This looks a little closer to Italy's answer to cheese in a can.

That soup looks good. How much stock to the head of garlic and how much dairy. Do you just cook it until the garlic is tender or further?

[Pontormo]

I can answer that question. The recipe for 6 servings calls for 6 HEADS OF GARLIC , or one per person, and 8 cups of the major liquids (6 c. water), remainder stock. Since there is only 1 T of milk per serving, I could see why Kevin chose to make his adjustment.

Beautiful job!!!

I love the new self-portrait, too. Great vegetable. Very anthromorphic!