about eating Italian wherever you are
I just made a potful of soup, packed with seasonal vegetables. Italians call this minestrone, a “big soup,” compared to a less ambitious minestra featuring fewer ingredients. Pellegrino Artusi, the so-called “father of Italian cuisine,” tells an amusing but sobering story. In 1855, he found himself in the coastal city of Livorno. Entering a trattoria,…
This seems as good a year as any to break with holiday eating traditions if you’re in the mood. One of our family’s favorite Thanksgiving side dishes could be called nontraditional: cipolline onions, braised to caramelized perfection in an Italian sweet-sour mixture of wine vinegar and just a little sugar and butter (recipe). Another route…
Biting into a piece of focaccia–crunchy, chewy, fragrant–I try to picture Etruscans eating this ancient flatbread. Their flour, milled from whole grains, was surely coarser than my bread flour. The degree to which their flatbread rose depended on whatever helpful microorganisms could be captured from the air. I rely on commercial yeast for consistent results. Their…
Our friends were leaving for Iceland, so we chose a restaurant called Chickadee, not far from Logan Airport. Bubbling over with happiness about the arrival of summer adventures and the chance to eat together, we ordered a lot of food. Smoked sea trout dip surprised us with big chunks of fish in a creamy sauce….
A few years back, I watched food writer Nathalie Dupree show how to make Southern-style biscuits. It was not a pretty sight. The batter was lumpy and seemed too wet. Unconcerned, Dupree swiftly shaped the unruly mess to form biscuits. “The trick is to handle the dough as little as possible,” she said. The tender,…
Onions are a kitchen workhorse. All year long, they dutifully sizzle in saucepans and skillets, sending out tantalizing aromas as they magically transform into a flavor base–soffritto–for all manner of dishes. But. When spring onions and their kin push up through the soil, they deserve their moment of glory. I can’t resist tossing any and…
Sometimes you can make a familiar dish—say, pasta with a mushroom sauce–and suddenly it tastes way better. Because you’ve made a few changes, whether deliberate or random, and the stars aligned in a good way. That happened recently when I made fettuccine with mixed mushrooms and radicchio. To my surprise, the dish rose a notch…
You can order sfincione by the square in takeout establishments all over Palermo, to be eaten right away or later, but Sicilian cooks make it at home, too. The crust is thicker than a typical pizza and a bit spongy, but at the same time crisp because the dough contains a generous amount of…
Brimming with fish, shellfish, shrimp, white beans and potatoes, this might be my favorite seafood stew. Certainly, it’s the one I make most often. It’s easy enough to make anytime, but worthy of taking center place in a traditional Italian vigilia. I have to admit that, although we almost always eat seafood on Christmas Eve,…