Italy for Dinner

Italy for Dinner
to my parents
ISBN 978-88-8347-587-0
© 2015
s i l l a b e s.r.l.
www.sillabe.it - info@sillabe.it
management: Maddalena Paola Winspeare
editing: Giulia Bastianelli
graphic design: Susanna Coseschi
technical supervision of images: Saimon Toncelli
photographs: Stefano Baldini
translation: Catherine Burnett
printed by Media Print, Livorno
Reprint
Year
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
The publisher is at the disposal of the copyright holders of images from unidentified sources.
Abbreviations
fl oz = fluid ounce
kg = kilogram
g = gram
lb = pound
ml = millilitre
oz = ounce
tbsp = tablespoon
Lucia Toso
* The translations of the songs, books and films with an asterisk have been provided
by the publisher to help convey their meaning, although no commonly used English
title exists to our knowledge.
Italy for Dinner
Food, Music, Cinema and Books in 20 Italian Recipes
I would like to thank the “E. Mattei” State Hospitality Training Institute of Rosignano
Solvay (Livorno) at Castiglioncello for their help and valuable advice.
The students of Class III B Wine and Food Section (s.y. 2014 – 2015), guided by
Chef Giuseppe Rizzuto, have made all the dishes in this book, following the recipes.
Thanks also to all the bloggers who write about food.
For the passion, irony and sense of fun that they express as they “stuff” the web full
of recipes, advice and memories of tastes and smells from childhood, all “glazed”
with love for good food and loathing for wastage.
sillabe
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… this is not a cookery book. Or rather, this is not just a cookery book.
It is a book with twenty quick and simple regional recipes that sum up the variety,
inventiveness, flavours and smells of the cooking in Italy, dressed with advice
about how to discover the places where the recipes originated. The regional wine
to drink, two spoons of the music by local composers to cheer the preparation of
the dishes, a bite of the films set in the same region to round off the evening with
friends and a pinch of literature to finish off the night in style.
Just as much as is needed, or quanto basta*, for a concise and intimate
overview of a cultural-culinary Italy that illustrates one of the country’s strengths
in addition to its masterpieces of architecture, painting and statues.
The recipes are as close as possible to the dish as it should be, bearing in mind
that in Italy there are many varying opinions on the subject. Our culinary history
is so rich, inventive and creative that the same recipe has dozens of variations
depending on who makes it (grandma, mum, aunt Adeline, the parish priest’s
housekeeper’s grandson’s cousin in the next village…), while surrounding
regions vie for official recognition of the true origins of the same dish. To nonexperts, the obsessive proportions of ingredients and the hamlet where they
were first put together are not vitally important. It is enough to have a good
dish that awakens the senses and makes us want to celebrate the taste for
life, that fills us up and satisfies us, with all due respect to the now numerous
cooking talent shows where everybody cooks as if they were insane, and only
two or three people taste and turn their noses up and nobody really eats. A
huge amount of food ends up in the dustbin and all the participants are tense,
short-tempered and frustrated. It is sad. Italy is a country where the kitchen is
the heart of the home and where sitting around the table together is a joy, and I
deeply believe that is how it should be.
The recipes are mainly for first course dishes. In part to include vegetarian
cooking suited to a style of life that more and more people are choosing to
embrace, and in part because first course dishes are often more well-rounded;
they represent many places in Italy and are full of the nutritional ingredients
that satisfy all our daily needs.
In addition, for the most part, they are easy and quick to make… because none
of us are Michelin starred chefs with all the time in the world to be in the kitchen!
And, moreover, nobody pays us to be there...
Twenty recipes from among thousands and a thank you to all the mothers and
grandmothers who, having spent so many hours at a hot stove, have passed
down our regional culinary heritage with all the flavour and love they could give.
Thank you, too, to the fathers who, for peace at home, whispered at the table:
“Eat, your mother has been cooking all day”.
And infinite thanks to all the parents who, like mine, besides feeding their
children, taught them to appreciate music, books, cinema and, last but not
least, good wine.
* In Italian the term quanto basta (abbreviated to q.b.) is used in cookery books to indicate that the cook has to taste the dish to find out how much of the ingredient to add.
Unless you repeat the same recipe so many times that you know exactly how it will turn
out, you must taste the dishes you cook. Do not risk the success of a dinner through over
confidence. It is not worth it. Add a little salt and taste. Adjust and taste again. Correct
and taste again. The most important thing is that the end result is perfect and that after
all your tastings there is something left to eat for your guests.
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20 Recipes
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Gnocchi alla Bava [Drooling Gnocchi]
Bagna Càuda [Hot Garlic and Anchovy Dip]
Pesto [Basil, Garlic and Parmesan Sauce]
Pizzoccheri della Valtellina [Valtellina Homemade Pasta]
Pasta e Fagioli [Pasta and Bean Soup]
Canederli [Bread Dumplings]
Frico [Pan-Fried Cheese]
Burlenghi [Savoury Pancakes]
Pappa al Pomodoro [Tomato and Bread Soup]
Bustrengo [Cabbage and Potato Pie]
Crescia [Easter Pizza]
Parrozzo [Semolina Cake]
Polpette Casce e Ova [Egg and Cheese Balls]
Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe [Spaghetti with Cheese and Pepper]
Uova alla Monachina [Stuffed Eggs]
Rafanata [Horseradish and Potato Pie]
Pasta e Patate Ara Tijeddra [Pan-Cooked Pasta and Potatoes]
Ciceri e Tria [Chickpeas and Fried Pasta]
Parmigiana di Melanzane [Fried Aubergine Bake]
Cascà [Couscous with Vegetables and Beans]
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12 Aosta Valley
Piedmont
Liguria
Lombardy
Veneto
Trentino Alto Adige
Friuli Venezia Giulia
Emilia Romagna
Tuscany
Umbria
Marches
Abruzzo
Molise
Lazio
Campania
Basilicata
Calabria
Puglia
Sicily
Sardinia
Let’s start by increasing our serotonin levels. Serotonin
improves mood, regulates sleep cycles, reduces
anxiety and helps people with minor depression. We
now know that food is a cure for the body and soul
and some foods, more than others, contain the key
to help us tune in to the right frequency. For the first
recipe, from the smallest and least populated region
of Italy, famous for its magnificent mountains and ski
stations... let’s dive into cheese! Italy produces over
five hundred varieties of cheese so, naturally, it can be
found in many of my recipes.
I admit that the name of the dish is not that inviting
but Gnocchi alla Bava [1] [Drooling Gnocchi] can
definitely be defined by the currently popular term of
comfort food and, once upon a time, a little intellectually,
the madeleine of Marcel Proust or, more simply, the
“Sunday dish”. The dish that brought the whole family
together, and perhaps guests too, at lunchtime, and
its aroma alone evokes childhood and a lost world
full of promise; the dish that still makes many of us
say: “I cook the same things as my mother, but hers
were better”. Apart from the ingredients, which were
perhaps more wholesome in the past, the thing that
links the two is the atmosphere of a special day.
For 6 people:
250g (8oz) fine-ground flour
250g (8oz) buckwheat flour
300ml (10fl oz) water (approx.)
500ml (18fl oz) fresh cream
200g (7oz) fontina cheese
white pepper
salt
Sift all the flour into a bowl and add a generous pinch
of salt. Add the water gradually and mix into a smooth,
soft, compact dough. Leave the dough in the fridge for an hour to rest and in the
meantime put the cream and the cubed fontina in a frying pan. Melt the cheese over
a low heat, stirring gently to prevent lumps forming, then add white pepper and a
little salt. And taste…
Roll out the rested dough into thin sausages (like big breadsticks) and cut into pieces
about 2 or 3 centimetres long. Press each piece in the middle to form a slight indent.
Some people may have a special grooved board to roll them on. Alternatively you
can press each piece on the reverse side of a grater, pulling them lightly with your
finger so that they turn in on themselves. The indent can also be made using the
back of the prongs of a fork. Dust the gnocchi with flour as you prepare them so they
do not stick to the work surface or each other.
Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil and add the gnocchi. As soon as they rise
to the surface, they are ready. Use a slotted spoon to remove them from the water and
put them straight into the frying pan with the cream and cheese mixture. Serve hot!
Try substituting the fontina with toma cheese and using a kilo of boiled and mashed
potatoes instead of the fine-ground flour.
I would drink a wine for fresh cheese with this gnocchi dish, a not too full-bodied red
or dry white. A Fumin or Müller-Thurgau, for example.
What should we listen to while we cut the cheese into cubes – without eating
them all – and our dough rests quietly in a bowl? Aosta Valley is a region of
great mountains which have inspired popular songs in Italian, French and patois,
and which have become part of the repertoire of many alpine choirs such as
Montagnes Valdôtaines [Aosta Valley Mountains*] (the official song of the Aosta
Valley region since 2006), Belle Rose du Printemps, La Granta Valaye and Le
Soir à la Montagne [Evening on the Mountain*]. The great pianist and enthusiast
of ethnomusicology, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, arranged Le Soir à la Montagne
and other mountain songs for the S.A.T. Choir (Society of Tridentine Mountaineers)
and left his lasting mark on this musical genre.
The tenth film of the Fantozzi series (Luciano Salce, 1975) is a film that, I believe,
is one of the few that all Italians have seen at least once in their lives. It was filmed
in Courmayeur and tells the story of the accountant Ugo Fantozzi, who has come
to represent all the “losers” in Italy, trying to prove he can achieve something
amidst the snow of the ski station where, as always, he goes from one catastrophe
to another tormented by his own clumsiness and the ineptitude of others.
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14 In 2015 a completely different film came out. Avengers: Age of Ultron
(Joss Whedon) is the second film about the group of Marvel heroes, whose deeds
were filmed in various places around the Aosta Valley region as well as in other
locations. The story is set in Russia in the 1940s, but you can recognise the market
square and other glimpses of Aosta, the Roman bridge of Pont-Saint-Martin and the
imposing Fort Bard.
Italian teenagers growing up in the seventies and eighties all remember Natalino
Sapegno (Aosta, 1901 – Rome, 1990), a historian and critic who guided them
through the Divine Comedy by unveiling the mysteries of fourteenth-century
vernacular and Dantesque tercets, which are always great to pick up again for a
reread of Italy’s greatest poetry.
Paolo Cognetti is a writer from Milan (1978) and the author of Il Ragazzo Selvatico
(The Wild Child, 2013). The book is a diary of Cognetti’s retreat in the region’s
mountains as he flees the deafening urban landscape to embark on a journey of
self-discovery and immerse himself in nature.
Also from Milan, Valeria Montaldi (1949) set her first historical novel, Il Mercante
di Lana (The Wool Merchant, 2001), in the Walser settlements of the city of Felik,
which, according to legend, stood on the hill between the valleys of Ayas and
Gressoney.
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Aosta Valley
Piedmont
Liguria
Lombardy
Veneto
Trentino Alto Adige
Friuli Venezia Giulia
Emilia Romagna
Tuscany
Umbria
Marches
Abruzzo
Molise
Lazio
Campania
Basilicata
Calabria
Puglia
Sicily
Sardinia
One of my favourite things about Italian home cooking,
which originates in many cases from rural tradition, is
that nothing should go to waste. In times of wretched
poverty, but also in times of crisis, throwing away
leftovers is a real insult to suffering. Even, or perhaps
especially, when it comes to bread, given its obvious
and exceptional symbolic value. I have two clear
memories of my maternal grandmother regarding bread.
Although she was not a cook (far from it!) she could not
stand seeing a loaf turned upside down on the table
because, she said, it was not “respectful” and, if she
was forced to throw away a piece of bread when it had
become almost as hard as a brick, if she did not make
breadcrumbs she kissed it, crossed herself and placed
it carefully in a bag in the dustbin. And my grandmother,
besides never having been a cook, had also never been
poor, nor had she come from a peasant family.
It is partly for this reason that I have chosen Canederli [6]
(Bread Dumplings) from the culinary tradition of Trentino
Alto Adige. The local name for the dumplings, knödel,
derives from the German word knoten, or rather, knot,
tangle, and there is also a sweet version. Canederli is
a very old dish, as we can see from a fresco from the
first decade of the thirteenth century in Burg Hocheppan
(Castel d’Appiano) with the so-called Canederli Eater
(Knödelesserin). In the Nativity scene in the chapel, on
the bottom right, a woman is seated and is eating a
dumpling from the full pan in front of her.
For 4 people (8 dumplings):
250g (8oz) stale bread
150g (5oz) Tyrol smoked ham (or mushrooms, for
vegetarians)
2 eggs
250ml (8fl oz) milk
30g (1oz) flour
40g (1 ½oz) butter
1 small onion
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp chopped chives
salt
pepper
sage
Sauté the finely chopped onion with the Tyrol smoked ham (cut into small cubes)
and then add all the bread (also cut into cubes). Beat the eggs in a bowl and add
the milk, parsley, chives and a pinch of salt and pepper. Combine the two mixtures
and let stand for at least 30 minutes, turning at intervals from top to bottom so you
do not crush the bread but ensure that everything is evenly wetted. Add the flour to
give texture but be careful not to add too much. If you do not want to end up with
large-calibre bullets, do not allow the mixture to become too solid. Make 8 balls, a
little bigger than a ping-pong ball. If the mixture is soft do not add flour, add some
breadcrumbs instead.
Boil the dumplings in salted water for 15 minutes (or at least until they come to the
surface like gnocchi) and serve them with melted butter flavoured with sage. You
can also eat them in broth and vegetarians can easily replace the ham with spinach
or porcini mushrooms.
Serve the canederli with a white wine: a Müller Thurgau, a Pinot Blanc or a
Chardonnay would be perfect.
The Concerto romantico for violin and orchestra by Riccardo Zandonai (Sacco,
Rovereto, 1883 – Pesaro, 1944) lasts the time that your mixture needs to rest, but if
you want to listen to more of his music, the symphonic poem Primavera in Val di
Sole (1916) is dedicated to his homeland and is steeped in memories (Alba triste,
Nel bosco, Il ruscello, L’eco, Sciame di farfalle) [Dismal Dawn*, In the Wood*, The
Brook*, The Echo*, Swarm of Butterflies*]. Zandonai was so attached to the Trentino
region and its evocative charm that he wrote a symphonic poem about one of his
fellow illustrious countrymen, the painter Giovanni Segantini (Quadri di Segantini
[Pictures of Segantini*], 1931). Zandonai was a pupil of Pietro Mascagni and his
famous opera Francesca da Rimini (1914) would certainly benefit the canederli. It
is full of echoes of influences from Richard Strauss to Claude Debussy, and the
masterful flow of Wagner.
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I would like to mention two films that could not be more different from each other:
The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht, Leni Riefenstahl, 1932) and Un boss in salotto
[A Boss in the Living Room] (Luca Miniero, 2014). The first is an expressionist film
by the famous German director, based on a rather basic storyline. Reifenstahl also
plays the lead character, and he creates a sort of tragic metaphor in defence of
ancient traditions from the encroachment of civilisation. The Blue Light was filmed
mainly in the Brenta Dolomites and the Sarntal valley (Bolzano).
Miniero’s film is a comedy about a woman from southern Italy who moves to Bolzano
and starts a new life and family. She is forced to take in her brother on house arrest
because he is accused of having dealings with the mafia, although she has told her
new family that her brother is dead so she would not have to have to explain her past
and the situation causes all sorts of misunderstandings.
A Trentino native famous all over the world is the mountaineer, explorer and prolific
writer Reinhold Messner (Bressanone [Brixen], 1944), the first man to have
reached the peaks of all fourteen mountains on our planet over 8000 metres high.
Messner has written many books on his climbing and life experiences. Books such
as L’avventura alpinismo [Adventure Mountaineering*] (1974) or La libertà di
andare dove voglio [The Freedom To Go Where I Like*] (2013), allow us to get to
know the man who, starting from his home in the Dolomites, has never yet given up
on any challenge.
L’ultima traversa [The Last Crossing*] (2012) is a short novel by the Gorizia-born
author Paolo Maurensig (1943). It is set in a small village near Bolzano and draws on
the author’s passion for chess, which he revealed to his readers in his debut novel
La variante di Lüneburg [The Luneburg Variation] (1993).
The story of the strange thriller novel XY by Sandro Veronesi (Prato, 1959) also unfolds
in the mountains of Trentino – the region always evokes inaccessible places and snowy
landscapes – and it begins with a terrible, inexplicable massacre in a forest.
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Italy for Dinner