Emiko Davies

Tuscan spice pumpkin bread, a tale of forgotten drugs

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 13:38:39 GMT

I am quite aware that this title sounds a bit ridiculous — because there is no such thing as Tuscan spice pumpkin bread and it sounds like one of those recipes that I see online and abhor, that has nothing at all to do with Tuscany, like “Tuscan salad dressing” (no such thing exists in Tuscany, we just use olive oil and a wine vinegar of choice). But this time Tuscan spice really is a thing and it’s a fascinating thing too, something also sadly disappearing and not very well known. A heady mix of spices and an unlikely pairing of ingredients go into this mix, which is called droghe (drugs!) and is sold by the weight from a disappearing culture of food shops. Its name comes from an ancient term that covered not what we think of now as drugs but all manner of pharmaceuticals, in particular, plants, herbs and seeds that were used for medicinal purposes. And pharmacists were those who, in centuries past, would have kept spices too. Today in Florence, Bizzarri is one of those shops that looks like it has remained unchanged for 150 years and it is still where I go today for hard to find whole spices like mace.

My mother in law’s grandfather, Angiolo, who built the house she lives in, was the owner of a bar and alimentari (a food shop, or deli), where his wife Maria churned out aniseed biscotti and cakes, where they sliced salami and prosciutto, supplied pecorino for grating and fresh bread, dried pasta, salt, pepper and other spices, everything by the weight and packaged in paper. Their “droghe” were sold, like all spices and salt, alongside the tobacco.

The droghe mix can contain spices such as cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, aniseed, fennel or perhaps liquorice, pepper, star anise, coriander seed, juniper berries, dried orange zest. It’s also the same mix of spiced commonly used in salumi-making to spice Tuscan salami, soprassata or sausages.

There is a shop in my mother in law’s town — one of those shops that is unchanged by time — that still sells droghe by the weight. The signora of the shop pulls down a white container from a shelf labelled “spezie toscane” (Tuscan spices), weighs out a scoop for me and packages it in a piece of paper to take home — she shares with me that to the usual mix of ground spices, they add raisins, pine puts and chunks of chocolate. It’s mostly used for gamey stews — it’s perfect for a sweet and savoury Tuscan wild boar and chocolate stew known as cinghiale in dolceforte, and it works very well with hare too, although that is a rare dish these days. It’s a similar mixture of spices also used in the medieval panforte, a dense, rich, heavily spiced fruitcake from Siena. Both these well known dishes taste of the Renaissance, with that wonderful spice mix being the hero, and the highlight.

This pumpkin bread is made with mostly buckwheat but you can use regular flour in its place, I personally love the nuttiness of buckwheat in a cake like this (also in this incredible apple cake from Danielle Alvarez). Buckwheat is naturally gluten free so if you are looking for a completely gluten free cake, you can use almond meal/ground almonds in place of the flour. We all know that pumpkin in cake is just another vehicle (just as with carrot cake or zucchini bread) for a delicious, tender cake full of spices. So rather than use the classic, American style spice mix (often labelled “pumpkin spice”) which is a usually a mixed blend of cinnamon, ginger, cloves and allspice, I used this special Tuscan blend of “drugs”. I wanted to include raisins and pine nuts in this too but you can leave them off or use dates or chunks of dark chocolate instead of the raisins, and walnuts, almonds or hazelnuts instead of pine nuts.

I made this with a simple glaze using the juice from the zested orange, sprinkled with pine nuts, but alternatively you can enjoy this unglazed, warm right out of the oven lathered with some butter. Add the pine nuts to the batter if you like instead.

Tuscan spiced pumpkin bread (Torta di zucca con le droghe)

For the Tuscan droghe spices, combine the following ground spices in equal amounts: cinnamon, ginger, cloves, fennel seed, coriander seed, nutmeg. Keep in a jar and use as you please.

125 gr butter, softened
150 grams light brown sugar
2 eggs
300 gr of fresh pumpkin boiled and mashed
1-2 tsp droghe spice mix (above)
1 tsp cinnamon
Zest and juice of an orange
150 gr buckwheat
65 gr flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch of salt
50 gr raisins, optional
120 gr powdered sugar (icing sugar)

Preheat oven to 180C and line a load tin with baking paper or grease with butter.

Beat the butter and sugar together until creamy and pale. Add the eggs and continue beating until well incorporated. Add the pumpkin mash, along with the spices and orange zest (reserve the juice for later) and now fold through the buckwheat, flour, baking powder and salt. Once the flour is well incorporated, stir through the raisins, if using. Pour into the prepared loaf tin and bake until the cake is well risen and the spices begin perfuming the kitchen. A cake tester inserted in the middle should come out clean, about 40-50 minutes.

Allow to cool and in the meantime, toast the pine nuts in a dry pan until golden, shaking them the entire time so they don’t stay in one spit too long and burn. Prepare the the orange glaze by mixing the powdered sugar with a teaspoon at a time of the freshly squeezed orange juice until it slides thickly off a spoon. Sprinkle over the toasted pine nuts and allow to set before slicing.

Prosciutto and pea pasta (Paglia e fieno alla fiesolana)

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 16:50:48 GMT

As family meals go, we are slowly but surely developing a repertoire of meals that all four of us — including the picky eater — can eat together and nothing makes my heart more full than a meal that we can make and enjoy together. To add to the growing list of favourites, Tuscan spiedini di carne (skewers of meat, sausage, bay leaf and bread), spaghetti con le vongole, my mother’s tamago no gohan (a simple stir fry of egg and rice, which I serve with dried seaweed and furikake and always results in empty bowls and requests for more) and my pantry staple, polpette di tonno (tuna croquettes), is this delicious pasta sauce, which goes by several names but the one I like best, for nostalgic reasons, is alla fiesolana, Fiesole style.

We are shortly moving house, from Settignano, a beautiful hilltop quarter of Florence near Fiesole, where we have called home for four years, to San Miniato, my husband Marco’s birth place. We have sadly but sweetly outgrown our tiny hilltop apartment with its even tinier kitchen, the room where we play, relax, cook and eat together. Mariù and Luna, who are 7 and 2, know their way around that kitchen and it’s here where they have become experts at cracking eggs and cranking a pasta machine – whenever they see me pull it out, they always want to be involved.

I always find it fun to turn a pasta making session into an activity for the girls — it is one of the things that got us through lockdown! Actually I shot all of these photographs while in the middle of lockdown for an article on our family meals that appeared in Corriere della Sera — so this pretty style of tagliatelle known as ‘paglia e fieno’, or straw and hay, was an excuse to get them playing in the kitchen. It’s a combination of egg and spinach pasta (hence the reference to straw and hay for the colours) from Emilia-Romagna. I found a similar recipe in the Silver Spoon with speck, rosemary, parmesan and cream as the sauce, simply called tagliatelle paglia e fieno, but otherwise I haven’t found any particularly old recipes or even old references to this so-called “Fiesole” sauce, making me think this is simply a newer, popular combination.

Truth be told, we most often make this with store bought pasta — penne is our favourite. It’s a delicious sauce, creamy, with a salty pop of prosciutto, the sweetness of peas, a hint of garlic and herbs — everyone loves it, even though one picks out the prosciutto and one picks out the peas, you can’t deny that the sauce that clings to the pasta is so good you want to lick the plate afterwards!

Pasta paglia e fieno alla fiesolana
Fiesole style pasta with prosciutto and peas

If you don’t have a pasta machine you can use any store-bought dried or fresh pasta for this, we also like it with penne (use 80 grams of dried pasta a head for adults, I usually calculate about 50-60 grams for the kids). The sauce is so quick to make that this makes an ideal weekday dinner or lunch – skip ahead to the last step if doing just the sauce!

Serves 4

For the pasta:
3 eggs
50 grams of cooked spinach
400 grams of flour (tipo 00 or all purpose)

For the sauce:
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
100 grams prosciutto, cut into thin strips
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
4-6 sage leaves
60 ml (1/4 cup) white wine or water
100 grams peas (fresh or frozen)
150 ml fresh cream
grated parmesan cheese for serving

For the pasta, combine 2 eggs with 200 grams of the flour to make the ‘paglia’ egg dough. For the ‘fieno’ spinach dough, combine the other egg with the pureed spinach and the rest of the flour. Let the doughs rest at least 30 minutes. Cut the dough in half and, working one piece at a time, dust with extra flour and roll through the pasta machine starting on the widest setting and working to the second thinnest setting on your machine. If you have the fettucine attachment to cut the dough, pass the dough immediately through this, otherwise, you can also cut it with a sharp knife – to do this, leave the pasta sheets to dry out slightly while you finish rolling out all the dough. Dust the pasta sheets very well, then fold several times over themselves until a smaller width than the knife’s lenth and cut into fettucine. Shape the well-floured pasta into little nests or let them dry long (a coat hanger or back of a chair works well for this) until you are ready to cook.

Put a pot of water on to boil the pasta and salt well (1 teaspoon per 1 litre/4 cups of water and calculate enough water to cover well the pasta).

To make the sauce, place the olive oil in a pan and over low heat, add the prosciutto and garlic, and cook for a few minutes, to brown the prosciutto slightly. Add the sage leaves and pour over the wine. Turn up heat to medium and let simmer 2 minutes. Add the peas and cream and cook a few more minutes until the cream has reduced slightly and the peas are cooked but still bright. I like to season with pepper (no need for salt thanks to the prosciutto but if you have little ones that complain about pepper, leave it out) and set aside until the pasta is ready. When the pasta is al dente, drain and immediately add it to the pan with the warm sauce and toss very well. Serve with parmesan.

White Truffle and Wine Culinary Retreat 11-16 November 2020

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:58:06 GMT

The pandemic has disrupted everyone’s plans and when we initially mentioned this workshop in January 2020 on instagram, it almost sold out instantly. Now, unfortunately, most of those guests have had to cancel their bookings due to travel restrictions. However, we have decided to keep it open and offer the workshop to a small group who can still make it and who want to experience a warm and casual retreat revolving around truffles and wine in Tuscany’s heart, with all the covid-19 regulations in place of course.

So if you are able to get to Italy this year, please join me and my sommelier husband, Marco Lami, on a highly curated trip to experience our personal favourite food and wine experiences in Tuscany! We have had so many questions and requests about it and, after the success of our last one in November 2019, and are looking forward to sharing this trip with you!

Autumn in Tuscany is magical. It’s misty, it’s perhaps wet, but it is mild and also the best time of year to experience Tuscan cuisine. We will be based in a beautiful restored farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside near San Miniato – Marco’s hometown and white truffle country – where home cooked dinners of the season’s best soups, stews and roasts, with specialties like saffron, wild mushrooms, chestnuts, new olive oil and white truffles, and wine tastings, held at a long table or around the open fireplace.

Our days together will consist of our most favourite things: a combination of trips to beautiful medieval towns, hands-on cooking classes, farm visits, eating out at some favourite places, winery visits and tastings, tasting new season olive oil and even being part of a truffle hunt – a white truffle hunt, no less, one of the most rare and unique ingredients in the world and a specialty of San Miniato. We will cook together and have aperitivo every night together, but for those who prefer a bit of down time and lounging by the huge fireplace with a glass of wine, you can choose to do that too and just join in on the eating part! See below for all itinerary and more details.

Dates: 11-16 November 2020 (5 nights, 5 days)

Location: San Miniato, Tuscany

Cost: from 2,500 euro per person

Highlights:

2 cooking classes with cookbook author Emiko Davies
3 winery visits and 2 wine pairings with sommelier Marco Lami
Truffle hunt and visit to San Miniato to explore the wonderful food shops
Olive harvest experience and guided olive oil masterclass with an expert from
Saffron harvest experience and a meal at our favourite farm
Truffle dinner in our favourite trattorias
Salumi tasting in our favourite butcher shop
Be immersed in a beautiful, traditional Tuscan farmhouse
Organic, local, slow food and wine

The itinerary:

Day 1: Arrival at the farmhouse in late afternoon. Aperitivo followed by a welcoming dinner together in the farmhouse.

Day 2: After breakfast, a short trip to visit to one of our favourite organic farms in San Gimignano to pick crocus flowers and harvest fresh saffron. A delicious seasonal lunch in front of the fireplace with produce, wine and olive oil all from the farm to follow. After lunch, free time to wander the medieval town of San Gimignano and visit to a local biodynamic winery. Casual dinner back at the farmhouse with wine pairings by Marco.

Day 3: After a relaxed breakfast, we will have a cooking class at the house with Emiko followed by lunch and an olive oil masterclass with an expert – learn how to recognise the difference between a faulty and an excellent olive oil. Time to relax and enjoy and explore the grounds of the farmhouse. Dinner will be homemade wood-fired pizza (made in the eighteenth century oven) with a wine lesson by Marco.

Day 4: Today will be all about white truffles! We start the day with a morning of truffle hunting. We will visit a biodynamic winery with a wine tasting and nibbles, have a light lunch in a butcher shop with the best view in town and then free time for a stroll through the town to explore all its offerings. Truffle dinner in a local trattoria.

Day 5: Breakfast and then a cooking lesson with white and black truffles, plus a wine lesson with Marco. We can spend the afternoon around the fireplace roasting chestnuts and chatting, answering questions and drinking wine. A casual dinner at the farmhouse for our last night.

Day 6: After a relaxed breakfast we say our goodbyes.

Retreat cost per person: 2,500 euro in double occupancy (single supplement: 400 euro)

What is included in the price:

5 nights accommodation in a beautiful, renovated, private farmhouse
Day trips and all transport in a private van included in the itinerary
Winery visits and tastings
Organic farm visit and saffron harvest experience
5 healthy breakfasts, 4 lunches and 5 dinners, including two typically Tuscan meals out
All wine during meals (and in between!)
Two full cooking classes with a cookbook author
Two wine lessons with a certified sommelier
A white truffle hunt and plenty of white and black truffles for the cooking class
Olive oil masterclass and tasting

Not included in the cost:

Airfare and travel costs to and from the farmhouse
Travel insurance (a must to join the retreat)

The farmhouse:

The house that we will call home during this retreat is a beautiful, traditional Tuscan farmhouse that sits atop 100 hectares of land that include organic olive groves, vineyards, grains, forest and a small farm of chickens, goats and bees, frequently visited by wild deer and pheasants. It is powered by solar panels. There are two floors with 7 bedrooms (each with private ensuite), a wonderful, giant fireplace and communal salon for relaxing in, an eighteenth century woodfired oven, views over the San Miniato hills and a central, long table for sharing meals. It is situated right in between Florence and Pisa, 6 kilometres away from the historical town of San Miniato and on the ancient pilgrim route, the Via Francigena.

To book the workshop:

Email workshops@emikodavies.com with your interest. When booking, please specify if you would like double occupancy (if coming with a friend or partner, please let us know so we can match up the bookings otherwise let us know if you are happy to share with a roommate) or single with the supplement fee – and please do let us know of any dietary requirements. You must have your own travel insurance to participate and because of ongoing travel bans, you will be responsible for checking your country’s travel advisory and its Italian consulate for information on whether you can indeed arrive in Italy safely, with or without a 14 day quarantine (there is some updated information here).

Getting here: Closest international airports are Pisa, Florence, Bologna and Rome. Pisa is the very closest and it is very easy to reach San Miniato by regional train (Trenitalia) from Pisa (it is on the line from Pisa going towards Florence). You can also rent a car from the airport but you won’t need a car during the retreat as we will take care of all transport during the retreat. We can organise transfers from the station of San Miniato for arrival and departure, if needed.

Tuscany in November:

We chose November for this trip because it is our most favourite time of the year. It is calm and the finest Tuscan foods are at their best, including white truffles (we will catch the 50th anniversary of the white truffle festival in San Miniato, read more about it here), freshly pressed, impossibly green extra virgin olive oil (you will never get to taste olive oil like this except this time of year!), harvesting saffron and more. Autumn in Tuscany is beautiful. It can be crisp, clear and sunny or foggy and wet, but it is always spent well with warming foods, wine, roasting chestnuts and traditions like harvesting olives, saffron and truffle hunting.

Your hosts:

Emiko Davies is an Australian-born cookbook author who has called Florence home for over a decade. She was a restaurant critic for The Good Food Guide in Australia for several years and has written about Tuscan traditions and Italian cuisine on this blog since 2010 as well as for publications such as Saveur, The Guardian, Conde Nast Traveler, Financial Times, Gourmet Traveller and Corriere della Sera, to name a few. She has written three cookbooks on regional Tuscan cuisine.

Marco Lami, is a certified sommelier and has worked with Australia’s top chefs, including Neil Perry at Rosetta, George Calombaris at The Press Club and Andrew McConnell at The Builder’s Arms/Moon Under Water. He was the head sommelier at Michelin-starred Il Pellicano and is currently the sommelier at Il Palagio at Florence’s Four Seasons Hotel. He was born in San Miniato, home to Tuscany’s precious white truffles, so you will truly experience this part of the visit through the eyes (and tastebuds) of a local.

Things to note:

The retreat will take place with a minimum of 6 and maximum of 10 participants and social distancing (1 meter) will be observed.
Guests will sign a certificate before arriving confirming that they do not have any covid symptoms; guests should also bring their own masks or we will supply disposable ones.
The itinerary is a guide; we reserve the right to make changes in case of bad weather or unforeseen circumstances where we may need to change the order of activities or replace some of the activities with something equally wonderful.
Retreat cost per person: 2,500 euro in double occupancy (single supplement: 400 euro).

To book now please email workshops@emikodavies.com

Grottaglie, a ceramic lover’s dream in Puglia

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 12:50:09 GMT

It was serendipitous that I read Patience Gray‘s recipe (which is more of a description of this beautiful summer ritual than actual measurements) for “salsa doppia” (bottled tomato sauce and fresh tomatoes in layers over orecchiette and a shower of pecorino cheese) while visiting Grottaglie in the province of Taranto in Puglia, a small, somewhat unglamorous town that has been known for centuries for its artisan ceramic production. Gray describes the oversized, shallow salt-glaze dishes typical of Grottaglie’s ceramics – a communal serving bowl where the pasta for the entire family was “poured, dressed and then despatched, each member attacking it with a fork.”

I was in Grottaglie with Alice Adams, friend and food stylist who I’ve worked with on two of my cookbooks, Acquacotta and Tortellini at Midnight. We were doing a workshop together with Saghar Setareh at Masseria Potenti and Alice was leading the group on a day trip to Grottaglie with the scope of checking out the behind the scenes of her favourite botteghe in the renowned ceramic town. I recognised instantly a stack of the ancient dishes that Gray described in the beautiful ceramic museum-bottega, Casa Vestita, some pieced back together, the large cracks running through them like creases on the palm of your hand.

Later, in Nicola Fasano’s ceramic workshop, I found entire dinner sets decorated, like the hand drawn illustration accompanying Gray’s salsa doppia recipe, with a rooster at the bottom of the plate. It is the symbol of Nicola Fasano’s ceramics, which Franco Fasano started making in the 60s after discovering a collection of perfectly preserved rooster plates that his grandparents had owned. He, too, recounted to me that families used to eat from the same large plate – huge, if you were to feed a family of ten like Franco’s. The image of the rooster, he said, was to trick you into thinking you might be eating more than what was actually on the plate. The dish may not have had chicken – or any meat – in it, but you could see the drawing on the bottom of the plate and imagine it did. A reminder that we eat with our eyes too.

The tradition of these very characteristic dishes from Italy’s deep south is at once practical, nostalgic and beautiful, even the everyday objects. I thought it would be nice for you to hear about what makes Grottaglie so special from Alice, who took me there twice on our trip together. Below you’ll also find my recipe for Patience Gray’s description of salsa doppia, which is from Tortellini at Midnight, perfect for the glut of tomatoes that we have right now in Italy.

ED: What drew you to Grottaglie?

AA: I had been collecting Italian ceramics for a few years and kept turning up – mainly at second hand mercatini — lovely simple terracotta pieces with the stamp CNF [Ceramiche Nicola Fasano] Grottaglie on them. I worked a bit with a stylist called Emanuela Rota and she had a lot of CNF pieces, all simple plates and bowls with the most beautiful single colour glazes, and perhaps a hand painted line or a textured edge. I knew that Grottaglie was in Puglia, and already loved the splatter ware that comes from the south, so Grottaglie was on my radar. Then I went back to Australia and turned over one of the green terracotta plates that mum and I had found together in the mid 80s, plates that had seen so many family lunches under the persimmon tree at Jamieson, and there it was again, the CNF stamp. The following June Leonardo (kindly) suggested that we dedicate a day of the family Puglia vacation to a Grottaglie expedition. I was almost nervous as we drove into town. Was I going to be disappointed? Were the workshops going to live up to my high hopes? The town, and the Ceramics Quarter, lived up to all those years of expectations, at every corner there was something to look at; here a terrace with a view over the maiolica tiled dome, here a ramp of stairs with hand painted tiles, over here piles of plates in every hue. Even my travel companions enjoyed it enough to come back for more time in the botteghe after an afternoon dip in the Ionian Sea.

ED: You’re absolutely right, it’s a ceramic-lover’s dream! Can you tell me about the kind of pieces that are really special to Grottaglie’s ceramic tradition, that are instantly recognisable as coming from there?

AA: There are two distinct traditions in Grottaglie; the caposanara or ruagnara, which concentrates on the production of amphorae, kitchen utensils and everyday objects, and the faenzara which concentrated on the more sophisticated world of highly decorated objects in the majolica tradition. The latter are also called bianchi or white wares because of the white glazed base on which they are decorated. Both of these traditions are alive and well in 21st century Grottaglie. I’m more attracted to the simple workaday objects like the straight sided bowls, which are made up to a metre across and were used for domestic activities like crushing the tomatoes for preserving. And the flat broad plates with the flower dot motif that hark back to the time when families would share a meal from the same bowl. Then there are the decorative pieces like the Pumo, an elegant single coloured glazed cone with feathers, said to bring good fortune, and which are to be found on all the balconies around the historic centre of the town.

ED: I am absolutely with you on the everyday objects. The flat broad plates you speak about is exactly what this huge bowl of orecchiette below needed — and you had that perfect plate in your collection (thank you)! I am absolutely crazy about the splatterware. What are your personal favourite pieces from Grottaglie?

AA: Before we visited Grottaglie as part of the Masseria Potenti Workshop, you put me onto a post by Carla Coulson that became the next step in discovering Grottaglie [yes! This one, a dream, all of Carla’s favourite addresses]. The Vestita Family have one of the most magical workshops (Bottega Vestita) but also open their villa to share the treasures uncovered when they renovated the property, including Roman floors and a 13th Century chapel, hidden from view for centuries by a medieval oven. Hundreds of antique ceramics are displayed in a small family museum that runs of the ethereal garden, where capers run over Roman columns and huge amphorae climb the walls. In the displays there are countless examples of dining ware, both from everyday and Patrician traditions. Watching the styles change over the centuries is fascinating, as is discovering similarities that have crossed the sea. The curved edges on the 19th century plates have almost the same lines as those of classic Wedgewood plates my mother serves cake on. I later bought a couple of hand thrown plates at Bottega Vestita, glazed in pure white, that echoed the style of the 18th century tableware on display at the museum. They have made it into lots of photos, including Tortellini at Midnight. Then I have lots of simple coloured and splattered pieces from CNF that get lots of use, and a very pale pink oval platter that all food looks beautiful on, also from CNF. The bowls about 15 cm across are perfect for putting over a lump of pasta dough as it rests, they are just snug enough.

ED: Any favourite shopping tips for ceramics in this area?

AA:My favourite makers (and at both you can watch the artisans at work if you visit at the right time) are Ceramiche Nicolo Fasano, or CNF, Via Francesco Crispi 6 (ask to see the workshop, it’s up the hill from the shop), and Bottega Vestita, Via Santa Sofia 23. Also Antonio Fasano and Cinzia Fasano, and many others, there are roughly 50 workshops. The Grottaglie Ceramics Museum in the Castle at the top of the Ceramics Quarter is really interesting and full of artifacts from the period of Magna Grecia onwards. The Casa Vestita Museum if it is open (check their facebook page for planned openings) is incredible.

ED: Thank you Alice! Before the pandemic Alice was hosting some expeditions to the second hand markets in Puglia and more trips to Grottaglie, so if you are passionate about collecting ceramics you will want to keep in touch with her. You can read more about Grottaglie on her blog here.

Salsa Doppia (Double Tomato Sauce)

Although the ancient custom of eating from the same bowl has now disappeared, Gray’s salsa doppia, which involves layers of homemade, bottled tomato sauce, pecorino cheese, orecchiette (or your favourite short pasta) and just-picked fresh tomatoes (which in her recipe are quickly cooked but I prefer to leave raw), is one worth repeating – I like to do the layering in a pretty bowl to present at the table and then portion out this summery pasta dish into bowls. This recipe was originally published in Tortellini at Midnight (this photograph is by Lauren Bamford, styled by Deb Kaloper and features one of the huge antique Grottaglie plates from Alice’s collection!).

Serves 4

3 ripe tomatoes, diced
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
4-5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 small onion, finely sliced
400 grams tomato passata (puree)
handful of fresh basil leaves
320 grams of short dried pasta such as orecchiette or penne
40 grams pecorino, ricotta salata or parmesan cheese, finely grated
salt and pepper

Combine the chopped fresh tomato with the garlic, about half of the olive oil and a good pinch of salt. Stir well and set it aside to marinate so that the juices are drawn out of the tomatoes.

Put on a large pot of water to boil.

Prepare a tomato sauce by gently heating the onion slices in the rest of the olive oil with a generous pinch of salt. I like to use a wide pan with curved sides and a bit of depth. Over low heat, it should take about 5-7 minutes for the onions to begin to sizzle and soften without colouring – add a splash of water or turn down the heat if they begin to brown. Add the passata together with about 80ml of water and a few whole basil leaves. Season with salt and pepper and let simmer over medium heat for 10 minutes or until thickened. Set aside.

Add salt to the boiling water and tip in the pasta. Cook the pasta until al dente, then drain.

In a large, shallow serving bowl, layer: half of the pasta, half of the grated cheese, the tomato sugo, followed by the rest of the pasta, the rest of the cheese and the fresh tomato mixture with all the delicious juices. Top with as many fresh basil leaves as you please and present it to the table like this. When serving at the table, give the whole thing a bit of a stir so that each portion gets a bit of everything.

Pici all’aglione, Tuscany’s rustic pasta al pomodoro

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 08:59:37 GMT

Cooking post-lockdown is still keeping us grounded, but also relaxed and even entertained. I have been turning more than ever to Tuscany’s comforting, frugal cuisine for inspiration – it just feels right. Not because we can’t get ingredients or are rationing but just using what we have on hand or what is abundant (hello tomatoes) at the little bottega in the piazza, skipping that trip to the supermarket in favour of staying home or close as possible to it.

I have been loving making pici since lockdown, a humble and ancient Tuscan pasta of flour and water, hand-rolled into long, fat noodles, so easy that even a two year old can make them.

The therapeutic nature of making dough with your hands, of kneading and rolling is an activity itself that is calming and stress-relieving. This pasta doesn’t take that long to make but I also find it such a pleasure that I like to take my time with this. In my opinion, pici should always be handmade; there is nothing like the charmingly imperfect quality of proper pici, painstakingly rolled one by one. It results in an almost primitive pasta with bite and a good chew that reminds me, nostalgically, of udon noodles. Noodles strong enough that they can support robust sauces like wild boar or hearty duck ragu, the carb-on-carb treat of anchovy and garlic-enhanced breadcrumbs or this classic all’aglione, a rich, rustic tomato sauce.

The sauce

Aglio means garlic, so aglione means literally “big garlic” and you’ll see why, it looks like an enormous bulb that can easily weigh over half a kilogram, the cloves of which are sometimes as large as one regular garlic bulb. But despite its looks, aglione isn’t actually a giant garlic, it’s a variety of allium ampeloprasum, which is a wild leek — surprise!

Aglione‘s main feature is that it is sweeter and milder than regular garlic and doesn’t contain allicin, which is what gives garlic its distinctive odour. In Tuscany it’s only grown by a couple of handfuls of producers today in the Valdichiana, the southern region between Siena and Arezzo, and since it was traditionally a vegetable only used by the farmers who grew it, it’s not all that diffused throughout the region so true aglione is hard to find even in Florence! It’s harvested in the summer so now is the best time to try to find it. It’s also native to many countries including all around the Black Sea, as well as Portugal to Egypt and found all over the world so maybe you have seen it in another context?

But even without true aglione you could replicate this with regular garlic too. I love the way the aglione is prepared in this rich tomato sauce, on a low and very slow simmer in lots of white wine and olive oil that brings out its sweet and mellow flavour before being mashed with a fork and added to the ripe tomatoes. It works wonderfully with regular garlic (perhaps with a bit of leek too?).

The pasta

Pici (or pinchi as they are called in Montalcino) come from the province of Siena and I’ve always loved them for the fact that they are so rustic, that you can instantly recognize handmade pici over machine made ones. I like to use a mix of semola (durum wheat) and regular (00) flour made of grano tenero (soft wheat). But you can use all flour or all semola if you like. As this is a rustic and poor dough, there is traditionally no egg in it, just water and a touch of olive oil.

The olive oil doesn’t go into the dough but onto it — a trick I learned at Villa Pienza (which is bang in the middle of pici territory in the incomparably beautiful Valdorcia). Rub about 1 tablespoon of olive oil into the surface of the rolled out dough — this creates a protective film over the dough which prevents it from drying out too quickly and keeps it soft, even if you keep the dough partially covered. This is important to keep the dough soft and pliable, you don’t want any cracking. If this is a technique you’d like to perfect, I highly recommend visiting cookbook author Rosetta Costantino’s tutorials on IGTV. She has an excellent series on how to hand roll and stretch semola and water pasta dough, each video based on shape. Check out the one on how to make rope shapes such as fedelini (which are the Calabrian cousin of pici) and lorighittas, it is enlightening to just watch how her hands move over the dough to roll them into perfect noodles.

The Recipe

Pici all’aglione

Note: Aglione literally means “big garlic” but actually comes from the wild leek family (allium ampeloprasum, Holmense variety, similar to Elephant Garlic which is the Ampeloprasum variety), with a mellower flavour than regular garlic. It’s a typical product from the Valdichiana area in Tuscany and has only recently been rediscovered and brought back into production (the ones I found are grown by Ortofrutticola Castiglionese). If you don’t have aglione, you can try doing this technique with regular garlic too. For those who like a bit of heat, some chilli is good in this too.

Serves 4

For the pici:

1½ cups/ 200 grams of plain flour
1½ cups/ 200 grams of semola, plus more for dusting
1 cup/ 200 ml water
1 tablespoon olive oil

For the sauce:
4 cloves of aglione
60 ml ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
100 ml white wine
400 gr tinned or fresh tomato pulp
salt and pepper

To make the pici, mix the two flours together on a clean surface, forming a pyramid. Create a well in the centre of the pyramid and pour in the water bit by bit while incorporating the flour by carefully swirling the liquid with your hands. Continue combining the flour and water this way until you have a smooth dough. If you find your dough comes together before you finish incorporating all the flour, stop there; if it is too sticky, dust on some extra flour. You want a ball of dough that springs back when you poke it and no longer sticks to your hands when you roll it. Set the dough aside to rest, covered, for at least 30 minutes (I use this time to start making the sauce).

Separate the dough into two pieces to begin with and on a well-floured surface roll out the first piece until it is about 2-3mm (1/10 inch) thick. Cut long strips and then with the palms of your hands on a board or between your thumb and fingers in the air, roll each flat strip from the center outwards, until you have thick noodle. Dust with plenty of semola and roll around your hand then set aside — I usually place them in a single layer on a wooden board dusted with semola or flour. Continue until you have finished all the dough.

Heat a pot of water to boil the pasta and season with 1 teaspoon of salt for each litre (4 cups) of water.

For the sauce: If you are using fresh tomatoes, you should blanch them in a pot of boiling water for 30 seconds first to peel the skins off, then chop roughly.

Peel the garlic cloves and place them whole (or if extra large, halved) in the pan with the olive oil and white wine. Turn heat on low and gently heat. The aim here is to very gently cook the garlic cloves without them colouring, until they are so soft that you can them crush them easily with a fork – it will take about 30 minutes at least, covered. If you’re using regular garlic then you’ll need less, about 15-20 minutes. The reason to do this and not chop them before is that they will more easily burn in smaller pieces and you want to draw out their sweetness by the slow, low cooking. Add the tomato pulp, season with salt and pepper to taste, and continue cooking a further 20 minutes, uncovered, until the sauce has thickened slightly, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon.

Boil the pasta until al dente, about 3 minutes for fresh pici, then drain and toss through the warm sauce until well coated and serve immediately.

A tip for preparing for this recipe: I would not recommend trying to make this pasta too far in advance as the pici could start sticking — or drying out too much which can affect the texture. If you would like to prepare a part of this recipe ahead of time, make the sauce. It will keep well in an airtight container such as a jar for a few days in the fridge. But otherwise, start first by making the dough. Then, while it is resting for 30 minutes, start the sauce. Go back to the dough once it is rested and by the time you have made the pasta and are ready to boil it, the sauce will be ready, and still warm.

A Cinque Terre getaway

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 09:49:36 GMT

If I could describe the summer break we just had in the Cinque Terre in a handful of words, it’d be a list of some of my favourite things, especially when experienced together: saltwater, anchovies, lemons, sea breeze, pesto, winding coastal roads, chilled white wine and cheesy focaccia that leaves your hands deliciously greasy with olive oil.

It’s been over 10 years since my last trip to the Cinque Terre, and even then, we always visited in the off-season, in particular March or October. I’ve never jumped into the refreshing, crystalline waters of Liguria before — I have clearly been missing out, but the five pretty seaside villages that make up the Cinque Terre on a most delicate hillside nestled in a UNESCO World Heritage recognised national park are small and easily crowded. It’s often too hard to find a place to stay or it’s just too unpleasantly crowded on the train to get there and move around — and let’s face it, being packed like sardines on a hot train takes some of the magic away from this very special part of the world. Over the years, as tourism has grown, the Cinque Terre has become a very popular destination for day-trippers and cruise ship goers too, giving it a similar problem to Venice.

This unusual summer of covid-19, made all the more sweet after one of the world’s strictest three month lockdowns, means travel to Italy is still off for Americans, Australians and many more — which means it’s a unique time for those of us in Italy to actually visit relatively uncrowded sights we may normally avoid. We managed to book this trip to the Cinque Terre less than 24 hours before we set off, unheard of in August! There was no traffic getting there, a quiet drive, just under 2 hours from Florence. We had no trouble finding parking, or getting restaurant reservations on the day. We even lucked out and found a comfortable family room (with air conditioning) in a beautiful, secluded spot between Corniglia and Vernazza with a 180 degree view of the sea (see the photo above and the two photos directly below): Cadè Ventu. The photos on their website don’t even do it justice.

I know how lucky we were, I lapped up every second of this short, lovely trip, making memories with the family — I know we may never get to experience it this way again, which I have very mixed feelings about. My eldest asked if we can come back next weekend (and I just might be tempted!).

Although we didn’t visit in the order listed below but rather we skipped around, arriving in Manarola for lunch, then spending the rest of the day/evening in Monterosso, or leaving the car in Riomaggiore for a dip in the sea, then taking the ferry to Vernazza, the train back to Riomaggiore then driving to dinner in Corniglia, I thought I’d list our favourite experiences by order of town as I find that most useful. I would say, you could do this all easily without the car of course (car access to the towns is extremely limited so you are better off traveling by train which is very handy indeed) but if you are staying in the accommodation we stayed in, they recommend having a car to get there (I would too) as it is quite secluded, though not impossible to do by bus/shuttle.

RIOMAGGIORE:

The southernmost of the five villages is, like the northernmost village, Monterosso al Mare, one of the larger of the villages (population 1500). There is one main, very steep, street where you’ll find shops, minimarkets, plenty of places to eat and more, but life really revolves around the pretty marina where there are restaurants and bars with sea views and boats to take you around to private coves and beaches you can only reach by sea.

We grabbed a delicious fritto misto from Tutti Fritti (Via Colombo, 161), a tiny, takeaway spot where everything is fried to order, and took it down to the marina to eat with legs dangling towards the water. A five minute walk from the marina takes you up and around the rocks to the rocky beach with the most crystalline water — an absolute dream, though not for the faint of heart as the rocks make it quite a challenge to get in or out of the water and there is no shade — however, it is totally worth the effort. It is up there as one of my favourite swims, ever (and I’ve swum in some remarkable places around the world!).

Halfway between the marina and the beach, you’ll pass by the ferry stop — if you’ve been clever enough to buy a ferry ticket at the little booth at the top of the steps from the marina then you won’t have to come back this way so that after a swim you can just hop on the ferry to another town of your choice (it costs 11 euro one way, 20 return, children are free).

MANAROLA:

The second smallest of the town with a population of 350 people, this charming little pastel-toned village has a pretty view from the church piazza (which doubles as a soccer field as it’s the only flat, wide surface in town for the kids to play on!).

Climb a little further up and you’ll find Trattoria da Billy, a sweet, little restaurant with a tiny terrace that boasts a sea view from high up — we shared the anchovies marinated in lemon (a Cinque Terre specialty, I ate it everywhere I went!) as antipasto, followed by pasta: handrolled trofie with pesto (the region’s specialty; this one with a very good garlicky kick and the classic addition of potatoes and green beans), spaghetti with vongole and bottarga, tagliolini with scampi and a julienne of vegetables; fried calamari for the girls and then semifreddo for dessert. If I knew I was going to have room for it, the mixed house antipasto consisting of many little dishes looked so good, and so did the off-menu special of pasta with swordfish and summer truffle that I could smell from the table next to us.

CORNIGLIA:

The tiniest of Cinque Terre is also the only one that doesn’t have the sea lapping at its edges. Higher up means you have a few hundred steps to reach the village from the train station but it’s pedestrian-only medieval streets lead to a beautiful terrace where you can see all the other four villages. And there are also a couple of wonderful places to dine here — Cantina de Mananan, which I first heard about thanks to the Slow Food Guide about 12 years ago. I admit, it’s been about a decade since I’ve been back but it continues to be a mainstay of the recommended restaurants in the area by guides like Gambero Rosso too, for its dedication to typical Ligurian cuisine and absolutely fresh fish. It’s directly inside the medieval hamlet so is quite small and cosy and tavern-like.

The place we chose to have dinner this recent trip is a spot my husband Marco used to take hikers to when he did tours of the Cinque Terre over a decade ago, Ristorante da Cecio. He was pleasantly surprised to find all the same staff still there, who still remembered him. We had a memorable meal here watching the sunset over the sea from the hydrangea and lemon tree-lined terrace: more lemon-marinated anchovies (these ones with the addition of diced fresh tomato), more handmade trofie with pesto (I could not resist), spaghetti alle vongole for the girls, pansotti (Ligurian ravioli) filled with black lobster in a creamy tomato sauce and perfectly cooked whole grilled sea bream with a chilled bottle of Cinque Terre DOC. We finished with lemon sorbet and a custard and pine nut tart. It is a romantic spot with its view over Corniglia and the sea behind it, but it’s perfect too for a larger gathering of family or friends as it has two large terraces for outdoor eating so everyone gets a spot with a view. We had such a lovely night here, dinner was well-paced, so fresh and delicious, the warm evening was breezy, the view was incredibly special, even the girls were well behaved! If you’re looking for a place to stay they also have rooms above the restaurant.

VERNAZZA:

With its natural port and it’s colourful houses that look as if they’re almost tumbling into the sea, Vernazza is irresistibly pretty – 10 years ago it was by my favourite of the villages but on this recent trip I felt that it had lost a little of the authenticity that you can still find in the other villages, perhaps it was also because it also felt like the most crowded of all the villages, possibly because of its narrow streets and smaller size.

We popped in on the ferry from Riomaggiore that arrives right in the marina and spent the afternoon wandering, having a spritz and eating gelato (Gelateria Stalìn had a very good selection of quality gelato, I had basil-infused fior di latte and ‘stracciamenta’, or mint chocolate chip, the girls had a mousse-like nutella and lemon sorbetto that they ate right down to the tip of the cone — sounds obvious but actually my girls normally tend to abandon gelato halfway through, the fact that they didn’t this time was testament to how good it was!).

There is also a small sandy beach right where the port meets the piazza, where many people were relaxing and sun bathing more than swimming. Being right inside the port, the water didn’t look as clean as the other beaches we visited but it’s definitely an accessible option and the kids playing in the water seemed to be having a blast.

If we had decided to stay here for dinner the place I had my eye on was Gianni Franzi, where you can eat out in the open right in Piazza Marconi overlooking the marina. Look at the appealing “off menu” items above – tagliatelle with mantis shrimp, soup with vongole and venus clams, linguine with lobster, roast fish with potatoes. After I read about their stuffed anchovies and the “tegame Vernazza” — a panful layered with Monterosso anchovies, potatoes, tomatoes and herbs — I think I may come back just to try it.

Our accommodation was halfway between Vernazza and Corniglia, 350 metres above sea level in the lush green national park, Cadè Ventu. If you don’t have a car, you can reach it by bus from Vernazza.

MONTEROSSO AL MARE:

Without a doubt Monterosso was the whole family’s favourite village. We arrived in the late afternoon and had a long wander through the centre of town, browsing shops — Lanapo for artisan-made sandals, hats and handbags inspired by the Cinque Terre, and Fabbrica d’Arte for artisan ceramics (I love anchovies of all kinds, even their ceramic ones, what a perfect souvenir of the Cinque Terre), stopping for snacks of cheesy focaccia and heavenly fried stracchino-filled focaccia at Il Frantoio (Via Gioberti, 1 – they mainly function as takeaway and sell by the slice) and lemon granita and gelato, before arriving at the beach.

Here there is a portion of the beach that is “free” (this part gets covered by shade first) and the rest is private (and has a longer time in the sun), accessible by renting an umbrella and lounge chairs at one of the bagni such as Bar Bagno Alga, where you also find showers, kayaks for rent and a bar for drinks, snacks or light meals — we were able to snap up a spot since it was late in the day but in August you’ll usually find it full. The water was glorious, crystal clear, the sand here is very fine and kept beautifully clean by the bagni. We were the last ones to leave when they closed at 7pm and the water turned silver as the shade drew across the beach, it was that hard to drag ourselves away!

We had booked a table for a light meal at a long standing favourite wine bar, Enoteca Internazionale, when we stopped at Il Frantoio for focaccia (it’s next door), and I’m glad we did as its outdoor wooden tables fill up quickly. It’s the perfect spot for tasting wine, with plenty of local wines by the glass (many natural options) and if you feel like a nibble, there’s a big selection of things such as platters of salumi, cheese or long boards of bruschette topped with anchovies (what else? This is Monterosso’s specialty after all), pesto, mozzarella and tomato, tuna carpaccio and creamy local cheese, but you can also just pop in to buy bottles of wine or other local specialties (pesto, honey, salted anchovies, Ligurian olive oil, traditional candies and biscuits, all the best kind of souvenirs!) to take home. Some other good places to eat that were recommended to me are Miky (perhaps to visit minus kids) and Ristorante Ciak, a favourite local restaurant that has been going strong for the past 50 years. We didn’t have time to eat there this time but they were high on my list after reading about them on Gambero Rosso and getting some personal recommendations too.

Admittedly the highlight for the girls (who are 7 and 2) was the playground and the beach, which are just steps away from each other. The playground is fenced so it keep the kids contained and parents can rest easy. Like most Italian families in the summer, we visited after dinner in the dark, when it’s no longer hot and the well-lit playground was crawling with kids until late!

Thinking about it, maybe we will just pop back next weekend.

Pan roasted sausages with grapes for Artusi’s 200th birthday

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 08:14:13 GMT

I would go as far as to say that Pellegrino Artusi helped me start this blog almost a decade ago. And write my first cookbook, Florentine. He would be turning 200 today, so I felt it apt to cook him dinner for his birthday. I didn’t choose anything fancy because to be honest, the recipes in his 790 page cookbook are anything but fancy. They’re regular recipes of the best kind — home cooking. So I chose something satisfying, homely, seasonal and, well, something that felt very ‘Artusi’ to me.

Born into a wealthy family in Forlimpoli in Emilia-Romagna on August 4, 1820, Artusi moved to Florence in 1852. He bought a home in the leafy Piazza d’Azeglio (incidentally, it is one of my favourite piazze in Florence — it is also very close to the Sant’Ambrogio market), where he lived with his butler and cook until his death in 1911 at the age of 90. He wrote several books but the one that he is known for, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, which he self-published at the age of 71 in 1891, is not only considered the first Italian cookbook (which makes him the great-grandfather of Italian cuisine) but it has never gone out of print. It’s a book that you’ll find in the kitchens of most Italian families, dog-eared and stained from frequent use, passed down from generation to generation.

I would say every Tuscan in particular knows ‘Artusi’, as his book is often called, and is familiar with its dishes — it does have a slight Tuscan bias to its language and recipes, as you would expect from someone who lived in Florence most of his life. In fact, he is even credited with contributing to unifying a young, highly regional Italy with one language: Tuscan, the language of Dante, Petrarch… and Artusi.

I was introduced to Artusi before I even started this blog; but the book was one of the reasons I began writing about food. It was a tattered, yellowing copy belonging to Marco’s nonna, Lina, passed on to my mother in law. The splattered cover was falling off, notes were stuck in randomly here and there, and the book opened instantly to the most well-used pages (the pasta frolla recipe, along with the notes in nonna Lina’s handwriting pointing to pastry “recipe B”, it is my absolute go-to for any shortcrust pastry but epecially for a classic crostata).

But my main relationship with Artusi really began when my blog was only a month old, in January 2011, when I began a series where I wrote about one of his recipes each month for a year — here is the first of that series, Artusi’s January, with a recipe for biancomangiare, or almond milk pudding. I got to know Artusi very well in that first year, choosing recipes from his seasonal menus or letting fate pick a page for me. I kept the book by my bedside table and carried in my handbag; it went everywhere with me. With nearly 800 recipes in the book, there is always something interesting to try or read about.

It had never occurred to me to make these sausages with grapes until now, but somehow it seemed quite fitting. It’s August, we are still a few weeks away from proper grape harvest season but it’ll be upon us any moment and you can find good grapes already. Plus, his three-sentence ‘recipe’ for salsicce coll’uva starts charmingly with “It is a trivial and ordinary dish, but I note it because the sausage, with that sweetness of the grapes could be to someone’s liking.”

Artusi’s recipe doesn’t specify any quantities, or whether the grapes are white or red. There is no other ingredient called for other than “a drop of water.” In Umbria, where this is a typical country dish, white grapes are often used. In Tuscany, where red grapes reign, I thought it would make sense to go with red, but in the end I couldn’t resist trying both. My verdict: go with a grape that has a hint of acidity. I find the green table grapes I used were very sweet, too much so, while the red grapes had a more interesting flavour here. I threw in some rosemary and sage with the sausages, and instead of water, added a splash of white wine — but I do believe water is just as fine. Either way, the wonderful thing is the little sauce that gathers at the bottom of the pan, a mixture of fat from the sausages and juice from the grapes, watch that it doesn’t evaporate all away.

Salsicce coll’uva (Sausages with grapes)

Serves 4

4 Tuscan pork and fennel sausages
a sprig of rosemary and 4-6 sage leaves
1 bunch of red grapes (or mixed red and green grapes)
60 ml (1/4 cup) white wine or water

Poke the sausages here and there with a fork and place them in a frying pan over medium heat. Let them brown all over and release some fat, then add the herbs and the grapes. Pour over the wine (or water) and continue cooking, turning the sausages and grapes as needed — you want the sausages evenly cooked and the grapes to be puffed and a little blistered. If the pan is looking a little dry, add a splash more wine or water or cover to stop the evaporation. It should take all of 15 minutes. I did not add any salt or pepper to this dish as Tuscan sausages are flavourful enough. Serve with crusty bread, a glass of wine and something green — a salad or some sauteed spinach. Or below for another Artusi recipe with spinach.

Frittata in riccioli per contorno (Spinach frittate for a side dish)

This is a cute and intriguing recipe that I wanted to try (see photo at the top of this post). Artusi suggests serving it as a side dish to a stew. It makes a nice lunch on its own too, maybe with a tomato salad.

1 small bunch of English spinach, washed
2-3 eggs
salt and pepper
knob of butter
freshly grated parmesan cheese

Blanch the spinach until it is completely wilted. Drain very well (you should have just a small handful left) then pulse it in a food processor until it is smooth. Crack 2 eggs into the processor and blend together with a pinch of salt and ground pepper. It should look very, very green, but you can add another egg if the ratio of spinach is so high that the frittate don’t hold. In a small frying pan greased with butter, fry very thin frittate, rather like crepes, until dry on one side. You don’t need to flip them, but turn them out onto a board until you have finished all the mixture. Roll up the crepes and slice into “tagliatelle”, then put these back into the pan with a knob of butter and toss well until coated. If you like, you can sprinkle them with freshly grated parmesan cheese. Serve immediately.

If you’d like to see more of Artusi, please do take a look at some of these — just a small selection of some favourite recipes I’ve written about in the past:

Zuppa Certosina (a sort of egg drop fish soup named for the Tuscan monastery)
Artusi’s gnocchi alla romana (baked semolina gnocchi)
Tuscan chicken liver pate (as is common, Artusi doesn’t give any measurements for this one, which he likes to add dried porcini to)
Artusi’s raspberry acetosa (a delicious raspberry syrup with a vinegary kick)
Duck pappardelle (still one of my all-time favourite pasta sauces)
Chicken gnocchi (the chicken is actually inside the gnocchi; one of the most soothing, comforting dishes ever)
Pumpkin pie (not just an American tradition after all, this is a favourite I make every autumn)
Rose petal jam (one of the most popular recipes on my blog, and one very close to my heart)
Torta Margherita (a 4 ingredient gluten an dairy free birthday cake)
Quattro-quarti (a pound cake, which I adapt into a pistachio, polenta and olive oil version)
100 year old apricot jam (my very favourite)
Polenta and elderflower cookies (modern sounding but delightfully old fashioned)
Braciuole nella scamerita (a wintry, very Tuscan, comforting pork neck with cavolo nero)
Spiced walnut linguine (a “lean” dish of walnut pesto laced with sugar and spices)
Artusi’s Good Friday menu (save this for a traditional Easter meal)
Almond milk gelato (with a hint of orange blossom water, so refreshing)
Sweet tomato jam (yes, this is sweet, you’d never guess it’s actually made from tomatoes)
Artusi on the perfect bistecca
Nocino (sweet and spicy walnut liqueur)
Artusi’s minestrone (and one of my favourite anecdotes in the book)
The language of food (an essay about how Artusi contributed to the Italian language)
Brodo (beef broth; the very first recipe in Artusi’s 790 recipe cookbook)
Artusi’s bomboloni
Polpette di trippa (funnily enough, Artusi was not fond of tripe but he includes this recipe which he in turn found in a seventeenth century cookbook. It’s insanely delicious; it will convert any tripe hater)

Stay at home with these comforting family recipes

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 15:14:41 GMT

What a summer! Post-lockdown Florence is bittersweet, we are wary and careful – masks still on, distances kept, obsessive hand washing and hand sanitizer a prerequisite for entry into any indoor space – the streets and piazze are free of travellers and previously tourist-dependant parts of the city now are left for residents to discover their own city again. It’s great to be able to see friends and family again and even take the odd weekend away (to nearby Maremma or Venice), but to be honest I’m still reluctant to be out in public too much – home is definitely a haven for me, where I feel most comfortable and where food is still providing comfort and nurturing.

With my friends and family in Melbourne back in Lockdown for a further 6 weeks and cases still climbing out of control in the US, it feels a bit too soon to be going outside no matter where you are, so I thought someone might appreciate some simple, satisfying foods to stay at home with. I’ve compiled a list of favourite, comforting, even distracting (for when you need a good project to keep your mind busy with something else) foods, the sort of dishes that have a good satisfaction to maintenance ratio, dishes that are easy anytime but perhaps right now are even inspiring in that they might take you daydreaming to Italy or remind you of a big Italian lunch. Yes, quite a few pasta dishes are here, it’s true, to me there is nothing more comforting!

These recipes all come from my latest cookbook, Tortellini at Midnight, which is about home-cooking, inspired by my in-law’s family and their origins in Puglia, Piedmont and Tuscany. It is family-friendly food, but like all homemade dishes, can be made to adjust portions (or simply freeze the leftovers for a day when you don’t feel like cooking – here is a handy, general guide on freezing food from NHS).

If you don’t have the cookbook, I’ve added the links below to where you can find them online so that I can share these all with you easily.

Ziti al Forno

Because pasta is always a winner in our home. It’s what we make when we need something quick, and satisfying, that everyone will be happy with. Ziti al forno is a classic southern Italian dish – basically pasta with tomato sauce and melted cheese baked in the oven. Marco likes to add sausage to it (pull off its casing, roll the sausage meat into tiny meatballs and add to the sauce). If you can’t find ziti, which are long tubes of pasta, you can substitute rigatoni as Nigella Lawson suggests. If you click on the recipe title above, it’ll take you to my recipe on Nigella’s site.

Ditalini con cozze e fagioli (Ditalini pasta with mussels and beans)

I can’t tell you how much I love this dish. Part soup, part pasta, all delicious, this is a classic homestyle dish from the port of Taranto, where all of my in law’s as far as I could trace back to the 1700s are from (side note: here is a rabbit hole you could go down if you have Italian family, try to map your family tree, I’ve created an article with all the resources I used to do ours here). Mussels are a specialty of Taranto and we ate this dish in every trattoria we visited, I could never tire from it. Thrifty, quick, easy and nourishing, this has all the elements I want too when it comes to comfort: broth, pasta, warmth and tasting of home. Clicking on the recipe title will take you to the Australian Good Food Guide site where my recipe is featured.

Agnolotti al plin (pasta stuffed with roast meat)

When you want a project to do, pull out the pasta machine and get to making these delightful little parcels. They are by far my absolute favourite filled pasta to make (and eat), I find them so satisfying! This is the very traditional meat filling from Piedmont – the idea is to use up leftover roast meat – served in the pan sauces with some butter and sage, but you can easily make it vegetarian with a ricotta and spinach filling like this one (from my recipe for tortelli maremmani for delicious magazine), the key is quite a firm filling so make sure you use well-drained ricotta and spinach if you go that way – and serve with a simple sauce of sage wilted in melted butter. If you need to see how to make them, a Pasta Granny can help you with that. Here is the inspiring 93 year old Ida making her agnolotti al plin with the ease and expertise of someone who has been doing it for a lifetime! Click on the recipe title above to go to my recipe on The Canberra Times.

Polpette di Nonna Anna (Nonna Anna’s meatballs)

This is probably one of the most loved dishes at home, one of my personal favourites from the book and definitely the one most made by other people (along with Angela’s apple cake below!). Kids and adults alike love it and if you’ve got leftovers, they are even more delicious the next day. If you eat all the meatballs and find yourself with a lot of leftover tomato sauce, it’s actually (like many good Pugliese dishes) meant to be stretched into another meal, to be served with pasta the next day – the tomato sauce with all the extra flavours from the meatballs and pancetta is so delicious. Click on the title to go to the feature in National Geographic or you can find a version of it here, along with the story behind this recipe in our family — a dish that belonged to my husband’s great-grandmother, a noblewoman who eloped with the postman.

Torta di Mele di Angela (Angela’s Apple Cake)

Baking is my favourite form of distraction when I need it, and I’m sure you already know this but baking is the best therapy, even science says so. While this isn’t a traditional Tuscan apple cake like this one from Florentine, my mother in law, Angela’s apple cake, was the cake she baked through most of the 80s and 90s. It has plenty of butter in it – beware those who try to bake it in a springform tin, as some of the butter might leak out and burn on the bottom of the oven. Please do try it in a cake tin that won’t leak. It is divine, especially still-warm, with some whipped cream. Click on the link to go to my recipe on the Australian Good Food Guide site.

Toast al cioccolato (grilled chocolate-hazelnut sandwiches)

When you need an instant pick me up, literally a food-hug, it is this grilled sandwich with special, gold-foil wrapped gianduiotto chocolates from Turin. Of course you can use any chocolate you have, just don’t feel guilty, take one bite of this and don’t look back. Click on the link for my recipe on Saveur.com.

All of these beautiful shots are from the cookbook, with my talented team, styled by Deb Kaloper and photographed by Lauren Bamford with me (4 week old baby wrapped around my chest!), Marco, my intern Helen Johnson and home economist Alice Adams in the kitchen, on location at Valdirose, my friend Irene Berni’s beautiful B&B in Tuscany. More on the behind the scenes/the making of the cookbook here.

Venice, post-lockdown, is still about the cicchetti

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 11:24:13 GMT

I don’t know if it’s just me but even after leaving Venice I feel like I’m still swaying on a pier waiting for the vaporetto. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it was one too many spritzes or a little bit of Venice’s version of Stendhal’s syndrome (also called Florence syndrome, from the feeling of dizziness and like you might faint after being exposed to the great beauty of the Renaissance city that I call home) but my head is still spinning after an intense weekend in Venice!

After seeing Florence’s centre so uniquely quiet and tourist-free, I knew it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to see Venice in a similar state (minus the dreaded cruise ships too!), so we brought the kids, met up with some good friends from Trento for a weekend of cicchetti-ing and enjoying having the place to ourselves. However, it was busier than I expected, particularly on Sunday, and it was very hot (especially on the vaporetto, where we were squeezed in like sardines, masks on but not a lot of social distancing happening there otherwise), reminding me why I love Venice (and Florence) so much in the autumn and winter. Once meeting up with our Venetian friends too we had six kids in tow (2 in prams to carry over a bridge every 2 minutes) so it was quite the endeavour! But the thing I have always loved about Venice, even pre-pandemic, is that that it has plenty of quiet pockets, backstreets and wide campi where there are no crowds, but just the peace and pace of neighbourhoods coming back to life and people enjoying being outside.

In 2016 I wrote a blog post called The Venice List with a handy list of some favourite things about Venice. They’re all still favouries but here are some more to add to that.

The Venice List II

Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio — here the kids played in the tree-filled piazza while the adults drank spritzes of all colours (Select, Cynar and Aperol!) at Al Bagolo. There are plenty of benches for people watching and there is also a handy Coop supermarket here and a water fountain to fill up water bottles.

Orsoni Venezia 1888 — Our good friend Edoardo was one of the architects who helped restore this stunning artisan mosaic workshop (the only one in Venice that makes glass mosaics in an ancient onsite furnace) so he was able to give us a personal tour. If you find some way to get in here (perhaps during the Biennale or some other special event) and see it’s “colour library” of 3,500 coloured glasses, it is one of the most fascinating places I’ve seen in Venice, just a testament to what a unique city it is especially for artisans, creatives and the arts.

Cicchetti — I have written a lot about my favourite cicchetti bars and I can happily say the ones I’ve written about earlier are still up there on my favourites list but also I would add Antica Mola, the new addition to Timon in Cannareggio. We had excellent oysters, shucked to order, and delicious cicchetti with fresh prawns and fennel and juicy, still warm polpette di tonno washed down with prosecco.

Fondaco dei Tedeschi Rooftop — Simply a stunning 360C view over the rooftops of Venice at the elegant Fondaco dei Tedeschi palazzo turned department store, conveniently right by the Rialto bridge. As numbers are limited you need to reserve your spot to go up there but it is free (and yes, there is an elevator).

Torcello Island — we spent Sunday on the island of Torcello at Taverna Tipica Veneziana with our Venetian friends. The draw card was the ample outdoor eating area, plus fun stuff for all the kids (goats, rabbits and playground equipment!). The food is classic Venetian, simple, no-frills, but aimed to please, a little like eating at nonna’s. We had squid stewed with tomatoes and peas and prawns in saor as antipasto, then fried calamari, bigoli in salsa (anchovy and onion sauce) and tiramisu.

Rialto market — I know, it’s always on my lists. But it’s just my favourite thing to do. Coffee and cornetto at Caffe del Doge sitting out in a backstreet, then second breakfast at All’Arco (for baccalà mantecato and a glass of prosecco), then a stroll around the market where I bought things for cooking dinner at our friends’ place: zucchini flowers from the island of Sant’ Erasmo (fried in batter after being filled with mozzarella and anchovies), line-caught sea bass (roasted with lemon and parsley), calamari for frying, razor clams (grilled quickly then tossed in a hot pan with samphire and dressed with lemon, olive oil, parsley and garlic).

Not everything was open, like many things around town, which sadly means some are finding it hard to reopen after lockdown but I am hopeful that Venice finds a way to come back, finding some balance, minus the cruise ships and mass hordes to blossom. Speaking of which, here is some interesting reading on the future of Venice and sustainable tourism that I highly recommend:

Venice Tourism May Never Be the Same. It Could be Better (New York Times)

Sail Away, No Seriously Sail Away (Prior)

It’s an Exciting Beginning: Venice Opens to Tourists (Guardian)

The Trampling of Venice Shows Why Tourism Must Change After Covid-19 (Guardian)

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Edna Lewis’ white pound cake

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 16:30:18 GMT

Between making yolk-rich pasta, the odd carbonara, or whipping up some crema, I always seem to have a few egg whites lying around — I honestly can’t bear to throw them away. I usually freeze the egg whites, hoping to find something useful for them but inevitably they sit there in the freezer, multiplying. My girls love meringues but I’ve found that defrosted egg whites don’t make the best meringues (or pavlova!). If I have just one or two I might make semifreddo with them, or lemon sorbet, two wonderful treats that often call for fluffy whites to add airiness.

Then, amidst an emotional and turbulent couple of weeks of the Black Lives Matter movement, learning and reading more about Black cookbook authors, I discovered Edna Lewis and her Taste of Country Cooking (1976) book (side note: this was a very interesting article to read, Cookbooks, not Restaurants, are giving Black Foodways an Identity, I’m looking forward to receiving Byron Ford’s New World Sourdough, which just came out, and Bryant Terry’s Vegetable Kingdom looks great; Deb from Smitten Kitchen has a long list here that I suggest you check out too if you’re interested). I honestly feel ridiculous for not knowing about her cooking and her books until now, about what an important culinary figure she is in American cooking (there are many great articles written on her, this New York Times article from 2015 seems particularly meaningful today, Edna Lewis and the Black Roots of American Cooking). I was so hooked, I ignored my family all day and just read it cover to cover. And amongst those page I found the absolute best thing to do with all those leftover egg whites: white pound cake.

It is exactly what I love most in a cookbook – full of personal stories, almost a memoir, with her recollections, a celebration, of an upbringing in a farming community in Virginia, where her family recipes followed the seasons (as do her chapters and the menus in each chapter) with simple, good food inspired by and with great respect for the ingredients and above all, the land. Her recipes are written with love, care and life experience, full of so many tips that are hard to find in cookbooks these days.

I know why Alice Waters said, “When I discovered her cookbook, it felt like a terribly good friend.”

What to cook first from it? I let Mariù choose, and as any 7 year old would, she picked the blackberry cobbler and lemonade, which we filmed. I was inclined to go with the casserole of sage-flavored pork, hot buttered beets and pan-fried chicken (cooked in hand-churned butter and home-rendered lard, served with a cream gravy because in the summer the calves were weaned and cream was plentiful, as was the green grass for them to graze on) from the same menu as the cobbler, the wheat-harvesting midday dinner from the summer chapter. I’m regretting that I didn’t know about dandelion blossom wine earlier but am drooling over the pickled watermelon rind and smothered rabbit, and holding out for the September green tomatoes to make preserves that Lewis says tastes like honey. Maybe with a batch of her corn muffins. The way she describes how her family wrapped the rest of the green tomatoes in tissue paper and stored in a cool, dark place to make it to Christmas reminds me of my mother in law’s recollections of the tomatoes her father would hang, as they often do in Puglia, in the attic to last until Christmas time. As her editor Judith Jones wrote, “I think every reader will feel genuinely grateful for the memories Edna shares with us.”

This white pound cake immediately caught me eye, perhaps because of the resourceful use of egg whites, but also because of all the simple, comforting recipes that fill this book, the very simplest ones like her yeasted bread rolls and this pound cake appealed in an enormous way to me. I knew this was going to be a wonderful recipe before I even made it and now that I have, I can say it is truly the best pound cake I have ever made or eaten. I honestly can’t stop walking over to the kitchen bench just to inhale the perfume of this cake!

I will say I used some special ingredients. I imagine that when Edna Lewis was writing these recipes she was also using the freshest ingredients off the farm. So I chose a very special butter from the mountains near Pistoia, you can eat it right from the packet, it tastes like cream. And I used raw milk from Camporbiano, a nearby farm, that comes in a bottle and still has a thick layer of cream on top. I only ever use organic, free range eggs and organic flour. I think Edna would approve, she speaks often in her book about using fruit or even water without chemicals, often even calling for bottled water in her recipes.

I had to adjust this recipe slightly from Edna Lewis’ original, partly because I don’t have a 10 inch bundt tin, as she calls for. I planned to use a loaf tin and I know from experience having baked many pound cakes in this tin before (like this pistachio, polenta, olive oil pound cake and this peach and jam pound cake from Acquacotta) that there would be too much batter to fit. So if you do plan to make this in a bundt you could probably double this – or go with Edna’s original (admittedly, although I reduced all the other ingredients, I kept the egg whites the same because I had so many)!

One thing I did not use from the original was almond extract, which I think would be lovely, and would give it a beautiful perfume. But at the last moment, I replaced it with a splash of sassolino, a clear, Italian liqueur with a strong, distinct aniseed flavour. Many Tuscan desserts are made with aniseed in them and I thought this might be a lovely way to bring that local flavour into this recipe from Lewis’ Virginian farm.

I hope you love it as much as I do. I urge you to try this with a few simple quality ingredients if you can – or splurge on just one, the butter would be my choice. It will make a difference.

Edna Lewis’ White Pound Cake
Plum cake bianco di Edna Lewis

For one loaf tin

I don’t normally post in cups, because it’s incredibly confusing, can you believe the US, Australia and the UK have slightly different cup measurements?! So please be aware these are US cup measurements. Since the original was in cups, I based this on that recipe, measuring on my scales in grams too.

200 grams/1 cup sugar
220 grams/1 cup best quality butter, softened
250 grams/2 cups flour
125 ml/ 1/2 cup milk
Pinch salt
2 tsp almond extract (or aniseed liqueur, try it!)
160 grams/2/3 cup egg white (about 4 whites from large eggs)

Prepare a loaf tin (I line mine with parchment paper) and preheat oven to 300°F / 150°C.

Beat the butter until creamy, then add sugar and beat well until pale and creamy. Fold in the flour and milk, alternating each until combined, starting and ending with the flour. Add the salt and almond extract.

In a clean bowl with clean mixers, whip the egg whites until fluffy and soft, not stiff peaks. Fold these in bit by bit (I did it in four lots) until incorporated and you have a smooth, creamy batter. Pour into the loaf tin and place in oven.

After 40 minutes, turn heat up to 325°F / 165°C and continue baking a further 15 minutes or until the top feels firm and a toothpick inserted inside comes out clean (I actually kept mine in 25 minutes; I would start checking from 15 as Edna instructs).

Remove cake from oven and leave in tin for 15 minutes before removing from tin and allowing to cool. Keep the cake covered (Lewis instructs to cover it after 15 minutes to ensure it stays soft), I keep mine wrapped in its original parchment paper and a clean linen teatowel around it. It keeps well without drying out this way for several days. If you can resist.

Fried tuna polpette, a favourite pantry meal

Thu, 28 May 2020 16:57:31 GMT

Whenever I make polpette, I have this image in my head of tiny Nonna Lina, Marco’s grandmother, standing by the stove, frying, creating an enormous pyramid of these polpette, only to have people pop in and out of the kitchen, stealing the one on the top, too hot to even hold let alone stick in your mouth. “Polpette” is also the name for meatballs but it can really refer to any roundish fried thing, regardless of whether or not they have meat in them. These particular polpette are more like croquettes, where mashed potato gives them body and you can add whatever protein you like — tuna is my favourite storecupboard staple.

Usually this is an excellent vehicle for recycling leftover meat, roast meat in particular, but also ham, perhaps with odd ends of cheese. This polpette recipe is itself a variation of the “polpette di lesso” from my latest cookbook, Tortellini at Midnight, which is a classic Tuscan recipe. It used to be common to make meat broth (in my in law’s home brodo was a daily preparation!) and the boiled meat leftover was aplenty so it was refashioned in different ways, namely these fried treats and also in a hearty onion stew that Florentines call Francesina.

I’ve been putting this version with a tin of tuna, in the regular rotation of meals lately, the whole family loves them (which you may have been following has been a battle for a while) and it’s been a very handy pantry meal to have on hand — potatoes, a tin of tuna (mackerel is also great), breadcrumbs, a garlic clove and you’re more than halfway there. I bind the mixture with an egg and a handful of parmesan cheese too. It doesn’t need much else but if you have it, parsley or some other fresh herbs like oregano or thyme, is nice in here. My girls like it with a squeeze of lemon and mayonnaise to dip them in, but they are also delicious as they are or with a dollop of zingy salsa verde.

Other variations: Vegetarians can easily do these polpette without the tuna (you’ll only need 1 egg), but you should also try this version with cannellini beans too, it’s absolutely delicious and is inspired by historian and well-connected British expat Janet Ross’ century old cookbook, Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen (1899). If you don’t know it yet, it is a wonderful book of vegetable recipes. She lived in Poggio Gherardo which is a beautiful villa (now a monastery), part of the skyline of my neighbourhood of Settignano.

And when you have leftover polpette (incredibly, it happens), they happen to be delicious cold and are ideal to put in a lunch box or take on a picnic, but Tuscans often prepare them “rifatte”, which is where they are warmed in a tomato sauce — and it is perhaps even more delicious. With each reinvention, they just seem to get better.

Polpette di tonno
Fried tuna polpette

This makes about 20, which you could serve as part of an antipasto or aperitivo for a gathering or as a meal, with salad, for 4.

2 medium potatoes
250 grams tinned tuna
salt and pepper
1-2 eggs, beaten
40 grams of parmesan, finely grated
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
handful of flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
80 grams breadcrumbs
vegetable oil for frying

Peel and roughly chop the potatoes. Place in a saucepan of cold water and bring the the boil over medium heat. Cook until fork-tender, then drain and mash with a generous pinch of salt. Set aside to cool (refrigerate if not using right away).

Drain the tuna and place in a bowl along with the mashed potato, egg (I use 1-2 depending on the consistency of the mixture or what I have on hand), parmesan and herbs and combine well, adding a pinch of salt taken with three fingers and some freshly ground pepper. Taking about 2 tablespoons of mixture at a time, form cylinders and place on a plate until you have used all the mixture.

Place the breadcrumbs in a shallow dish and roll each polpetta to coat completely. Set aside. Pour enough vegetable oil in a wide pan (cast iron is ideal for frying, if you have it) to about 3cm and heat over medium-high heat. To test when oil is ready, a cube of bread should turn golden brown in about 15 seconds – less and it is too hot, more and it’s not hot enough – adjust heat accordingly. Fry the meatballs in a single layer for about 3 minutes on each side or until deep brown. Drain on paper towels and salt while still hot. Serve immediately.

Strawberry tiramisu

Sat, 16 May 2020 15:28:30 GMT

I made a video of my girls and I making strawberry tiramisu recently on Instagram and it was such a hit, I loved seeing others making this, so decided it should be a permanent recipe on the blog too!

There are so many reasons I love this version of tiramisu, first and foremost because strawberries and cream in any combination is a treat. But also, this tastes like strawberry shortcake without having to bake (note that down, those without an oven or, like me, who live in sweltering hot places in the summer and don’t want to bake), and because of that you can even make it in any container or form you like — individual cups or glasses, in a long, rectangular glass dish, a trifle bowl, or like here, a cake tin (which I love as it feels more like “cake” and reminds me of making a Tuscan zuppa inglese). Finally, even though it’s best to wait a few hours for it to set, it’s quick and easy to make. Even the kids can do it.

This is more or less the tiramisu recipe that I learned when I was 16 from a family friend who had lived in Rome. Actually tiramisu is one of those newer recipes — invented in the 1960s in the Veneto, they say — which explains the cross-regional ingredients (savoiardi from the Veneto and mascarpone from Lombardy) and also means, unlike centuries old traditional recipes, there is really no “set” way to make it. My Tuscan mother in law makes a tiramisu in a way that I admit isn’t my favourite — she uses pavesini biscuits, which are the same shape as savoiardi but flat and in my opinion are inferior because you don’t get the fluffy, sponge like layer that you have from savoiardi and they can too easily get soggy. She also uses dark chocolate, chopped roughly in chunks to cover her tiramisu, which I think jars with the delicate cloud-like cream and fluffy biscuit layer – a light dusting of grated chocolate or even powdered cocoa is my preference, if anything at all.

To be honest, it’s just a very simple variation of the classic tiramisu, just more kid friendly. In place of the coffee (spiked perhaps with rum or vin santo), the biscuits are dipped in macerated strawberries and their juices. I recommend doing this in high strawberry season when they are ripe and plentiful — you will get plenty of juice as the strawberries macerate with a bit of sugar and lemon juice. But if you find they’re not as juicy as you hoped, you can add a splash of orange juice (blood orange juice is wonderful, also for the colour), and while you’re at it, add a bit of the zest in there too! Raspberries are a delicious alternative.

Strawberry Tiramisu

Note, this recipe uses raw eggs so it is important that you have very fresh, organic, free-range eggs – if that isn’t already your norm. There are many recipes online that involve pasteurising the eggs if you are squeamish about using them raw, but it isn’t the way it is normally done in Italy so rest assured this is a healthy, delicious treat as it is.

500 grams of ripe strawberries (note, my girls eat a lot of them along the way, I think we used in the end about 400 grams)
200 grams sugar
1 lemon, zest and juice
3 very fresh eggs, separated
500 grams mascarpone (if you want to make your own, see here)
500 gr savoiardi (lady finger) biscuits
A small square of dark chocolate, grated, or powdered cocoa for garnish, optional

Chop the strawberries into small pieces or slices, discarding the green tops. Place the strawberry pieces in a bowl and scatter over 50 grams of the sugar and the zest and juice of the lemon. Leave to marinate (macerate) about 1 hour at least.

To make the mascarpone cream, separate the yolks and the whites into two medium to large sized bowls. Whip the yolks with the sugar until you have a dense, creamy and pale mixture. Add the mascarpone until combined. Whisk the egg whites (make sure you use a very clean bowl, glass or metal is best, and very clean beaters to quickly get beautifully stiff whites) until you have stiff peaks that hold their shape even when you turn the bowl upside down. Fold the whites into the mascarpone mixture. Set aside — if not using straight away, store covered in the fridge.

If making a round, cake-like tiramisu this should make 3 layers. You may get 2 if using a rectangular glass dish.

The strawberries should have created a lot of lovely juice. Strain the juice into a shallow dish wide enough for the biscuits to fit and set aside the berries. Dip biscuits one by one quickly on both sides and make an even layer your prepared tin. Repeat with more biscuits until you have a nice, tight layer that covers the base of the tin – you can break them to make sure they fit. Cover the lady fingers with a thick layer of mascarpone cream (if making three layers, use one third of the mixture, if making two use half). Layer over some of the macerated strawberries. Repeat layering with dipped lady fingers, cream again, strawberries and so on until you finish with a thick layer of cream.

Leave in the fridge overnight (or for at least four hours if you are in a hurry), covered. Decorate with more strawberries, grated chocolate or cocoa powder and enjoy!

What we are drinking in lockdown

Wed, 06 May 2020 13:00:04 GMT

I’ve been talking a lot about what we have been cooking in lockdown for the past two months (most recently for the Financial Times How to Spend It weekend magazine), and it’s unsurprisingly been a lot of comfort food, a lot of baking and lots and lots of bread as our sourdough starter has finally been given a life!

Off the back of a fun little live chat that Marco and I did on Instagram recently about wine (you can see the notes from it in my highlights here), I thought it would be nice to do another “what we are drinking” blog post, which is about introducing some interesting Italian winemakers that Marco picked and why we like them.

In lockdown, drinking wine has been part of our daily aperitivo ritual – a glass of wine with nibbles as we are preparing dinner, or maybe taken down to our neighbour’s olive grove, picnic style, with some tiny glasses, salami and Marco’s sourdough bread, so the girls can stretch their legs after being cooped up for most of the day. That golden hour before dinner is the prettiest time to be out on the hillside, under the olive trees, it is absolutely magical and it has been a lifesaving, head-clearing ritual over the past weeks, a nice excuse to go for a walk, look up at the sky, switch off and relax with my family and I keep reminding myself to do it more often while we can (we have to enjoy it now before the mosquitoes drive us away)!

But to the wine, I want to share something with you about these interesting grape varieties from equally interesting wineries, a selection of the things that have stood out lately. It’s a coincidence but they all come from northern Italy and, looking at these now written down together, they actually make the start of what would be a fabulous food and wine inspired road trip!

Marta Valpiani, Albana di Romagna 2018 Madonna dei Fiori (Emilia-Romagna)

Marta Valpiani is a winery in Emilia-Romagna, near the medieval town of Castrocaro Terme, composed of a mother and daughter team that call themselves “artisan winegrowers”, which I like. We ordered a few of their wines as well as their olive oil and really enjoyed this Albana (below), a golden white wine made from older vines (between 30-60 years old) grown according to organic and biodynamic principles, harvested by hand. It’s a wine for dining with and goes well with punchy flavours like bottarga, anchovies, even artichokes which are notorious for pairing with wine.

Ca’ Lojera Lugana Annata Storica 1999, Lake Garda (Lombardy)

Ca’ Lojera is an organic winery situated on the south side of Lake Garda, right on the Lombardy/Veneto border – not far from Verona, even if it’s on the Lombardy side. We picked up this 21 year old special vintage Lugana (above), made with 100% Turbiana grapes at our local bistro in Settignano, Caffe Desiderio, which is closed like all restaurants and bars right now, but offering deliveries. It was a steal, too, at 30 euro. It was balanced and elegant, with notes of apricot and honey to match its deep honey colour (see the first photo in this post!). We drank it with a whole roasted sea bream with potatoes, but it would have been wonderful with a plate of cheeses too. If you’re interested about this grape variety, Turbiana, Wine Folly has an interesting story on it here, until recently it was thought to be a Trebbiano grape but it is actually a Verdicchio, which in Lugana’s microclimate is expressed in a very unique way.

Le Sincette Groppello from Lake Garda (Lombardy)

We visited this winery (in photo below) last autumn, while driving back from beautiful Bergamo. Situated on the southwest side of Lake Garda, near Salò, it is one of the most important biodynamic wineries in the area. They grow mostly red grapes, plus chardonnay, an interesting one is their Groppello. It’s a native grape to the little pocket of vineyards on this end of Lake Garda on the Lombardy/Veneto border (it is one of the few DOC wines that crosses borders actually, though on the Veneto side this same grape is called Rossignola), and is often used in blends with Sangiovese, Marzemimo and Barbera — single variety wines like this are rare. A nice red to go with salumi.

Diego Morra Verduno Pelaverga, an unusual grape variety from La Morra (Piemonte)

Pelaverga piccolo is a rare grape varietal grown in the Langhe in Piedmont, especially around the town of Verduno. It’s production today is limited to about 18 hectares divided by about 10 producers only, but it has actually been around since at least the 1400s when this small, black grape was trained over fruit trees as supports. It had a little revival in the 70s and in 1995 was awarded DOC status (in an effort to showcase some of Piedmont’s lesser known varieties) but as you can imagine, it’s still overshadowed by the region’s more famous Nebbiolo, Barolo and Barbera. It’s a fruity, aromatic, peppery, bright red wine and is versatile for pairing with but Marco rightly suggests to simply drink it on its own, so you can enjoy this unusual and rare grape without any distractions. Diego Morra is a family winery run by three generations of winemakers in one of the most beautiful winemaking regions I’ve ever been to.

I’ll leave you with this intriguing piece by journalist and wine writer, Alice Feiring, on what has changed by drinking alone in isolation:

“When drinking with others (even one other), my game plan is to choose wines that can oil the joints of conversation, wit, gossip, and sometimes argument. But COVID-19 requires more proletarian options.”

It’s interesting, is wine the same when you don’t have someone to share a conversation with? Marco has always been reluctant to write about wine, or let me even interview him about wine for the blog, insisting that wine writing is outright boring. What’s interesting – to him – is the tasting, and especially tasting with others, so that you can talk about it together. He was even skeptical about me writing this post but I stubbornly insisted because I like to share and tell the story of food and recipes, things we have been enjoying, why not wine? Yes, he’s right that it’s not the same as drinking it at the table together in person, but hopefully you find this useful, maybe you can seek out these interesting grapes or these particular low intervention winemakers where you are, or plan a trip for the future. And hopefully one day we can drink them around the table together.

Carrot and ricotta gnudi

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 11:26:13 GMT

This is actually a recipe I already had on the blog — one of the very early ones, from March 2011, believe it or not. But I wanted to revisit the dish. It is one that I love for a couple of reasons — one, because it is a recipe that was first made for me by my college roommate, Sara Lando (an incredible Venetian photographer and part of the duo behind the design of this blog) and it brings me back to her, and our time navigating art school in the US together — nearly 20 years ago now! This is in fact a revisitation of her original recipe.

And secondly, because it is simply such a pleasure to eat — while I was preparing these this time, I said to Marco, “I don’t know why this isn’t more of a thing, why don’t people do this all the time?” So here it is, again, re-introduced because it is spring, carrots are delicious and I think this wonderful dish needs a little bit more attention.

Sara, who comes from the beautiful town of Bassano del Grappa, actually called these carrot gnocchi. But because these remind me so much of Tuscan gnudi — pillowy balls of equal amounts of ricotta and spinach, usually served in a sauce of just-melted butter and wilted sage leaves — I can’t help but keep calling them gnudi too. I also couldn’t help add a little bit more ricotta to the mixture than what Sara does (I doubled it), and a few leaves of sage, but aside from these minor changes I’ve stuck to Sara’s recipe.

Funnily enough, Sara often lived on a bag of crisps for dinner, so when she said she was cooking dinner and presented these gnocchi to me one night, I was totally blown away! It is also telling of this lovely recipe — it is actually a cinch to make.

My tips for making these are similar to the classic Tuscan gnudi. Get a nice firm ricotta, and if you need to (usually you do), ensure it is well-drained. This is a soft mixture, not a firm one, but if you are finding the mixture too soft to shape into balls, use two spoons to help you, and I admit I was heavy handed in the extra dusting of semolina once shaped so they are easier to handle (and even more similar to classic gnudi!).

Carrot gnudi

This recipe below makes about 16 gnudi, which is plenty for 2, even stretching to 3. And if you’re serving this as a starter before another course, it makes a perfect portion of about 4 gnudi a head for 4 people. You can easily double it.

Serves 2-3 as a main or 4 as a starter

500 grams carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
120 gr (1/2 cup) fresh ricotta, well drained
2 egg yolks
1 tbs semolina flour, plus more for dusting (aka semolina rimacinata, if you do not have this use plain flour)
35 gr (1/4 cup) plain flour
1 tbs finely grated parmesan cheese, plus more for serving
nutmeg (or white or black pepper)
50 gr butter
handful of fresh sage leaves

Boil or steam the carrots until tender, then either blend in a food processor or squash them with a potato masher until mashed. Set aside to cool.

In a bowl, combine ricotta, egg yolks, flours and parmesan cheese until just combined. Add the cooled carrot mash and season with salt and nutmeg.

With two tablespoons to help you, make golf-ball sized balls of the mixture, placing them on semolina-dusted surface (wood preferably, as stone or marble tends to cause sticking, otherwise on top of parchment paper) until you’ve finished. Heat a pot of salted water to boil and carefully drop in the gnudi. After a minute, give a gentle stir to make sure they are not stuck to the bottom of the pot.

In the meantime, melt the butter gently in a pan wide enough to fit the gnudi too. Add the sage leaves and gently wilt in the butter. Add a few spoonfuls of water from the pot and bring to a fast simmer, which should ensure the butter doesn’t brown (although that is another type of sauce entirely and might also be nice) and instead creates a sweet, creamy emulsion.

Let boil for several minutes, when they feel firm and begin to float, remove with a slotted spoon placing gnudi directly into the butter sauce. Serve with parmesan cheese.

A guide to eating through charming Bergamo

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 18:07:00 GMT

In October 2019 I found myself lucky enough to be in Bergamo, Lombardy, to judge the Guild of Fine Foods World Cheese Awards, which was an exciting and delicious opportunity — I tasted 50 cheeses tasted in one morning! It was a busy time and surrounded by almost 4,000 cheeses in the industrial outskirts of the city near the airport, I must admit that I had no idea how utterly charming and beautiful Bergamo was until after the awards when I took some time to explore the herringbone streets of the historical town with Sabrina, a native Bergamo chef and an old colleague of Marco’s from the Four Seasons. Thank goodness she was there to take us around her town and introduce us to some of the gastronomic delights as I probably would have missed some of these!

I want to share them here because not only do I think this is a town that should be on your must visit list, if you love food, love traveling to lesser known places and adore Italy, but also because they will need people to visit more than ever. Lombardy in northern Italy has been the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic in Italy, and all of Europe. And Bergamo, a town of 110,000 people lying about 40km northeast of Milan, has been especially hard hit. On April 6, there were over 9,000 cases and 2,245 deaths in Bergamo alone (some, according to Eco di Bergamo, think in reality is actually double this number taking into consideration the entire province). An average of 50 deaths per day, and on one particular day, 195. An utter tragedy. When this is all over, they will need you more than ever, and if you are looking for a lovely place for a “slow” visit, easy to get to yet un-touristy, authentic and delicious, this should be high on your list.

The very fact that stracciatella gelato – a favourite of mine, delicious fior di latte with chunks of shaved dark chocolate folded through it – was invented right here in Bergamo in 1961 at Pasticceria La Marianna should be enough to make it worth a trip! Below I’ve highlighted some other must tries too, including the little marzipan treats you can see in the top left of the photo underneath and casoncelli, meat-filled ravioli-like pasta typical of Bergamo.

What you should eat in Bergamo

Cheese & Salumi: Amongst the various salumi (local prosciutto and salame) and cheeses from Lombardy that you’ll find on offer in restaurants in Bergamo, cheese is a high point for me and you should look out for taleggio (a strong, washed rind, soft cow’s milk cheese), strachitunt (an ancient cheese from the Taleggio valley called the ancestor of gorgonzola and the descendant of taleggio, it’s made from the raw milk of Brown Alpine cows) and bitto (which comes from the Valtellina Valley and is made from a mixture of cow’s and goat’s milk and is only produced in summer when the cows feast on Alpine meadows. It ages well, sometimes for over 10 years).

Casoncelli Bergamaschi: this candy-shaped filled pasta is the town’s specialty (you can find a version in many parts of Lombardy). Bergamo’s version has a meat (pork or beef) filling and is usually served with pancetta, sage and butter sauce. Yes, wear your stretchy pants.

Polenta: A staple of the region, I particularly love la polenta taragna, which is a polenta of corn mixed with buckwheat, which gives it an earthier, nuttier flavour than regular corn polenta.

Sausage: The local specialty is called loanghìna in dialect, a long, thin sausage, simply rolled up and pinned with toothpicks before grilling to keep it’s shape — served with creamy polenta or in a panino.

Stracciatella gelato: Invented in 1961 at the central pastry shop, La Marianna, this is the creamiest stracciatella (made with fresh milk and cream and studded with dark Lindt chocolate) that you’ll ever have!

Polenta e osei: Literally ‘polenta and little birds’ in dialect, the reference is to a traditional (savoury) dish found in northern Italy of creamy polenta with roasted small birds such as quails and thrush birds, but in Bergamo these are sweet marzipan and polenta treats made to look like polenta complete with little chocolate black birds. You can find them in pastry shops around town, Marianna have them too.

Wine: On our drive back to Florence from Bergamo we made a pit stop on the western side of Lake Garda for some lake fish and a spritz (FYI read my friend Joanna Savill’s guide to Lake Garda for Gourmet Traveller, her husband is a Brescia local), and we popped in to biodynamic winery, Le Sincette, for a tasting and a few bottles to take home.

Where to eat in Bergamo:

For a traditional meal, I turned to Sabrina for suggestions and she gave me these: La Tana, Lalimentari, Mimi La Casa dei Sapori. They were completely booked out so I recommend booking in advance! We did, however, make it to Trattoria Parieti for homely cooking, warm, quirky atmosphere, smiley staff and a plate of delectable casoncelli alla bergamasca and hearty polenta taragna with brasato (braised beef), all very reasonable. We also stopped into Al Carro Ponte, a modern wine bar/bistrot for aperitivo (photo above), it’s not in the historical centre but it’s worth a visit for their extensive wine list, perhaps some champagne, enjoyed with oysters, mini burgers and tartare.

How you can help Bergamo:

Italy Segreta has created a Go Fund Me page to raise money for Bergamo’s hospital, which ends at the end of this week. You can contribute here!

Stale bread for cinnamon fritters and tortine di mozzarella

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 12:36:13 GMT

Cooking as a family has been keeping us grounded and inspired lately. We have been baking a lot, Marco has started a new sourdough project, while Mariu, our 7 year old, and I have been making some recipe videos.

These are two really easy recipes that you can make with stale bread — and I mean you can use completely rock hard bread. Tuscans never, ever throw out bread. It is revived and made into salads like panzanella, soups like pappa al pomodoro or ribollita, crostini and that stale bread is turned into many more meals. We often have stale bread lying around (especially now that we are making our own) and I set it aside, bit by bit, until I have about half a big loaf’s worth and then I make a cake with it – savoury or sweet.

This was one of those times we wanted both, Mariu liked the idea of making something sweet inspired by her favourite snack, cinnamon toast, I wanted to do something savoury to make good use of some mozzarella and caprino (fresh goats curd) I had. I don’t know if these kind of recipes already exist but basically we dreamed these up one day while in Lockdown and not having any flour at home and not wanting to make a trip to the supermarket. They were largely inspired by a stale bread cake that I love to make (see Giulia’s recipe for that here) and that I have made in a million variations, including savoury versions (a savoury bread cake is essentially very similar to a savoury bread and butter pudding or breakfast ‘cake’, strata). We didn’t have enough bread for a whole cake so I thought we could fry them like pancakes.

Notes: I started with about 350 grams of stale Tuscan bread, or half a big loaf of country style bread and poured 2 cups/500 ml of almost-boiled milk over it. If your bread is very stale and dry (as my Tuscan bread was) you may need to leave it to soak for a few hours, eventually in the fridge when the milk cools. If not, you should be fine with leaving it to soak for about 15 minutes, or until you can crumble the bread with your hands (and you may need to squeeze out excess liquid, see how you go). Extremely hard crusts may need to be discarded.

We split the bread into two bowls for the 2 different recipes below, so make note if you are only making one of these recipes you’ll only need 1 cup of milk and roughly 180 grams of stale bread (about 1/4 of a country style loaf). This is a fun one to do with kids, you can watch Mariu’s cinnamon sugar fritter video on my IGTV or here at Vimeo.

Frittelle di cannella // Cinnamon sugar fritters

This is a very forgiving, very delicious, you-can-do-it-by-eye type recipe. Along with the milk-soaked bread above, crumbled into a bowl, add 2 beaten eggs, about 30 grams of melted butter, 1/3 cup/70 grams sugar, a heaped teaspoon of cinnamon and mix until you have a sort of chunky batter. You can even use an immersion blender to do this very quickly. Add a tablespoon of butter to a cast iron or non stick pan and fry spoonful-sized blobs of the batter like pancakes. Flip and cook on the other side until browned and delightfully springy. Add butter as needed for greasing until they’re all fried. Once finished, dust in cinnamon sugar (combine 3 tablespoons of sugar with half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon) and serve warm. This makes approximately 12 fritters.

Tortine di mozzarella e caprino

I don’t know what to call these. Tortine di formaggio (little cakes of cheese)? Sformato di formaggio? Cheesy muffins (Marco said that sounded ridiculous)? They essentially taste like baked mozzarella in carrozza, mozzarella sandwiches, so I even considered calling them baked mozzarella in carrozza! Anyway, they are delicious warm or cold, and this small size is perfect for antipasto or aperitivo (we enjoyed the with some hand-cut prosciutto and a glass of wine) or a snack or part of lunch with some salad (the girls prefer raw vegetable sticks!).

Combine the rest of the crumbled milk-soaked bread with 1 egg, salt and pepper, 200 grams of cheese (I used 100 grams of goats curd and a 100 gram ball of mozzarella, chopped into 1cm cubes). Use any cheese you like or the equivalent bits and pieces, even other things — consider one or two of the following: chopped ham, peas, or sliced mushrooms that have been cooked down, roasted cherry tomatoes, herbs, finely chopped spring onions, even anchovies!

You can make fritters exactly like the cinnamon toast ones (they are cheesy and melty) or bake this in a small baking dish like a gratin, even in a round cake tin! I thought the girls would be more likely to eat this as a snack so I baked them in a muffin tin greased with butter. Dot some more butter over the top and sprinkle some dried breadcrumbs and grated parmesan over the top. Bake until golden brown, about 20 minutes. Wait 5 minutes to remove them carefully (they will be soft and cheesy while warm and will harden as they cool). Makes 8-10 tortine.

We enjoyed these tortine as aperitivo in the neighbour’s unused olive grove which has been providing us with so much relief and a breath of fresh air during the Covid-19 Lockdown, since we are not allowed to go to parks or playgrounds and even a simple walk is discouraged. It has been a refuge for us when our small apartment gets too small for the four of us and, it turns out, taking a glass of wine or a little picnic of cookies for the girls down there feels so special, particularly at this golden hour just before the sun goes down. These cute fifties-style cat eye sunglasses by Max Mara were a gift from Vision Direct.

Why baking a cake is the best therapy

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 20:37:28 GMT

There is something incredibly soothing about baking. If you love cooking and read this blog of mine, I’m sure that you probably feel the same. When times get tough, or you’re simply feeling down or uninspired or, maybe just because it’s raining or you can’t leave the house because you’re in a national lockdown, baking a cake (or perhaps bread) can be the perfect remedy. When Amelie came out and I watched it for the first time, that scene where broken-hearted Amelie runs home to bake a cake so resonated with me, I knew exactly how that felt and how baking smoothed those raw and especially blue emotions. And now, on almost our fourth week of lockdown in Italy, I am regularly turning to soothing, comforting cooking, if anything to pass the time doing something peaceful and calming, or to have something perfuming the house with the beautiful, heartwarming smell of cake baking.

For me, it’s partly the ritual: cracking eggs, the motion of whisking by hand, watching the batter transform into a silky, smooth cream. Buttering and lining the pan and even the waiting for the cake to bake, with that buttery perfume filling the kitchen, reassuring me that soon there will cake. Then it’s partly the result too, obviously: there is nothing more comforting than sitting down to a slice of still-warm cake and a cup of hot, milky tea (when I need to slow down or relax, nothing does it like a cup of tea for me) — even better if you’re sharing it with someone.

I wondered if there was something that science could explain about why baking is stress-relieving and comforting — indeed there are plenty of articles about the connection between baking and its therapeutic qualities. Maybe it is the eating of the cake (comfort eating) and the sharing of it with those you love (the company, compassion when you cook for others) or maybe it has more to do with the ritual (there is a kind of mindfulness to baking, the careful measuring, the stirring, the order of it all) or simply the certainty of cake when faced in a period of uncertainty that makes it feel good to bake.

I read an article where behaviour experts and psychologists describe that the seemingly inexplicable toilet roll hoarding accompanying the global pandemic panic was simply a way of taking control of something during a crisis, a situation where you otherwise have no control. Fascinating, though I think baking a cake is more constructive, personally.

Baking is creative, like other creative outlets from painting to music to dancing, and if you’re like me and often need to keep your hands busy creating something, these kind of outlets have a positive effect on our well being too.

I found a cake that really hit the spot particularly well for me. Danielle Alvarez’s brown butter buckwheat and apple cake, which she posted in her Instagram stories recently (and which will appear in her upcoming book, Always Add Lemon). I absolutely love Danielle’s food, her restaurant in Sydney, Fred’s, is one of the most inspiring — I would eat anything and everything she proposes.

What I especially love about Danielle’s cake is that it is flexible — I followed her recipe that she posted at the end of her stories but she used spelt flour instead of the buckwheat, and oat milk instead of regular milk, and she says if you don’t have either of these flours you can use regular all purpose flour. It also only calls for 1 egg — bonus if you’ve been having trouble finding eggs lately. I have written about a similar northern Italian torta di granosaraceno, a buckwheat and apple cake that is usually eaten with a lingonberry jam filling but the main differences are it calls for 6 eggs, white sugar rather than brown and a grated apple instead of chopped chunks of apple. Also, Danielle makes hers with brown butter, which is a game changer. Simply the smell of the butter browning and the perfume that will fill your kitchen as this is happening is worth it.

I made a little instagram video of baking Danielle’s brown butter apple cake and I included in it a slightly longer clip of how I line a springform cake tin — I admit, I am very lazy when it comes to lining cake tins and this is a good trick. Also if you’d like some further ideas for a comforting baking project this weekend (some are handy if you do not have flour or butter or all the basics), here are some favourites:

Torta caprese, my favourite flourless chocolate cake, all you need is dark chocolates, almonds, eggs and sugar (and you can adjust it to however many ingredients you have, the chocolate, sugar and almonds just need to be the same weight).

A classic Tuscan apple cake

Ada Boni’s chocolate cake, an incredible recipe from the famous 1920s Italian cookbook to have in your back pocket. There’s no egg or butter required, just flour, water and cocoa powder plus a liquid — you can use any liquid from milk, coconut milk, almond milk, I’ve also done it with coffee or even simply water. The perfect thing if you’re craving cake but lacking a few basic ingredients.

Walnut cake, it’s another Ada Boni recipe and all you need is walnuts, eggs and sugar.

Lemon polenta cake, this is the kind of baking that makes me really happy — sunny, lemony, easy, you can make these in a loaf tin, a round tin or a muffin tin for mini cakes. There’s no flour but if you have polenta lying around and some almonds. I make these with olive oil but if you don’t have it, you can substitute with melted butter.

Focaccia pugliese, if you’re more like my husband and savoury baking is your thing, I love this Bonci recipe for a fluffy, bouncy pugliese style focaccia with cherry tomatoes.

For some further reading, perhaps while you’re waiting for the cake to bake, there’s this too, Dorie Greenspan on the pleasure of baking.

Lockdown in Florence: Comforting chicken and farro soup & home deliveries

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 14:06:23 GMT

These are strange and surreal times and unless you’ve been hiding under a rock (not such a bad idea) you probably already know that the entire nation of Italy is under lockdown in an attempt to contain the coronavirus, Covid-19. Things change every day, with new regulations, new realities, new travel bans, new closures, every single day.

The current situation on the 13th of March is this: Florence is deserted as citizens are encouraged to stay home until April 3rd. No school. No gatherings of any sort, not even Sunday lunch with nonna or coffee with a friend. All non-essential shops have been closed, including restaurants, hairdressers, clubs, gyms and bars. Even parks will be locked and closed to the public. Open, though, are all food shops, supermarkets, newsagents, chemists, petrol stations, banks, post office. So there’s no need to stockpile. You can buy food, or a lightbulb, or, yes, toilet paper – there is plenty of that and no need to fight over it.

It may sound extreme but I have enormous respect for how the Italian government is handling this global pandemic, their decisions to just make everyone stop. And wait. And I’m amazed at how everyone is responding, encouraging each other to do it for the community, for their elders and the more fragile. This has been so heartening. There are even hashtags (of course there are hashtags), #iorestoacasa (I’m staying at home) and #andratuttobene (“everything will be ok”, where you’ll see a plethora of rainbow paintings by children). And don’t forget Nonna Rossetta, who is handing out the best advice for everyone on how to behave during the pandemic. I love her so much.

So really, we are absolutely fine — we have everything we need, no need to stockpile food as you can pop to the shops anytime, we can go for walks, or light the pizza oven for homemade pizza. I feel it’s rather like August in Florence when there’s the mass exodus to the seaside and Florentine shops and restaurants close for a good part of the month. The streets are empty, it’s too hot to go outside much and no friends are around — we are always the only ones, it seems, to be foolish enough to have to stay in Florence over the summer and have to be inventive to entertain each other! So we are well-practiced at this.

For us, personally, I feel these are days that we really needed. To learn how to slow down, and sit still for a moment. An overtired, overworked husband has been saying all he wants is some days off at home, to rest and spend time with his family (he got his birthday wish, yesterday). So for us, it’s the perfect opportunity to do all those things that get put off for being “too busy”: writing letters, pottering about at home, spring cleaning (perfect time for it), fixing old clothes, cooking projects (I made these bomboloni again and I highly suggest you try the soup below) and revisiting old books, or books I still haven’t opened! Catching up with old friends over the phone. While we aren’t encouraged to go in the car anywhere if we can help it (you have to carry a certificate with you anywhere you go to show to police who’ll stop you to ask where you’re going and if it’s absolutely necessary), we did take a beautiful walk through the woods just 15 minutes from our house and it may just have been one of the best things I’ve done all year so far.

I know we are extremely lucky, though. We live in a beautiful bubble, right on our hilltop neighbourhood of Settignano, where everyone knows each other (and it’s not the only time that this has been the preferred setting for avoiding a pandemic. Boccaccio set his fourteenth century Decameron here, which starts with a group of 10 friends telling stories to each other on a villa on the hill above Florence to pass the time away while the Plague ravages the country).

When we feel stuck, we have an entire olive grove next to the house the kids can run around in. Meanwhile, the news today is that in the centre of Florence, even parks are closing and being policed because it seems it’s too hard to keep bands of teenagers away from each other. We are also lucky because, as a family, we have been longing to be together, and to have Marco at home in the evenings these days is my daughter’s dream come true. But I know there are many others in situations where they are not going to find it easy to be together. Or where staying at home in lockdown is not a desirable, or even safe, option (the national anti-violence number is 1522). Or where it might just be downright lonely. Add to that stress (the stress of losing a job, or not knowing if you’ll have one to come back to), and some worry or anxiety — my heart goes out to the many people who will be suffering through this lockdown simply because of the situation it is enforcing upon them. I know I’m lucky.

Another thing that does break my heart is knowing how this is absolutely crushing Florence (like many cities in Italy that rely on tourism), I don’t know anyone not affected directly financially by this. It will be so hard for businesses to pick themselves up after this, many closed well before last night’s new decree shutting down non-essential shops, some are not sure when or how they will reopen. One thing I can say is that many have already faced this challenge by thinking outside the square and many businesses that have to remain closed are offering home delivery (which for now is allowed but I realise at the rate things are changing here, this could change too). This could be particularly useful for people who cannot leave the house for health reasons (for example if they are elderly, or are already sick — with or without coronavirus, if you have a fever you have to stay at home — and cannot buy basic groceries or cook).

I for one am hoping to support as many of my favourite places as I can during this difficult time and while I have been posting updates on stories, someone rightly suggested a round-up — I will keep this updated during this crazy lockdown period!

Another way you can help is to donate to Italy’s Red Cross, directly through this paypal link.

Some Florentine businesses offering delivery during the Lockdown:

Trattoria Burde: They just posted a photo of a mountain of crumbed braciole about to be fried and cooked in tomato sauce. Home delivery: 055 317206

Todo Modo Libri: A bookshop that happens to have an excellent wine bar. While they are closed during the lockdown, they are offering home delivery of books and wine (is there any better combination?). Email libreria@todomodo.org or contact them via instagram @todomodolibri or phone 055.239.9110.

Caffe Desiderio: Our favourite local bistro here in Settignano are offering home delivery of their delicious meals (they suggest their chicken liver terrine and their fresh pasta such as cappellacci filled with ricotta and chicory – see instagram for their latest!). Place your order before 12pm, 055.697687

Le Volpi e L’Uva: Delivery from 11am to 6pm, phone 055.239.8132 (they were too busy to delivery to us today, good thing there’s another few week of lockdown!).

S.Forno: The best bakery in town is ready to deliver to your home fresh bread, schiacciata, milk, biscotti and cakes — servicing the areas between Porta San Frediano to Piazza Santa Felicita’, Piazza della Calza and Piazza Tasso. Email info@ilsantobevitore.com or call 055.239.8580 (I’m considering hiding in the janitor’s closet, Elaine Benes style).

C.bio: Fabio Picchi’s beautiful bottega is open for businesses, selling organic produce, his signature bread, deli goods and more but they will also deliver — even if all you need is a bottle of milk! 055.247.9271

I recommend checking any business’s social media directly to get the full/updated picture.

Also check this post by Girl in Florence on how to support Florence.

Right now remember the focus is on health, on staying at home to stop the spread of the virus, particularly to Italy’s large elderly population who are the ones at risk. Everyone, every business, is taking things one day at a time. We need patience. Italy will bounce back, and she will be waiting with open arms.

I’ll leave you with the recipe for my current favourite, comforting chicken soup and an excerpt of this really important, passionate message from an infectious disease specialist in Toronto, you can (and should) read the full post here.

“I am not scared of Covid-19. I am concerned about the implications of a novel infectious agent that has spread the world over and continues to find new footholds in different soil. I am rightly concerned for the welfare of those who are elderly, in frail health or disenfranchised who stand to suffer mostly, and disproportionately, at the hands of this new scourge. But I am not scared of Covid-19.

“What I am scared about is the loss of reason and wave of fear that has induced the masses of society into a spellbinding spiral of panic, stockpiling obscene quantities of anything that could fill a bomb shelter adequately in a post-apocalyptic world.

“But mostly, I’m scared about what message we are telling our kids when faced with a threat. Instead of reason, rationality, openmindedness and altruism, we are telling them to panic, be fearful, suspicious, reactionary and self-interested.

“Covid-19 is nowhere near over. It will be coming to a city, a hospital, a friend, even a family member near you at some point. Expect it. Stop waiting to be surprised further. The fact is the virus itself will not likely do much harm when it arrives. But our own behaviors and “fight for yourself above all else” attitude could prove disastrous.

“I implore you all. Temper fear with reason, panic with patience and uncertainty with education. We have an opportunity to learn a great deal about health hygiene and limiting the spread of innumerable transmissible diseases in our society. Let’s meet this challenge together in the best spirit of compassion for others, patience, and above all, an unfailing effort to seek truth, facts and knowledge as opposed to conjecture, speculation and catastrophizing.

“Facts not fear. Clean hands. Open hearts. Our children will thank us for it.”

— Dr Abdu Sharkawy

Chicken, fennel and farro soup

Here’s that soup I mentioned a while ago – it’s comforting, nourishing, delicate and that hint of lemon makes it even refreshing. To make now and perhaps freeze for later. It doesn’t take much effort, you just have to stick around so it’s perfect for when you’re pottering about the house, and then it really just does all the work on its own. I used two marylands which are the thigh and drumstick that I cut out of a whole chicken, they cook in the soup creating their own stock — you only really need the meat from one maryland for the soup itself, the rest I shredded and will use in some chicken sandwiches tomorrow. You can also leave out the chicken for a meat-free version and substitute with chickpeas, cannellini or other beans (if using tinned, add them right at the end with the greens).

1 leek or small onion, finely sliced
1 clove of garlic, whole but squashed
1/2 fennel bulb (or 1 whole if small), thinly sliced
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
60ml (1/4 cup) white wine (or water)
1-2 fresh or dried bay leaves
1-2 chicken marylands, whole
Water
Handful of chopped green vegetables, optional (this is lovely with just fennel but if you want to up the greens, do; I added 1 small young zucchini and a few leaves of chard)
Handful of parsley or other fresh herbs such as thyme or oregano, chopped
Juice of 1 lemon
Handful of farro (or rice or barley)
Salt and pepper to taste

Place the leek, garlic, fennel and olive oil in a heavy bottomed pot. Add a good pinch of salt. Over medium heat, cook stirring occasionally until the leek is limp and the garlic is fragrant, about 10-15 minutes. It’s important not to let anything brown, but if you spy some browning happening earlier, add a splash of wine or water to the pot and let it simmer away for 5 minutes. Add the bay leaves and marylands, then pour in enough water to cover them. Cover with a lid and let simmer on the lowest heat until the meat begins to pull away from the bone, about 1 hour. About halfway through, add the farro to the pot.

Remove the marylands and let them cool slightly on a chopping board before pulling off the meat and shredding it. While you’re doing that, throw in the greens and let them cook for about 10 minutes. Adjust your seasoning – I quite like a lot of pepper in this – and finish with the juice from a lemon and fresh herbs.

Photo essay: Chestnut polenta in the Tuscan mountains

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 19:42:03 GMT

One late October, my friend Simona, who runs a beautiful B&B called Canto del Maggio, brought us to her special place, a little wooden ‘rifugio‘, as they’re known in Italian, a mountain cabin offering a place of rest and nourishment for hikers. This particular rifugio, called Osteria la Rocca, clings to the tiny stone hamlet of Rocca Ricciarda, high up in the chestnut woods of Pratomagno, between Florence and Arezzo. The cosy, little trattoria with its fireplace serves the Tuscan typical fare from this area and is open only on Sundays.

We walk in to find 92 year old Mario hunched over the fireplace, steadily and patiently shaking and turning chestnuts in a perforated cast iron pan. He let us into the kitchen to show us how he makes chestnut polenta — this is the real reason why Simona has brought me here, to show me this incredible, dying tradition — by vigorously stirring chestnut flour (which is nothing more than dehydrated chestnuts that have been ground into a very fine, aromatic flour) and boiling water in an ancient copper pot with a wooden pole (an awkward, muscle building exercise that no one does anymore because it is so strenuous), before being turned out onto a perfectly white linen cloth.

It looks like a dark, round loaf of bread but it is incredibly light and pillowy. Mario cuts slices of the still warm, steaming polenta with sewing thread (can you spot it?) and serves the warm slices with fresh ricotta. I’m in heaven. There is also gnocchi — Pratomagno potatoes are held in high esteem and are recognised as a Slow Food presidium, these red-skinned, oval potatoes are grown in altitudes over 500 meters, some say they were derived from King Edward potatoes — and schiacciata all’uva and divine, ricotta-stuffed, fried chestnut flour fritters. Mario goes back to roasting chestnuts on the fireplace, patiently turning and tossing them throughout lunch, and recounting to us how, growing up, they were all he had to relieve his hunger, chestnuts and potatoes.

How to create your Italian family tree

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 14:32:21 GMT

I have spent many, many years tracing my husband Marco’s family tree, a project that started well over a decade ago when I was woking as a restorer, first as an intern and then in the archives of a photography museum in Florence and it struck me on a really personal level how many thousands of photographs (many family portraits) of unknown faces were in the collection. I immediately made my mother in law pull out her black and white family photos and tell me who everyone was – she is the only one these days that knows – and I set about putting a name to the faces and writing everything down. My grandmother in Australia constructed a very impressive family tree in the 1980s (completed with visits to graveyards and travels through the UK) but no one in Marco’s family had ever done a complete one. I knew I would be the one to fill in the blanks.

On our first trip to Puglia in 2011, the archives were not yet digitalised and looking for Marco’s grandfather Mario’s birth certificate meant walking in to the dingy office of the State Archives and asking for it in person. Enormous albums with their spines held together with swathes of silver duct tape (seriously! See the photo below right) were taken off shelves and as the pages were flicked through, I noticed large – like frying pan sized – sections missing. There had been fires and it’s not guaranteed that they will find the records, I was told. And I can imagine how many other natural disasters and wars had affected these delicate records throughout Italy. But we did find them and that was the start of our family history research, which eventually led to the birth of my latest cookbook, inspired by the stories I found.

Luckily, for anyone else interested in tracing their family history in Italy, many archives have now been completely digitalised and placed online for free. An excellent place to start is the website of “Antenati” archives of the Ministero dei Beni Culturali. Here, the registries of over sixty State Archives have been uploaded and with just a surname or some rough dates and the name of the town or municipality that you’re interested in, you can find the scans of original, historical birth, death and marriage certificates.

Even if you don’t have Italian language skills, it’s pretty easy to start your search as the main part of the website has been translated into English. Reading handwriting from the nineteenth century is another thing! And on the original certificates you’ll need some basic Italian to know what you’re looking at and deciphering the information but I hope that the tips below will help you know how to get the most out of using this website for your family history research.

Once on the home page, you will find you have an online search with the option of Sfoglia i registri (browse the archives) or Trova i nomi (find the names). I find the latter by far the most useful for starting family tree research.

Here you will find the registries from the following provinces (this includes the towns and cities that make up the municipalities under that province – for example the towns of Martina Franca and Grottaglie but also Taranto itself are in the wider province of Taranto): Agrigento, Asti, Bari, Benevento, Bergamo, Brescia, Caltanissetta, Campobasso, Chieti, Cremona, Enna, Forlì-Cesena, Genova, Grosseto, Imperia, L’Aquila, Mantova, Modena, Mondovì (Cuneo), Napoli, Padova, Pesaro, Pescara, Potenza, Prato, Ragusa, Reggio Calabria, Rieti, Roma, Salerno, Savona, Taranto, Torino, Trapani, Udine, Urbino, Vicenza, Viterbo

How far back can you go?

There are limits to the dates of the registers that you will be able to find. First of all, take into account that Italy was only unified as a country in the 1860s and therefore the archives themselves were only created in or around 1866. Prior to this date, births, deaths and marriages (and baptisms) were usually recorded in the local family parish, in registri parrocchiali. From around the mid-sixteenth century onwards this was the case. In order to have access to pre-1866 records, you will have to visit the family’s parish – if you’re not sure of which one that may be, on later records you will find that the addresses are written on every birth, death or marriage certificate so you may be lucky enough to find out the area the family lived in and hope they did not move around too much. Saying all of this, some provinces kept their records differently (they were like different countries after all) and in some cases you’ll find some certificates that date to the early 1800s so just try and see how you go!

I personally found the Antenati database most useful for searching within the dates 1866 and 1900 – but admittedly, between birth and death certificates you can find a lot of information (names, ages, professions, addresses, spouses, parents names) just within these years – I was able to go back as far as the mid-1700s in terms of family member’s birth years (thanks to a death certificate and a bit of simple subtraction!). For my family tree purposes, I know that the Cardellicchio family moved away from Taranto after the First World War. They moved to Turin for work, and while Turin is one of the provinces that have their archives digitalised, I discovered that many results that are around or less than 100 years old are no longer are considered ‘historical’ and you need to request access to these certificates from the archives in the city in question.

How to start searching:

Once you are in Find the Names section all you need to start is one or more of the following (depending on what you know and how much or how little you would like to find out):

name – first or last or both
year – start and finish of the search (for example if you know the year of the birth, you can put in just that year, if you’re looking for a parent and can guess the years in which to search based on age assumption, put those years in)
type of certificate you’re looking for (birth/death/marriage)
municipality – if you know the town or province of the family (and if it is one of the ones mentioned above)

If you don’t even know the exact province where your family came from, what is very interesting to know is that Italian surnames are highly regional (Tuscany surnames for example are easy to spot as they end in an ‘i’). If I type in my mother in law’s surname, Cardellicchio, and put just the dates, but no place, all of the 300 results that come up are from Puglia and almost all happen to be from Taranto – this is definitely a surname that comes from this one town! Very helpful (and absolutely fascinating) is a map of Italian surnames where you can put in the surname and find out where they are currently most concentrated. This is a great starting point if you do not even know the possible locations of the family. I like using this one. While this map gives more precise results by town.

Once you put something in to search, you will get results with some basic typed information (as in the image below) that includes in the first column the name, age, and names of the person and their mother and father (note that in Italy, women keep their maiden names), along with (in the second column) the type of certificate, the date of the certificate and the municipality/city/town in the province. In the third column, if available, is the name of the spouse. What is very handy is that this search will also give you results if one of the parents or the spouse has the name you are searching.

When you find an entry you want to look at, you can click to open the scanned certificate. Double click to enlarge the image and now prepare yourself for squinting, enlarging and deciphering the elegant handwriting! You’ll notice more than one entry on each page so make sure to check you’re looking at the right one.

In a death certificate:

The certificate (atto di morte in Italian) will name the witnesses present (often their age and residency too), the date and hour, the address of where the person lived and, interestingly, his or her job and spouse (you can tell if someone is widowed – and therefore learn some more information about the spouse if you don’t already know their dates – by the description “vedovo” for a man or “vedova” for a woman).

You’ll notice there are two death certificates in the search results above that are related — Francesco Cardellicchio (1890) and Angelo Cardellicchio, his son (1877). In Francesco’s certificate, we learn that Francesco Cardellicchio died at age 71 in 1890, so I can work out his birth year. He was a barbiere, a barber, and was already widowed, his spouse was Rosa Leone, and he lived at Vico Morrutto (the number of the address isn’t indicated, it says “senza”, none). Funnily enough, as I was wandering the streets of Taranto before having done this search, I took a photo of a motorino in a classic, arched Taranto alleyway – a search on google maps when I got home told me that very alleyway was the tiny Vico Morrutto. Amazing to think we walked the narrow street of my daughters’ great-great-great-grandfather’s home without knowing it.

Francesco Cardellicchio was the father of Nicola Cardellicchio, whose death certificate I was able to find easily too. A construction worker (muratore) like his brother Angelo, Nicola also died young at age 35 on August 1, 1885, two weeks before the birth of his son (as I learned from another birth certificate), Nicola Cardellicchio – yes, confusingly they have the same name, and this happens. This younger Nicola was the great-grandfather of my husband – and the husband of Anna, whose polpette are a family heirloom and one of the most treasured recipes in Tortellini at Midnight, a recipe that has made it’s way from 1800s Taranto up to Turin and then to my Tuscan mother in law’s table (the photo below is from the book, taken by Lauren Bamford, I cannot resist her photo of it!).

In a birth certificate:

Nonna Anna‘s birth certificate (atto di nascita), along with her brothers and sisters, were easy to see in a list of names because they had four or five names, not just one – a sign of their noble family heritage, my mother in law says. Anna Michaela Comasia Maria Calianno was born on 13^th of May 1889. You’ll see similar information to a death certificate but the information here will round out what else you know about the family. In this certificate, it mentions Anna’s father, Francesco Calianno, age forty, a pharmacist, living in Via Duomo (what a difference an address makes, while Vico Morrutto is a tiny, enclosed alleyway in the rabbit-warren like part of Taranto, Via Duomo is the main street in town, full of elegant palazzi, leading of course to the basilica). So now I have Francesco’s birth year, I can presume his job and his address meant he was extremely educated and well off, which supports the family stories of Anna’s nobility.

Interestingly, on a birth certificate, the mother’s name will also have her residency and her father’s name next to it, for example, “Girolama Melucci di Taranto di Giuseppe di anni trentasei” – so now you know she was born in Taranto and you can also search for “Giuseppe Melucci” to find Anna’s mother’s father and his family. Also you have the information that Girolama was thirty-six years old when she gave birth.

This last tidbit resulted in a thoroughly interesting discovery of the family history where I actually was able to find more information through the lines of all the women in the family than the men, thanks to the way the birth certificates were filled out.

Marriage certificates:

Not all archives have marriage certificates. Taranto is one that doesn’t have them and I speculate that this is because marriage records were kept in the parishes in Puglia. Again, the information that you have from a marriage certificate is interesting, especially as you have the parents names of both husband and wife, ages and more. Flicking through randomly, I found some interesting bits and pieces from records as diverse as Mantova and Agrigento in Sicily. Some were absolutely indecipherable, being entirely handwritten. In one Sicilian wedding certificate I saw the parents of both husband and wife were not named, but referenced, “madre ignota” and “padre ignoto”, unknown parents, which usually means the person in question was an orphan, and your trail might end there!

I hope this is a helpful start to researching your Italian family history. I could – and did – spend countless hours immersed in it and every new discovery had that same satisfaction of finding a piece in a puzzle – until I reached the end where I think I’ll have to visit the parishes to fill in the rest. It will be a good excuse to visit Puglia again. I leave you with some photographs I took of Taranto in film from our last visit there while researching for Tortellini at Midnight. Happy searching!