Erica De Mane

Recipe: Sformata with Parsnips and Fontina Sformata, hard to pronounce, even for a guinea girl like me. SSSSSSFFFFOOOOORRRR. Think of the makeup shop Sephora and you’ll get the idea, except you’ll want to elide the sound, not break it into two syllables. All it really means, in Italian culinary parlance, is something that’s molded, like [...]

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Recipe: Tangerine Sorbetto Every year on Christmas Eve I serve some type of light citrus dessert. I can’t help it. It just seems the only way to go after a big fish dinner. Sometimes I’ll make a sweet blood orange salad with sugar and a touch of cinnamon, or one of those wobbly Sicilian gelatina [...]

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Salt cod at the Boqueria market in Barcelona. Wow, pretty expensive this year. Recipe: Baccalà Mantecato In the last week or so several people have asked me about this salt cod dish, knowing I always make it for Christmas Eve. Baccalà mantecato (mantecare means to whip) is a Venetian dish, but it’s essentially the same [...]

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Recipe: Polpettone with Ricotta, Pistachios, and Prosciutto A friend recently told me that he had just made a meatloaf, an American-style one, and it had come out very well. I like a good American meatloaf, but I also love polpettone, Italy’s version of  a big old load of baked chopped meat. The one I came [...]

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Very fresh tuna at the Trapani fish market. Dig the sword spire. Recipe: Cavatelli with Fresh Tuna, Marsala, and Rosemary I don’t know about you, but I find it extremely hard to keep up with the lists of endangered, semi-endangered, or just plain bad-for-your-health fish. I do consult the seafood selector set up by the [...]

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Recipe: Polenta Lasagna with Brussels Sprouts and Fontina In my ever-reaching quest to Italianize Thanksgiving, this year I came up with a lasagna loaded with good Italian ingredients like pancetta and fontina Valle d’Aosta. It actually, despite all my efforts, tasted very Thanksgivingy, and it went very well with turkey and all the other traditional [...]

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Picasso drawing a fish. Recipe: Whole Roasted Sea Bass with Rosemary Oil The approach of Thanksgiving always gets me thinking about food that has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. It’s not my favorite food holiday. In fact, I’d have to say it’s my least favorite food holiday, except possibly for Halloween. I like the wines [...]

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Recipe: Tagliolini with Oyster Mushrooms, Prosciutto Cotto, and Sage I recently went hunting for oyster mushrooms in Dutchess County, New York, with my friend Toby. He finds them almost every year, growing shelf-like from half dead trees in the woods around his house. This year he had so many that after trying to peddle them [...]

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Still life with leeks, Chaim Soutine, 1893-1943. Recipe: Pappardelle with Cockles, Leeks, and Saffron It’s time to take the tomatoes out of your pasta. Don’t you think?  Although I haven’t resigned myself to cranking open the canned stuff quite yet. There’s always this in-between period for me, after a summer of fresh tomatoes (especially this [...]

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