Erica De Mane

Augusta, Sicily, hometown of Olivia’s grandmother.

Italian Recipe Exchange

Olivia’s Grandma’s Ricotta Cake

My friend Olivia recently sent me five recipes, four for cookies and one for cake, from her Sicilian grandmother’s recipe book. Her grandmother, now gone, was evidently always stingy with her recipes, not even sharing them with her own daughter, yet sometimes distributing them to neighbors instead. I’ve certainly seen that before. I remember meeting up with a group of people from my grandmother’s hometown in Puglia. When I inquired about a recipe book they had put together, and I knew for a fact it existed, they acted like they had no idea what I was talking about. They didn’t want me to get my greedy little hands on it. Southern Italians can be very strange and suspicious, attaching odd motives to innocent people, especially relatives.

At any rate, I’m glad to have Olivia’s family recipes now. I find them very interesting, for they illustrate the metamorphosis much Italian food went through when it made its way to this country. Many of the ingredients Italians relied on just didn’t exist here, so they made do in ingenious ways. You wonder why grape jelly shows up in so many Italian-American dishes, even meatballs? Well, maybe you’ve never wondered, but I’ll tell you. It was usually a stand-in for vino cotto, cooked down grape must, a common sweetener in Italy.

Olivia’s grandmother came from Augusta, Sicily, a small harbor town on the southeastern part of the island, about a half hour from Catania. Olivia visited the town last summer and commented in an e-mail to me that it was amazing “in a surreal kind of way.” She didn’t elaborate on this, but I think I know what she meant. A surreal feeling can set in when you feel a part of something but yet don’t truly feel a part of it. There’s more desire than reality in many of these Old World discovery trips for a lot of us. A similar mood came over me when I visited my grandmother’s hometown of Castelfranco in Miscano.  I can truly say I never felt particularly inbred until I visited that town (with its six or seven family surnames listed in the local phone book).

Olivia’s recipes are for anise cookies, hazelnut biscotti, Sicilian date balls, something called Sicilian Chocolate Salty Balls (love that name, but oddly there’s no salt in the recipe), and a ricotta cake. Getting back to my mention of grape jelly, some of the ingredients in these recipes are very obviously stand-ins. I knew I had to make the ricotta cake first, since its inclusion of a box of yellow cake mix really intrigued me, a sort of Sicilian answer to the show Semi-Homemade. I imagined cake mix must have been one of grandma’s exciting discoveries when perusing the shelves of Boston supermarkets, marveling at all the packages and cans of unfamiliar but fascinating looking stuff—something like my Nanny’s obsession with frozen spinach. She must have decided at some point to augment her family ricotta cake recipe by including it. It’s hard to say what her thinking was, and Olivia doesn’t know, but I can tell you the cake is absolutely delicious and nothing like any ricotta cake I’ve ever had in Sicily.

The technique is interesting. You first put together the boxed cake mix batter. I chose Duncan Hines French vanilla, which seemed to have the least amount of artificial flavoring. You pour that into a cake pan. Then you whip ricotta up with eggs, sugar, and a little anise flavoring, and pour that on top. As the cake bakes, the ricotta falls to the bottom and the cake bakes up on top, producing a two layer affair with a lovely, moist texture. It had the taste of a traditional ricotta cake, but with the look of an American custard pie. An amazing feat of chemistry.

Three of the cookie recipes she gave me list Crisco or margarine as an ingredient, and I believe those are stand-ins for lard, which was and still is to a certain extent a staple of Sicilian baking,  used in traditional cannoli shells, for instance. The Sicilian date balls contain two cups of Rice Krispies. They may just be a substitute for rice, but it’s hard to say.

I will tackle the Salty Balls at some point, but since they were a little more complicated, with many ingredients including Hershey’s dark cocoa, cloves, cinnamon, chocolate chips, walnuts, and Crisco, I thought I’d hold off on them for a while.

Olivia, I thank you so much for sharing these recipes with me and my readers. They’re a delicious history lesson to be sure.

Here’s the cake recipe from Granny’s collection. And I might add that this entire cake takes about 15 minutes to assemble. Great for a spur of the moment espresso or vin santo party.

Ricotta Cake

1 box yellow cake mix
2 pounds whole milk ricotta
¾ cup sugar
4 large eggs
¼ teaspoon anise oil (I used ¼ teaspoon anise extract mixed with ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Grease and flour a 13-by-9-inch cake pan. Prepare the cake mix according to the directions on the box, and pour it into the pan.

Now, in a large bowl, blend together the ricotta, sugar, eggs, and anise oil (or use the anise and vanilla extract substitution I chose) until well mixed. Pour this over the cake mix, but don’t mix it into the batter.

Bake for 1 hour. Let sit about 30 minutes before slicing so it can firm up a bit.

Recipe:  Homemade Ricotta for Easter

What does Easter actually mean to me, a person beyond the classification of lapsed Catholic and into the bright white area of atheism? Not much. I do experience frequent attacks of pagan soil worship, which I suppose bring me closer to the world of spring rebirth and all its wonderment. Growing up half an hour from Manhattan didn’t really give me the chance to play nature girl. I never milked a cow or watched a goat being born, but the aroma of ricotta with its creamy beauty brings a lovely Easter feeling into my heart.

So many traditional Southern Italian Easter dishes use ricotta as a foundation, and they are some of the glories of the Italian kitchen. Pastiera, the sweet ricotta pie studded with wheat berries and perfumed with orange flower water, is in my opinion a work of genius. My mother’s family made something similar using rice instead of wheat, creating a kind of crustless firm pudding that they cut into squares.  Pizza rustica, the savory version of ricotta cake, stuffed with little chunks of provolone and salami, and ravioloni filled with ricotta and finished with butter and fresh sage are two other dishes that showed up on our Easter table when I was a kid and Easter was still the way in my Italian-American world. Now that all the genuflecting, the patent leather Mary Janes, the floral hats with matching purses, the Rodda Peeps and chocolate eggs are no longer part of my Easter day, what remains is ricotta. But don’t pity me. Ricotta is a powerful presence.

Now, to get to the point, if you’ve never made your own homemade ricotta, it’s time you started. There are few things, culinarily speaking, that are so easy and produce such huge rewards for the cook.  Nothing you can buy is comparable to your own homemade still-warm ricotta, drizzled with olive oil and sea salt, or with honey and a sprinkling of nutmeg, or folded into a bowl of al dente spaghetti, or used to make elegant Easter dishes, like the pastiera that I mentioned earlier.

Even though traditional ricotta is made by recooking whey leftover from cheese making, you can make a wonderful version at home using whole milk. It involves adding an acid, like lemon, to whole milk, and gently heating it until it curdles. You don’t need any fancy equipment; just a big pot and a piece of cheesecloth or a fine mesh strainer, and possibly a kitchen thermometer as a security blanket, if it’s your first time.

In my book The Flavors of Southern Italy I give a sort of standard recipe for homemade ricotta, using lemon juice.  Almost everyone I know makes it that way. The result is good, but occasionally it can be a little drier than I like. In the several years since I wrote that recipe, I’ve continued to experiment with making ricotta, and I’ve decided that adding buttermilk instead of lemon as the curdling agent gives a moister result. I’ve even gone ahead and added a little heavy cream, so the ricotta is extra rich and soft.

Bruschetta topped with homemade ricotta, roasted peppers, olives and capers—something to think about.

Homemade Ricotta for Easter

(Makes about 4 cups)

1 gallon whole milk
1 pint heavy cream (optional but recommended)
1 quart buttermilk
1 teaspoon salt

Put all the ingredients in a large, nonreactive pot (stainless steel or enamel both work well), and place it on a medium flame. Let it heat, uncovered, stirring once or twice, until little bubbles form on the surface. This will take about 10 minutes or so. Then let it bubble, without stirring, for about 5 minutes. You will see curds start to form and will notice the liquidy whey just start to separate from the solids. The temperature should get up to 170 degrees (a kitchen thermometer is helpful the first few times you make it, until you get the feel of it). Turn off the heat, and let the pot sit there, undisturbed, for 10 minutes (don’t be tempted to stir; it’ll break up the curds while they’re forming). You’ll now notice the faintly greenish whey separating more cleanly from the white curds. Gently pour the mix into a strainer lined with cheesecloth (or into a fine mesh strainer), scraping the bottom of the pan to loosen any stuck-on ricotta. Let drain until all the whey runs off but the cheese is still moist.

I love eating it still warm, but the ricotta will keep in the refrigerator for several days.

Monkeys in the Kitchen, by David Teniers the younger (1610-1690)

Here’s another little piece of the memoir-type book I’ve been working on. It describes a period of anxiety cooking I went through when I was a senior in high school.

Cooking as Teenage Therapy

All of a sudden I just wanted to cook, and that’s all I wanted to do. When I first started my “cooking frenzy” as Mo, my mother, called it, I wasn’t at all interested in the bold and delicious Southern Italian food I’d grown up with, but with an emerging 1970s style of health food. I cooked recipes from The New York Times Natural Foods Cookbook, just published, something I picked up because many of the fragile hippie girls from my school, the ones with straight dirty blond hair, were reading it. What could be in this book that was making these girls so serene? Me serene seemed as likely as me the astronaut, but I bought the book hoping it would fill me with sophistication. I should have known right off this wasn’t going to be a good fit for me.

The food I cooked from this New York Times health book was immediately repugnant to me, but I kept at it. It didn’t occur to me right away to go in any other direction. All those foreign smells, produced by me, wafting from our family kitchen, made me almost gag at times—dusty grains, molasses, carob, dried fruit, oils that smelled like fish, leaden bread studded with rancid seeds and walnuts. But I couldn’t stop turning out huge quantities of those brownish gray breads, cement-textured cookies, and grain dishes held together with a slimy glue.

My production hours were erratic; sometimes I’d be up until four or five in the morning pulling solid loaves from the oven. Food without life. It was a profoundly surreal experience, but yet, at the same time, it was my first encounter with the thrill of losing myself completely to a pursuit. Miraculously, much of my anxiety melted away.

But something was not quite right (or something went “terribly wrong,” as journalists always say when reporting on a freak accident) . Culinarily I was on the wrong path. I loved the chopping and the mixing, and putting food through grinders. And I was very taken with fire; the gas range, the broiler, the long bar matches, Tiki torches, bug candles. I loved the reddish orange and deep blue purple hues that fire gave off.

Gradually, I’d say it took around three months, my disgust with the foreign food I was turning out from the New York Times book became profound and unsustainable, but my desire to cook only grew stronger. The Southern Italian cooking that had surrounded me my entire life began to have a positive pull. I finally woke up. Our family food wasn’t current like the dusty ten-ton oatmeal and pumpkin seed loaves I had been baking (I actually baked about eight of them one day, all dry as a bone and smelling vaguely like mildew); it was just what we ate, every day. I began paying attention to the aromas of our kitchen, the frying pork cutlets or raw red peppers, Mo marinating chicken legs in sliced garlic and lemon wedges, or opening clams over the stove in a winey tomato sauce, or tossing a salad with pungent red wine vinegar and bitter olive oil. I loved the aroma of sautéed zucchini when the edges got a bit burnt and when my mother would then tip it all out of the skillet into a big dish and scatter on fresh basil that she’d tear nonchalantly with her fingers. Dick, my father, cutting up cantaloupes and draping them with prosciutto, or just salting slices of melon and popping them into his mouth. Salty melon. What a concept!

Asparagus and Soccer Team, by Madeline Sorel (Rome, 1980).

Recipe: Asparagus with Fontina Lemon Cream

The crocuses are up, half frozen from yesterday’s brief snow flurry, and that means only one thing: It’s time to start thinking about asparagus. Not the New York local stuff, which doesn’t appear until late April or early May, but the decent, flavorful California import. I have to admit, I’m not crazy about the California version’s uniform look. I love the bunches I will find at Union Square, where you’ll get some fat stalks, some thinner ones, some straight, some crooked, a few really gnarly looking brown-tinged stalks mixed in with bright green beauties. Though not anywhere near as unruly, they sort of remind me of the asparagus patch we let go to seed in the backyard of a Riverhead, Long Island, rental house my husband and a few friends shared many years ago. The patch went crazy mainly because everyone was always too high on various 1980s-style mind-altering substances—cheap red wine, cocaine, Quaaludes (or was that the ’70s?)—to figure out how to manage it. But two or three times during the spring and early summer, I’d stumble out there, grab a good mix of pencil-skinny and almost zucchini-fat stalks, some literally going to seed, and cook up a puréed soup. That was really delicious, and at least the stuff never went to waste.

I love asparagus. The taste can be so pungent, and it’s certainly unique, and you get that special personal aftereffect as a bonus. Last spring I was into extreme Southern Mediterranean treatments for asparagus—olives, orange, garlic, olive oil, vinaigrette—but this year I’m starting off with a richer, more northern approach. I just picked up a chunk of particularly fragrant Fontina Valle d’Aosta. Sometimes this lovely cheese can have the aroma of spring wildflowers. I don’t always see it in such great shape—too often it’s overripe—so when I do, I grab it. I thought I’d just make a creamy sauce with the special cheese, pour it over boiled asparagus, and then run it under a broiler for a minute. And that’s what I did.

I didn’t use a beciamella as a base but instead went with a little reduced cream that I melted the Fontina into, whisking away. I added a few scrapings of nutmeg and lemon zest and scattered sweet Piave cheese over the top before browning. Good ingredients, simple preparation. To my palate, this dish is great with a pan-sautéed mild whitefish seasoned with a little butter and lemon. I chose a boned shad, which is in season now.

Asparagus with Fontina Lemon Cream

(Serves 3 as a side dish)

1 large bunch asparagus, trimmed and the tough skin peeled
1 cup heavy cream
1 garlic clove, peeled and smashed with the side of a knife
¼ pound Fontina Valle d’Aosta cheese
A few large scrapings of nutmeg
The grated zest from 1 lemon
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup grated Piave cheese (the aged grating version is the only one I’ve found in this country so far, and that’s what you want here)

Set up a big pot of water, and bring it to a boil. Add the asparagus, and blanch for about 4 or 5 minutes, until just tender, with a touch of firmness left to it. Take it from the water and plunge it into a cold water bath to stop the cooking. Dry it on paper towels.

In a small saucepan add the cream and garlic, and turn the heat to medium. Cook, uncovered, until reduced by about half. Now turn the heat to low, add the Fontina, and whisk it until it’s melted and the sauce is smooth. Add the nutmeg, lemon zest, a pinch of salt, and some black pepper. Turn off the heat. You can make the sauce a little ahead (maybe about an hour) and reheat it, but the texture is best when it’s made right before serving, and it only takes about 10 minutes.

Place the asparagus in a small baking dish, and season it with salt and black pepper. Pour the hot sauce on top (removing the garlic), and then scatter on the Piave.

Run the dish under the broiler, about 6 inches from the heat source, just until the top is golden. This will also reheat the asparagus. Serve right away.

Eggplant Parmigiana, by Leighann Foster.

Recipe: Sweet Lasagna with Eggplant, Cinnamon, Almonds, and Honey

I’m often frustrated that Sicilian food doesn’t taste more Arabic, that it has dropped many of the spices that give Tunisian and Moroccan cooking, for instance, their allure. There are undeniably many Sicilian dishes that have clear Arab roots—couscous and many desserts based on honey, nuts, and dried fruits come to mind—but present-day Sicily seems, like Italy in general, to favor herbs over spices, giving much of its food a fresh taste rather than the more burnished kind spices can provide.

So I find myself taking Sicilian-style dishes and augmenting them with a touch of spice. This suits my palate lately, and it has been making me happy in my kitchen. I’m especially enamored of the sweet-tinged spicing of Moroccan couscous dishes, with their cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, bay leaf, anise, allspice—some of the spices that make up ras-el-hanout, one of Morocco’s gentle spice mixes. Sicilian-style couscous goes easy on spices. In fact sometimes it includes none at all. I don’t like that. When I make Sicilian-style couscous, generally fish-based, I usually include saffron, bay leaf, and a pinch of cinnamon, a very gentle combination but still a fragrant touch.

So here’s my Sicilian eggplant lasagna with a nudge toward North Africa. It starts with the pretty standard eggplant-tomato-and-ricotta trilogy, but then I add cinnamon, a pinch of cumin, toasted almonds, and a drizzle of honey to carry the flavor to the Sicilian–North African land in my mind.

Oh, and one thing that’s kind of important: I don’t often bother with eggplant this time of year, since it can be so bitter, but I do find that the long Japanese variety tastes pretty good even in winter, so I’ve used it here.

Sweet Lasagna with Eggplant, Cinnamon, Almonds, and Honey

(Serves 6)

1 pound homemade or store-bought fresh lasagna sheets, very thinly rolled
Salt
Extra-virgin olive oil
4 medium Japanese eggplants, cut into small cubes
1 large shallot, minced
2 garlic cloves, very thinly sliced
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
⅛ teaspoon ground cumin
Freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon honey
A splash of dry Marsala
1 28-ounce, plus 1 15-ounce, can Italian plum tomatoes, well chopped, with the juice
1 cup grated pecorino Toscano cheese
2 cups whole milk ricotta
¾ cup slivered almonds, lightly toasted
A large handful of flat leaf parsley, the leaves lightly chopped

Drizzle an 8-by-12-inch baking dish (or an equivalent oval one) with olive oil, coating it well.

Cook the lasagna sheets in plenty of boiling salted water, a few at a time, until just tender (if they’re very fresh, this can take under a minute). Then run them under cold water, and let them drain on kitchen towels.

In a large skillet, heat 4 tablespoons of olive oil over medium flame. Add the eggplant and the shallot, and sauté until just starting to brown, about 4 minutes or so. Add the garlic, cumin, cinnamon, salt, and black pepper, and sauté a few minutes longer. Add the honey, and stir. Add the Marsala, and let it boil away. Add the tomatoes, and cook at a low bubble for about 10 minutes. Turn off the heat. The sauce should still be a bit loose, so add a drizzle of warm water if it has gotten too thick. Taste for seasoning, adding more salt and black pepper if needed (remember that seasoning a layered dish properly after the fact is difficult).

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Ladle a thin layer of sauce on the bottom of the baking dish. Add a layer of pasta sheets. Add some more sauce, and give the top a good sprinkling of pecorino. Add another layer of pasta. Now add all the ricotta, spreading it out well. Season with salt, black pepper, and some more pecorino. Scatter all the almonds over the ricotta, and then scatter on about half of the parsley. Add another layer of pasta, and spread on the rest of the sauce. Top with the remaining pecorino. Give the top a few grindings of black pepper, and a drizzle of fresh olive oil. Bake, uncovered, until the lasagna is bubbling and the top has started to brown a bit, about 25 minutes.

Let the lasagna rest about 10 minutes before cutting it.

Recipe: Whole Grain Spaghetti with Anchovies, Onions, and White Wine

You know how certain dishes can seem so incredibly intriguing even before you taste them? That was definitely the case for me with this Venetian pasta. Its sauce is made almost exclusively from softened onions and anchovies (or sometimes sardines—salt-packed, not fresh—instead of anchovies). The idea of slow-cooking onions with anchovies just seemed so right. I could imagine the aroma steaming from the pan. I could picture the melting texture of this concoction clinging to the long skinny pasta as I gave it a toss. The dish came out just as I imagined it would. Not so true for all fantasies.

In the Venice region, this absolutely delicious sauce is usually served with buckwheat or whole wheat bigoli, a long pasta with a hollow down the middle, something like a thickish bucatini. It’s such a traditional dish it’s referred to simply as “bigoli in salsa.” To me it is one of the best cold-weather pastas, effortless but with big rewards. Isn’t that what we all ideally want?

I added bay leaf and thyme to achieve a fuller flavor. Some recipes I consulted called for white wine, some didn’t, but  if I can include wine I do, so in it went. It also seemed like a good idea to use Vidalia onions, since they release so much sweetness, a good play against the saltiness of the anchovies. And choose salt-packed anchovies if possible, for the best flavor.

Bigoli pasta is not that easy to find around here, and it’s extremely hard to make at home. A good producer is the Venetian company Borella. I can sometimes find it at Todaro Brothers in Manhattan, but I’ve also seen it for sale on Amazon. I couldn’t manage to procure a bag of bigoli this week, so I used a whole-grain spaghetti by Racconto, a mix of whole wheat, buckwheat, and farro. It was very good, although the texture is different. Bigoli is thicker and a bit softer. But what you definitely want here is a dark, wheaty-tasting long pasta to wrap around the clinging, deeply flavored sauce.

And here’s a little trip to Venice via photos and musica:

Whole Grain Spaghetti with Anchovies, Onions, and White Wine

(Serves 5 as a first course)

Extra-virgin olive oil
3 large sweet onions, such as Vidalia
10 salt packed anchovies, filleted, soaked in water to remove excess salt, and chopped
1 fresh bay leaf
Freshly ground black pepper
½ cup dry white wine
Salt
6 large sprigs of thyme, the leaves chopped
1 pound buckwheat or whole grain bigoli or spaghetti
A handful of flat-leaf parsley leaves, lightly chopped

In a large skillet, heat ⅓ cup of olive oil over medium flame. Add the onions, the anchovies, and the bay leaf. Let sauté until the onions start to soften, about 5 minutes. Add a bit of black pepper and the white wine, and let the wine reduce by half. Now pour in about ½ cup of warm water, cover the skillet, turn the heat down a bit, and simmer until the onions are very soft and the sauce looks somewhat creamy, about 30 minutes.

When the sauce is just about ready, set up a pot of pasta cooking water, add a generous amount of salt, and bring it to a boil. Drop in the spaghetti or bigoli.

Add the thyme to the sauce, and taste for seasoning, adding a little salt if needed.

When the spaghetti or bigoli is al dente, drain it and tip it into a large, warmed serving bowl. Add the sauce, a generous drizzle of fresh olive oil, a few more grindings of black pepper, and the parsley. Give it all a good toss. Serve hot.

The Italian Recipe Exchange

Recipe: Walnut and Roasted Garlic Pesto

Here’s a really delicious recipe I got from Cindy, my hair stylist extraordinaire (go see her at Crown Salon if you want to look gorgeous). In addition to being an expert colorist and hair revamper, she’s also an accomplished and dedicated cook. Routinely she brings little bites of unusual sweet things she’s made, such as chocolate squares flavored with chilies, for her clients to nibble on while they’re in her chair.

This is her interpretation of the walnut pesto served on crostini at Gottino, a wine bar in the West Village in Manhattan that we both like very much. I did a little review of the place when it first opened a couple of years back. The pesto at Gottino, as I recall it, was basically walnuts, a bit of garlic, olive oil, and Parmigiano. Cindy says they also throw in a few sun-dried tomatoes (not sure how I missed that). I make a very simple version, often using instead of the parmigiano a few anchovies. This is great for pasta and spread on crostini, as they do it at Gottino.

Since I concoct my own interpretations of restaurant dishes all the time, it’s always interesting to see how other people taste dishes and then make them their own, and that’s partly what I want these new postings to be about, self expression, whether it’s a restaurant recipe or an old Italian family dish you’ve reconfigured. I say, bring it on.

Cindy’s pesto is more elaborate then the one from Gottino. First off, she roasts the garlic, giving it a rich mellow undertone, and then adds lemon juice and zest for brightness. She goes on to round the whole thing out with fresh thyme and rosemary. It’s a lovely melding of flavors. Her suggestion to toss a little of it into a dish of pasta with spinach seemed right on to me, although I didn’t try it that way. The first night I spread it on crostini, and on night two I decided at the last minute to stir some into chicken sautéed with white wine and shallots. It was really  a lovely addition (and this stuff keeps for about four days, so you can have it ready for impromptu dishes like this one or for an easy appetizer to offer to unexpected drop-ins).

With this Italian recipe exchange, what I try to do is keep the recipe as much as possible in the style written by the cook. Some recipes need more help than others, and I’m happy to tinker or just plain out show someone how to do it. Cindy instinctively knew how to do it. All I did in her case was put the ingredients in the order of use. But even if you send me a “talk it through” style of recipe (the way the great British food writer Elizabeth David wrote many of hers), that’s fine with me.

I love the way Cindy ends the recipe saying, “Taste it, and add more cheese or tomatoes or lemon juice until you like it.” Very good advice and often overlooked.

Here is her note and recipe:

Hey Erica, is this how you do it? Ha!

I often stop into Gottino in the West Village for a lovely glass of Italian wine, and I much enjoy their walnut pesto . . . so I did a variation on my own at home. I enjoy it on a crostini, tossed with pasta and spinach, in an omelette, on pizza . . . let’s just say I ENJOY.

Walnut and Roasted Garlic Pesto

Extra-virgin olive oil
Sun-dried tomatoes (not oil cured), 5 – 8
Walnut halves, 1 – 1½ cups
Garlic, 1 bulb
Fresh lemon, 1
Fresh thyme, 2 – 3 sprigs
Fresh rosemary, 1 – 1½ teaspoon, chopped
Parmigiano Reggiano, 1 – 3 ounces
Coarse sea salt

Place the sun-dried tomatoes in a jar, and cover them with olive oil. Put the lid on. Let it sit out overnight to soften the tomatoes and flavor the oil.

Roast the garlic: I like to peel the cloves, put them on a piece of parchment paper, drizzle them with olive oil and salt, then wrap the parchment into an envelope, then wrap THAT in foil. Then bake at 350 for about 40 minutes, until they are soft.

Zest the lemon, and then squeeze all of the juice out. You’ll need both!

I’m not super perfect with measuring, so maybe Erica can recommend here . . . but I take about 1 to 1½ cups of walnut halves and put them in the food processor. Add 3 – 5 chopped sun-dried tomatoes, the zest of the lemon and about 1 tablespoon of lemon juice, 5 – 6 cloves of roasted garlic, 1 – 2 ounces of Parmigiano Reggiano, and the herbs. Pulse everything, then add the olive oil from the sun-dried tomatoes by mixing in with a fork. Taste it and add more cheese or tomatoes or lemon juice until you like it.

Chicken on a White Tablecloth, by Chaim Soutine (1924).

Recipe: Chicken  Braised with Red Wine, Shiitakes, and Juniper Berries

There comes a point each winter, usually in late winter, when I get sick of smelling canned tomatoes. I love them around Christmastime. and they continue to be a gift in the coming cold months, but after I’ve been trapped with them in my kitchen for too long, something about that tinny smell when I open the can, even with really good San Marzano plums, starts to remind me of cafeteria food. That’s when I turn to wine and broth for my sole braisings liquids.

Here’s a version of chicken alla cacciatore, without tomatoes (not so unusual even in Campania), flavored with rosemary (very typical of Campania), and made rich with pancetta, mushrooms, red wine, and home-made chicken stock. There are no sharp edges here. I resisted capers, lemon zest, olives, and other jolting ingredients from my usual Southern Italian bag of tricks. I went easy on the garlic, substituting a mellow, lightly caramelized soffrito of onion and carrot, a sweet touch, and adding juniper berries, a good partner for rosemary, both being piny-tasting elements..

I make this with chicken thighs only, the best part, juicy, tender, really hard to dry out unless you blast them with excessive high heat. I have removed the skin, though not for dietary reasons but simply because even after you brown the skin well, once you get on with the simmering in liquid, the skin will become flabby again and unappealing. So now I flour the skinless thighs, avoiding that problem.

Think making chicken stock is hard? Think again. Do you routinely or even occasionally pick up a preroasted chicken at a supermarket? Keep all the bones (best with snippets of meat and skin still attached), chopping up the carcass into large parts. Put this in a pot with a broken up carrot, a celery stalk if you’ve got one, a piece of an onion or leek, and a few parsley stems. Sauté all this in a little olive oil for a minute or so, then cover the chicken with water. Bring to a boil. Turn down the flame and let it simmer for an hour. Season with a little salt, if you like. Strain and freeze. Very handy. If your takeout chicken has an unpleasant dried herb flavor (many of them are covered with dried rosemary or a mix of stale old herbs), give any remaining skin areas a rinse before sautéing.

And for your viewing pleasure, “The Italian Chicken Dance”.

Chicken Braised with Red Wine, Shiitakes, and Juniper Berries

(Serves 4)

Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
8 chicken thighs, skinned
½ cup all-purpose flour
Extra-virgin olive oil
¼ pound chunk pancetta, cut into small cubes
1 small onion, cut into small dice
1 small carrot, peeled and cut into small dice
1 garlic clove, thinly sliced
3 juniper berries, crushed
4 allspice, ground to a powder
4 sprigs rosemary, the leaves chopped
1 glass dry red wine
1 glass good chicken broth
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
A large handful of shiitake mushrooms, stemmed, small ones left whole, bigger ones cut in half
A splash of grappa
A handful of flat-leaf parsley leaves, lightly chopped

Dry off the chicken thighs, and season them with salt and black pepper. Coat them lightly with flour.

In a large skillet, heat about 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Add the chicken, and brown it well on both sides. Take the chicken from the skillet.

Now add the pancetta, and let it crisp up. Add the onion and carrot, and sauté until they’re softened, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic, juniper berries, allspice, and rosemary, and sauté a minute to release their fragrances. Add the red wine, and let it reduce by half. Add the chicken broth, and bring to a boil.

Put the chicken back in the skillet, turn the heat down, and braise gently, partially covered, until the chicken is just tender, about 20 minutes.

In a small skillet, heat the butter over medium-high flame. Add the mushrooms, seasoning them with a little salt and pepper, and sauté until they’re soft and starting to give off a bit of liquid. Add the grappa, and let it burn off (careful of the flames there). Add the mushrooms, along with any skillet juices, to the chicken, and simmer a minute to blend the flavors. Skim the top of fat if necessary.

Pull the chicken from the skillet, and arrange it on a warmed serving platter. If the sauce seems loose, reduce it over high heat for a minute or so, or if you feel it’s cooked down too much, add a bit more chicken broth.  Check for seasoning,  pour the sauce on top, and scatter on the parsley.

This is really nice served with polenta.

The Dinner Table, by Joseph Keiffer.

The Italian Recipe Exchange

Recipe: Tagliatelle Ragù Bolognese

Here’s the first posting for my new project “The Italian Recipe Exchange,” where you get the chance to send me a recipe you love (please click here to learn how), to share with the world

This lovely recipe for a chicken-liver-based ragù was sent to me by Chris, a Facebook friend. I cooked it up last night, invited a few friends over, and had a wonderful Dolcetto- and pasta-filled evening.

The recipe was given to Chris by the chef at Arqua, a restaurant in Tribeca, now unfortunately closed, that we both knew very well. Chris used to live around the corner from it, and I announced my wedding engagement to my parents over a beautiful dinner there. That was in the late 1980s, when the place was hopping but never annoying trendy (though Madonna was there that night). It was an elegant place where you could actually have a conversation.

The ragù turned out quite grand. It’s an opulent dish, for one that cooks so fast (about 40 minutes, as opposed to several hours for most ragù sauces). The key to its success is good ingredients (when aren’t they the key?), so I made sure to purchase free-range chicken livers (no Purdue for this), make my own stock (a mix of chicken and beef), use a glass of the Dolcetto we were drinking as an accompaniment, and have a fine chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano. The recipe says to finish the dish with either lemon zest, something I can never resist, or Parmigiano. Well, I used both, and the flavor was excellent. I didn’t overdo it with the cheese, though. This sauce can stand on its own.

I hope everyone will have a go at this amazingly delicious but easy ragù, and leave comments, especially if you might have something like it in your own repertoire and want to discuss variations or your personal take on it.

The wine I chose to go with it was a Dolcetto D’Alba produced by De Forville. I picked it up from a tiny shop called MCF Rare Wine, Ltd., that just opened on my block. If you happen to live in the West Village or anywhere in downtown Manhattan, do yourself a favor and check it out. The owners only buy from small producers and the stock is always changing. You’ll find bottles there you don’t see anywhere else. Here’s their website: http://mcf-rarewine.com/.

And here’s the note and recipe I received from Chris:

Hi Erica!

This is my all-time favorite recipe for tagliatelle ragu Bolognese, specifically as it is completely unorthodox (according to most recipes, and according to the “official” one). If you make this, your guests will never, ever guess that the sauce is 100% chicken liver. I have served this happily to men, women, and tons of children of all stripe who would faint or worse if they ever knew, and no one, not one person, has ever guessed, asked, or questioned this delicious sauce! The recipe was given to me by the chef at Arqua when I lived around the corner on Hudson Street waaaay back in the day, but I have since seen it in print somewhere. Anyway, this recipe was the chef’s grandmother’s (he from a chicken farm in the region—hence the liver), and I like it because it is very old school. Artusi suggested that the sauce as made centuries ago would contain the “gifts of the chicken,” and this is as close as I’ll come to adding the wattle and etc. Anyway: Mangia bene!

Tagliatelle Ragù Bolognese

Serves 6

2 tablespoons butter
½ cup finely chopped onion
¼ pound pancetta, cut into a fine dice
1 pound chicken livers, trimmed
¾ pound fresh mushrooms
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 cup dry red wine
2 cups hot beef or veal stock
¾ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
⅛ teaspoon grated nutmeg
½ cup heavy cream
1 pound fresh tagliatelle
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese or 2 tablespoons grated lemon zest

In a large saucepan or flameproof casserole, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion and pancetta and cook 3 to 4 minutes, or until the pancetta is lightly browned and the onion is soft.

Add the chicken livers. Increase the heat to medium high, and cook, turning several times, 3 to 4 minutes, or until lightly brown but still pink in the center. Remove the livers with a slotted spoon, and reserve.

Add the mushrooms into the pan, and cook, stirring occasionally, 2 to 3 minutes to brown lightly. Using a slotted spoon, remove the mushrooms to a cutting board with the reserved livers. Chop the livers and mushrooms medium fine. Return them to the pan.

Add the tomato paste, wine, and stock.  Bring to a boil, reduce.

Turn the heat to low, cover, and cook 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Uncover and boil until the sauce is thick. Stir in salt, pepper, nutmeg, and cream. Simmer 2 minutes.

When the sauce is almost ready, cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until tender, 2 to 4 minutes; drain. Pour the pasta onto a warmed platter, and pour the sauce over top. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese or grated lemon zest.