Twenty years ago when I left for Italy to study a year at the University of Bologna, my mother snuck a copy of Marcella Hazan’s “The Classic Italian Cookbook” into my suitcase. While it would seem strange to give a kid flying off to Italy a cookbook in English, it was a lifesaver.

I have found cookbooks that are just as fun to read, and others that are pleasure to browse through, gawking at enticing images of food and Italy. The book, the size of a thick paperback crime novel, was a perfect guidebook for a young american college student as he plunged into a year in city of tortellini and lasagna. She had (and has) a way of translating recipes and cooking philosophy that made them accessible to American supermarkets and minds. So even though her instructions for Spaghetti alla Carbonara call for pancetta or, if that is not accessible, bacon, whereas purists central Italy say only guanciale will do, if you have her books as a guide, you will eat well, which is what really counts in the end.

It is better with guanciale, an unsmoked version of pancetta made from pork jowls (guancia means cheeks in Italian), but even in Abruzzo and bordering regions where it is common it is not easy to find and keep on hand.

She helped me understand that Italian cooking does not have to be complicated. Recipe Zaar publishes her instructions for “the simplest tomato sauce ever” (www.recipezaar.com). The ingredients are canned tomatoes, butter (yes, sometimes butter is better than olive oil in Italian food) and a medium sized yellow onion, cooked slowly for about 45 minutes (the onion is thrown out at the end).

In the end the key is attention to detail, and thinking about what you are doing, that matter most. In the US it was groundbreaking decades ago to build your meals around the vegetables that were in season nearest to you. But when you think about it, it just makes good sense. The huge varieties of foods and dishes and creative variations that make Italy the place the world wants to visit for its food. And in Italy, food is built from the ground up.

(For those of you reading this on Facebook, it was first published on carbonara.wordpress.com)

There’s a colleague I’ve been meaning to call for a while. Diego’s agency developed the visual image and promotional materials for Vinalia, a small wine bar and restaurant that was just near Palazzo Margherita in the heart of l’Aquila. I had a lot of favorite places to eat and drink in L’Aquila, and Vinalia was where I went when I wanted something intimate, elegant and refined (and was in the mood to pay for it). Marzia Buzzanica, Vinalia’s mind, heart and soul was somehow able to transmit her rich knowledge of wine and her attention to detail, but also make you feel at ease and somehow in control. Of course she was playing with a stacked deck. It was all good. And the nights where dinners were combined with wine tastings guided by representatives of some of most renown winemakers in Italy and France became relaxed sumptuous dinner parties among friends.
I still have one of the last messages she sent out to Vinalia’s followers:

“All the bottles in the wine cellar are now on sale. Please look at the website. If you are interested please write me with what you want and where to send it now.
Please pass this on.
A big Hug”

When I started this blog, I started out with a brief piece on Vinalia, finishing with a promise to write again about what Marzia and her people were able to do. Now I have to work from blurry memory.
When I lived in Venice as a student twenty years ago I first began to feel that cities were far more than the sum of their streets and buildings and the people animating them. What counted was how you would interact with the people and places there – and your relationship with the city itself.
It’s not a question of not being able to go for wine in Vinalia or Il Bar Garibaldi or Fenice or Ju Boss, or go for an espresso at Caffé Polar or the Frattelli Nurzia. Or no longer being able to have a last minute neapolitan pizza at Bella Napoli for Friday lunch with my girls, or sneak a slice at one of a dozen different places around town, or even just reading the shared newspaper at the bar in Piazza San Pietro in front of Silvia’s university office.
The people behind what made these and other places so enjoyable are still alive and that’s what counts most. Many have already reopened bars and eateries elsewhere in town. When something this big and bad happens you discover that rebuilding your life comes naturally.
But what what was part of my life and thousands of others is gone. Thirty seconds was all it took to transform one of Italy’s lesser known but more beautiful historic centers, a place where tens of thousands of people would live, work, shop, study or just hang out with friends, into a vast, mostly inactive, construction site.
But I think my youngest daughter Emily was more eloquent. At the beginning of this Summer when she was saying goodbye to her cousin who had come to visit us at the hotel that housed and cared for us in Montesilvano. “Your are so lucky that you can go back to your everyday and habits”

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Discovering Cioccolata di Modica

When I think of great chocolate, its usually creamy. If it’s grainy with traces of lighter, dusty overtones, it usually means it’s gone stale. But not always. The chocolate they have been making in the Sicilian town of Modica is the exception that proves this rule.

I first learned about cioccolato di Modica recently when Pierluigi and I were exploring the Testaccio neighborhood of Rome, scouring th streets and piazze looking for for-sale signs. Testaccio is the neighborhood just over the river from Trastevere. It was my first time to this small neighborhood, and the night was a great one for exploring, cool and calm. Pierluigi had bough a 200 gram bar while leaving a pub in Piazza Testaccio. “Be careful, it’s not what you would expect.” he said.

The thick squares were hard to snap off and the first bite didn’t thrill me – hard, grainy. But since we were were exploring, I drove on. I held the second bite in my mouth as I jotted down the phone number of a sign for a two bedroom flat in via Vespucci the sugar crystals started to melt and mix with the cocoa. I noticed a trace of Vanilla (the package later confirmed this). It was not a chocolate to rush through.

Cioccolato di Modica has been made this way for centuries, following family recipes that are today used by the twenty producers still active in the city. Raw cocoa is amalgamated below melting (under 40 °C) with cane sugar and aromas – traditionally vanilla and cinnamon but today other spices, hot pepper, and even lemon and orange peels are common. No cocoa butter is added beyond what is in the cocoa itself, which reach anywhere from 65% of the bar on up. It can be eaten straight or melted and sipped warm.

The night after the Testaccio expedition I was at a dinner party near Piazza Navona, the guest were starting to trickle out and the hostess offered coffee. A young italian screenwriter I had just met and I were the only takers. She served us espresso in wide white cups with a square of Modica chocolate on the dish to the side. This time the aroma entwined between the grains of sugar was cinnamon and the way they blended with the cocoa and the espresso’s bitter afterglow are still with me.

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I also write about nonfood experiences at:
http://expatinitalia.blogspot.com/

I just adore cicerchia. Pronounced “chee-cher-ki-ya” (more or less), it is one of those ancient foods have almost disappeared from the tables of the world.
In English they are known as red peas or flatpod peavines (and many other strange names) but I had never heard of them before I first savored them years ago a the Sagra della Cicerchia in Castelvecchio Calvisio near Santo Stefano on top of the Gran Sasso. They are almost wild (according to some websites they are wild) and grow well in places with difficult climates and poor soils throughout the Mediterranean and the middle east. Small yields and unbelievably long cooking times (and food poisoning if you don’t drain the water away enough), they were mainly an emergency crop in isolated areas, to eat when other crops fail. Or so it seems.
They are related to chick peas, and look as though a chick pea was squished into an uneven cube. But it’s the flavor – a cross between italian chick peas and upper Wisconsin wild rice – that makes a simple plate of cicierchia and sagne pasta (with tomato sauce and olive oil) make you feel rugged and warm.

The Sagra di Castelvecchio was always one of my favorites. But not just for the food; it was held in the narrow medieval streets of this tiny old town perched up on a promontory below the Castle in Calascio. The earthquake last April put an end to it, for now. This year they teamed up with other towns and cicerchia were on hand at nearby Santo Stefano da Sessanio.
To this year they were even tastier.
Great with arrosticini.

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September is ending and the hustle of work and school has once again taken over our lives. In the mountains of Abruzzo weekends can go from warm and sunny on Saturday morning to rainy and chilly on Saturday evening (enough to get a fire blazing in the fireplace) to short-sleeve sunny again on Sunday. Perfect days to sneak in the last few grill-outs of the season.

Which brings me once again to arrosticini.

Arrosticini are to Italian picnic and sagre (small town fairs) like hot-dogs are to the the Fourth of July picnics and county fairs back in the United States. They are tiny shish-kebabs, little chunks of mutton on tiny wooden skewers. The are gilled over coal and are so common in Abruzzo that many families have two outdoor grills, one for most other meets, cheeses and vegetables, another for arrosticini. These grills are long and skinny so that they little sticks rest on the sides and the cook can turn them over with his bare fingers. The fine cut of the mutton and the heat of the coals make otherwise chewy meat tender and and almost primitively delicious.

You have to eat them right off the gril, before they cool and lose their tenderness and flavor. Usually whole plates are places in the middle of the table and people reach and grab a few sticks.

I usually avoid them at sagre, because the lines are too long and chaotic (but this only confirms how popular they are). In our garden in Navelli they are much more fun too cook, shooting the breeze with friends, drinking a bottle of Peroni beer or a glass of local wine. Kids first, then the rest of us. In Abruzzo, as in most of Italy, when it’s dinner with family and friends, there is always more than enough to drink.

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Vacation is over, a wonderful week along the beach and the dunes of Sabaudia, on sea south of Rome. It’s easier to not think about L’Aquila when you head is underwater. Beautiful place and normally the day after a trip away I would be daydreaming about the fish nibbling at my feet, but this morning what I’m really thinking about is dessert last Friday night in the nearby costal town of Terracina. A seafood dinner, mainly raw or marinated shellfish and crustaceans. (Not something I’m crazy about). But what really stood out was one of the desserts at the end: a chocolate and pear tart.

I don’t know the official name – there were twenty of us at our table and confusion reigned that night. And a warm chocolate and pear tart is not what you would expect to find at a dinner based primarily around crudités and other cold dishes on a sweltering end of summer night. But it didn’t matter. The dessert was a toasted bag-like shell a cross between a fried won-ton and baked filo dough filled with diced pieces of pear simmering in warm dark chocolate.

Maybe the contrast is intended, but I was smiling and forgetting that I really don’t love more than three oysters on the half shell…..

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Before moving to Italy I didn’t even know you could eat fresh figs. Not that I had given it much thought. When I was growing up, figs in Wisconsin were mainly an ingredient in Fig Newton cookies. At Christmas dried figs would show up and were avoided with the dried prunes and dates. But I had never seen them fresh.

My first contact with fresh figs was when I was going through my master’s degree in business communications at the Università di Venezia. I was one of the tallest in my class and few of my classmates asked me to pick them a few out of reach figs from the tree giving shade to the entrance to our classroom. I looked above me and plucked a few of the little green, soft bulbs above my head. They were so ripe that some were showing purple shading similar to overripe chives. After picking a few for those around me I tore one open for myself and bit in. The seeds and the syrupy sweet fruit inside was a shock, but not enough to stop me from picking them.
When I moved to Italy almost twenty years ago prosciutto e melone, slices of cold fresh cantaloupe and dried Parma ham, was becoming well known among people who loved Italy and Italian food in the US. The other variation on the theme is prosciutto e fichi, , fresh figs laying over a bed of prosciutto.

The only problem is finding fresh figs. Silvia’s cousin Biancamaria arrived last night with a wooden case of them the lush hills around Chieti. I’m looking forward to biting into them again this evening.

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One of the evergreen treats I have had the joy of sneaking into my mouth or serving to guests are my mother-in-law’s caramelized almonds.
Mandorle caramelate are basically sugared almonds, but don’t let the simplicity of the idea – or the recipe – fool you. They are one of the real tests of who has Italian cooking in their veins the rest of us, including me.
Or, as my cousin would say every time he would accidently sink an impossible put in miniature golf on the Jersey shore, “It’s all in the wrist”.
Mandorle caramelate are are a close cousin to croccante and torrone but the main difference is that they do not form sheets of caramelized sugar and nuts that are then cut into bars before they cool too much. Sugar is melted until it becomes a dark, sweet-smelling liquid. Slightly roasted almonds are then added. The skins are kept to help give them their slightly auburn coloring of the finished treat.

They are left to simmer until the sugar begins to crystalized, then, when she senses it’s the right moment she starts stirring them and, when she knows it’s time, pours them over a cool, usually marble, surface so that they spread out and don’t stick together as they cool.
They are served them to guests at Christmas as well as Ferragosto, or anytime that it good to host friends, relatives or anyone who gets invited over.

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It is Monday and the Saffron and Chick Pea feast is over. But just for this year. The Earthquake and the threat of rain (just a few drops) kept a few people away, but throngs of people came for the Palio degli Asini (a donkey race created as a send-up of the famous Palio di Siena horse race in that beautiful Tuscan hill-town), and, of course, for the saffron and chick pea based dishes.
This year I stuck to the saffron-based foods, having had a summer full of chick pea based dishes at my mother-in-law’s. The saffron supplì, fried balls of saffron rice, were tasty. The risotto alla milanese (rice dish made by cooking in broth and saffron) was a bit paler and more liquid than previous years.
But despite being cooked in a festival camp the Penne allo Zafferano was amazing. Once again the true Italian cooking secrets of simplicity and access to amazing ingredients won out against the adversity of mass-production. Pennette, short straight pasta similar to maccheroni were covered with a blend of fresh local ricotta cheese and saffron and simmered pancetta (similar to bacon, salt-cured but not smoked).
Great food.
On a side note, my niece daughter was in the Palio degli Asini, the donkey race that rivals the saffron as an attraction. Six teams, each with a donkey, a rider and a page (each one a boy-girl team) raced four times around a track traced out more by the crowds of laughing spectators than the plastic tape. Her donkey broke away from the pack in the last lap, only to stop a yard before the finish line and not budge. Then another did the same, stopping next to theirs, then a third, this time wandering over the finish line.

My niece’s ass came in second. And wee all won. Especially those of us who had the penne allo zafferano.

Mark your calendar for the first full weekend after the Ferragosto holiday (August 15th). See you there.

The first weekend I came to L’Aquila, in 1994, I discovered two places that have been making my mouth water ever since. Ju Boss, the city’s oldest wine bar, and the slightly spicy hot pizzette, or mini-pizzas from Pane e Lavoro.
Ju Boss is still off limits in the “red zone” that was the city I loved so much, and it’s fans have to wait, destroying their livers elsewhere. But Pane e Lavoro, in the Torrione neighborhood, is open again.
I never have asked them the details about their bakery or their pizzette, I just buy them and, more importantly, I eat them with conviction. It’s not the city’s most renown bakery, but I’ve never heard any ill spoken of it either.
The come in two sizes: round pizzette that could cover your outstretched hand to the fingertips, and smaller round pizzette that would rest in the palm of your hands. Just pizza dough and a generous dash of chunky tomato sauce. Especially the chunky kind.
Torrione is the neighborhood Silvia was born in. It’s name comes from the “tower” that is actually the last remaining leg of the Roman aqueduct that carried water from sources on the Gran Sasso, the Apennine’s tallest mountain, to the baths and fountains of Amiternum. (The ruins of Amiternum are visitable near near one of the largest post-earthquake housing projects the government is building for the thousands of us still homeless. But more on that another time.) The tower today is half what it was at Christmas, its ancient bricks littered around like shavings from a hyperactive child’s crayon.
The Torrione neighborhood was built following World War II and is today a gateway to the old city. It was full of shops as well as apartments and schools. Very few people have been able to moved back but like grass after a forest fire, shops are sprouting again.
The Pane e Lavoro bakery is one of them. As is a branch of the Pane di Prata bakery. And Il Buongustaio, one of the best little butcher and specialty food stores in town is making the best of things. They are now an affordable but for unbeatable quality take away and have set up a few picnic tables under a tent outside.
“Pane e lavoro” means bread and work. What can be a more fitting starting point for the reconstruction of L’Aquila than the bakery and what’s still standing after 2000 years of Roman bricks and mortar.
I

Joshua
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