Italy

In this classic Italian braised beef recipe, a Cappello del Prete (chuck blade) is cooked very "low and slow" for fall-apart tenderness with great flavor. 

As with most recipes, having the best equipment makes everything easier. For this one, I wanted to see just how "low-and-slow" I could go, keeping the pot at the lowest heat that would cook the meat. This is because I was cooking a Cappello del Prete, a tough cut from the shoulder with a great seam of connective tissue through the middle of it. Most American supermarkets do not carry this cut, but butchers can do it for you (I got mine from the butcher at Friends Market in Orleans, MA). 

Using this cut of meat, I needed the right tool, please see the Notes for more!

Unlike the similar (and costly) Beef Braised in Barolo which is cooked in only wine, this is cooked in 2/3 wine and 1/3 beef stock. This can be served over polenta like the Barolo beef, but it's also good with short pasta or crusty bread.

Maccheroni al Limone is a delicious light pasta dish for summer. A small serving makes a great appetizer because it wakes up your taste buds without filling you up.

This is also good with angel hair pasta and some filled pastas.

This beef braciole is a fundamental part of a traditional Neapolitan Sunday dinner, simmered slowly in a tomato puree that becomes the sauce for the ziti or rigatoni that always accompanies it. It's loaded with great flavor from long simmering of fine ingredients.

This is my favorite of the Four Classic Roman Pasta Dishes. It's essentially a Pasta Cacio e Pepe in which you first fry up a batch of chopped guanciale and stir the pasta into the bacon fat. Then you add the finely grated cheese like in the Cacio e Pepe to make the sauce. When you use top quality ingredients and good IGP pasta di Gragnano, it's simple and simply wonderful!

Rigatoni or other short, ribbed pasta is traditional for this dish. Shown here is Mezze Maniche from Pasta Somma in Gragnano.

This is one of the four classic Roman pasta dishes, along with Pasta Cacio e Pepe, Pasta alla Gricia, and Pasta alla Carbonara. This one has a light zesty tomato sauce enriched with guanciale (smoke pork jowl).

Here's a simple and very classic dish from Naples. There are very few ingredients, so quality is of top importance. I call here for top quality canned tomatoes: that's because the best brands have a reputation to maintain, the tomatoes are ripe when they are canned, so they are far better than "fresh" supermarket tomatoes in January in New England. Of course if you can get farm-fresh tomatoes in August and September, by all means use them! But the rest of the time you will probably be happier with canned tomatoes from an excellent producer. The onion, cheese, and basil must also be of good quality, and that's about all there is to this sauce.

Of course it's best served on high-quality pasta, too, which means for a Neapolitan recipes you want Pasta di Gragnano if you can get it.

This classic from the tiny region of Molise on the Adriatic coast is simple and delicious, but the quality of the ingredients is important. The sauce is just diced guanciale with onion, garlic, basil, and parsley.  You need good pancetta or guanciale, and fresh herbs work out better than dried herbs.

Unlike the fine folk of Molise, my usual diners are not so eager to scorch their tongues, so I left the chili pepper whole, and served it with a little homemade chili-infused olive oil. I got a little fire, not a raging bonfire. Feel free to chop your chili as you see fit! 

This version of spaghetti and meatballs comes from Abbruzzo but it is eaten all over Italy. Spaghetti alla Chitarra (say key-TAH-rra) is a long pasta that is traditionally made fresh, then rolled into sheets as thick as uncooked spaghetti and pressed onto a chitarra, a frame with many long closely-spaced parallel wires. The resulting spaghetti is square in cross section. The square chitarra pasta has more surface area than round spaghetti so it holds more sauce.

Spaghetti alla chitarra is served many ways, but one of the most traditional ways is with a simple tomato sauce and tiny meatballs called pallottine.

This is like Snails in the Burgundy Style (Escargot) from the other side of the Alps. The Piedmont is also a wine growing region, famous for well-known wines such as Barolo, Barbaresco, Barbera, Gavi, Moscato d'Asti, and more. All of those grape leaves have long produced a quantity of vineyard snails that the Italians prepare in their own way, also with a garlic-parsley-butter but enlivened into a pesto with walnuts and an anchovy.  

You can serve these fancy, in snail shells as shown here set in a deviled-egg plate, or without the shells in a snail dish (a simple plate with depressions to hold the snail butter and snails, or just in a serving dish just big enough to hold everything.

Cacio e Pepe (say KAHT-cho ay PEP-ay) is a traditional Roman dish of local pasta dressed with a wonderfully cheesy sauce that, like Fettucini Alfredo, has a creamy texture but no cream. The zip of the black pepper heightens the richness of the cheese and butter that, together with some starchy pasta water, form the sauce. 

The method here was developed by J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats, one of my favorite food blogs, with his trademark attention to optimizing a recipe to highlight the best parts of a dish.