Italy

I got Ada Boni's wonderful Italian Regional Cooking many years ago and it is still one of my favorite sources of inspiration. This Sardinian dish captured my imagination probably 15 years ago and I have wanted to make it ever since.

It took about 10 years to find the wine. There are oceans of Vernaccia di San Gimignano available, it's a fine dry white wine made from the Vernaccia grape in Tuscany, but the Sardinians have a different idea. The Vernaccia di Oristano is a fortified wine made like a sherry, aged in oak and chestnut barrels, and it's considerably more expensive. They are nothing alike and one cannot be substituted for the other.

I guess it became a quest, and now it has reached a happy conclusion! 

Farinata is a crispy thin bread of chickpea four and water, cooked in an oiled skillet at high temperature. It's gluten-free, so it's not like most breads, but it's too crispy to be called a pancake. It has a natural sweetness, but I still classify it as a savory dish. In Liguria and along the northern Tuscan coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea as far as Pisa it's a street food, but we're not so familiar for it to have "bred contempt", so with good technique and quality ingredients it can go nicely with any assortment of aperitivi.

By all accounts that I have seen, the best farinata has a thin crispy crust with a soft custardy center, the whole thing perfumed with fresh rosemary and black pepper.

The key thing to know about farinata is that the chickpea flour-water mixture must rest for about 5 hours before you bake it. There's no rising, it just takes that long for the chickpea flour to get fully hydrated and stay tender and digestible.

Here's how to do it:

This recipe is not difficult and the flavors are wonderful! This would be perfectly suitable for a dinner during the holiday season.

You marinate and then braise the pork in Marsala with seasonings, then late in the cooking you add chestnuts. When the pork is done you blend the cooking liquid and chestnuts to make a sauce. It always gets rave reviews. I set aside some of the cooked chestnuts while still whole to use as a garnish. I love chestnuts!

This is the most famous of the Italian recipes for oxtail. It's got incredible rich flavor from slow cooking the meat with tomatoes and vegetables, and then finishing it with pine nuts, golden raisins, and bitter chocolate!

If you have leftovers, they'll go great with rigatoni in the classic Roman way.

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.