This feisty pasta dish is named for the fiery protagonist of Cavalleria Rusticana, an opera by Pietro Mascagni (who scored this timeless hit in a competition as a young man, and then never had another hit).
Like his brilliant little opera, this dish served a place in your permanent repertoire! Bravo!
This punchy little lunch dish goes great with some crusty bread!
The Fonduta Valdostana is the Italian form of the French/Swiss Fondue, popular in the Valle d'Aosta on the southern slopes of the French Alps. The key differences are:
The recipe isn't difficult, but you must plan ahead both for the soaking step at the beginning, and then to be sure that it is hot and ready to serve at the right time for your diners.
As for the fontina cheese, there are three broad classes of it. The red-coated Danish variety is not suitable for this dish; it has an insipid flavor and an objectionable consistency. The brown-wrapped mass-produced Italian variety and the related Fontal are acceptable and surely used in many households. For a special event (and certainly I you have the white truffle!) you want to get the artisanal Fontina Val d'Aosta from a good cheese market or Italian gourmet shop.
On 5 December 2021, our friends Dave and Lisa joined us for a grand discovery feast exploring the cuisine of Italy's far northwestern corner. To make it extra-special, they generously sprang for two fresh white truffles from Alba, which are in season in early winter, local to the Piedmont region, and terribly expensive!
Piemonte and Valle d'Aosta are the foothills to the Alps, and they border France to the west and Switzerland to the north. Valle d'Aosta is all mountainous and heavily influenced by Swiss and French Alpine cuisine; Piemonte is the piedmont region that slopes from the mountains down to Liguria and the coast west of Genoa, known for its excellent wines and expensive white truffles. Both feature mushrooms, cheese, polenta, chestnuts, freshwater fish, and other ingredients used in making this feast. This grand Italian feast included no pasta and no tomatoes!
I first enjoyed herb-stuffed Roman artichokes in Rome, where they were naturally well-prepared. It was a delicious dish that I vowed to reproduce one day, not knowing that there's a lot to learn about preparing artichokes.
The basic principle is easy enough: you trim the tough outer leaves and the tips, scoop out the fibrous choke, stuff with parsley and mint, and cook. Well, trimming and scooping takes some time if you're not a long-experienced Roman sous-chef!
This is a wonderful and comparatively simple dessert from the mountains of northern Italy, but it requires a food mill to get the proper texture and look. I made this one for a feast that focused specifically on Italy's Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta regions. The city of Val d'Aosta and the region are at the foot of that famous Alpine mountain on the border between Italy and Switzerland. It is traditionally topped with whipped cream to resemble the snow-capped mountain. In the photo it is surrounded by Marrons Glace and foil-wrapped gianduia (chocolate hazelnut candies) from Torino.
Some recipes put this on a base of Swiss Broyage, which is nice but it adds over an hour of cooking time to whip and dry the meringue.
To get the rugged traditional appearance, sweetened chestnut paste is passed through a potato ricer, forming long threads of paste. You might be able to reproduce that look by forcing it through a colander, but I've never tried that.
You can make quite a pretty salad if you have access to good mushrooms, which is getting easier in New England now that several farms have started in Maine. This one includes Chestnut Mushrooms, Lion's Mane, Blue Oyster, and Button Mushrooms, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice with sea salt, fresh basil, and parsley.
This is a simple, tasty dish that you can make whenever there are cauliflowers in the supermarket. The main flavors are cauliflower, tomato, and oregano. It's good enough as a standalone vegetarian dish or as an accompaniment to anything with an Italian flair.
I have also seen this prepared with the cauliflower sliced into steaks, with the sauce and cheese on top of each steak.
On September 5, '21, we celebrated the cuisine of central Italy with our friends and summertime neighbors Lance and Lynda Hylander. For this project, one of three recorded on this blog, I defined "Central Italy" as the six regions north of Campania/Apulia and south of Emilia-Romagna and the Po River valley, to wit: Tuscany, Umbria, Marche, Abbruzzo, Molise, and Lazio (Lazio is where Rome is).
As usual for these dinners, we started out with Vermouth in cordial glasses and an Antipasto course of a fine salumi platter that represented all of the regions featured in the dinner.
The Insalata course was a hearty Insalata di Lenticchie, or lentil salad, with delicious tender lentils from Umbria, an area known for its lentils. This also showed that not all Italian cuisine demands tomatoes! With the salad we opened a couple of local white wines, a Trebbiano d’Abbruzzo (from Abruzzo) and a nice Frascati (from Lazio).
These clove-studded Cipolle di Napoli made a great side dish for the Pork Roast in the Florentine Style. I expect they'd be good with any pork or poultry dish that's not too highly seasoned.
A funny thing happened: as the onions cooked and the water inside them expanded, the innermost part of the onions got squeezed out! You can see them in the photo, above the front left-hand onion like bunny ears and to the right of the front onion like a jaunty beret! The next time I make this, I will try cutting an X in the top of each onion to see if that helps.
