My dream was about to become a reality. Based in Los Angeles, I was used to taunts from my otherwise wonderful East Coast friends, who were never shy about battering me with people in Southern California don’t know what REAL pizza is. Though I had eaten my way through New York, Boston and Philly in the past and had sampled their delicious pies – I would ask them countless times why it was a REAL pizza and others were not.
A crostata is an Italian baked tart or pie, also known as coppi in Naples and sfogliate in Lombardy. The earliest known use of crostata in its modern sense can be traced to the cookbooks Libro de Arte Coquinaria (Book of the Art of Cooking) by Martino da Como, (circa 1465).
I think I would be remiss if I did not tell our readers about an Italian restaurant my bride Elaine and I visited when we were in Cape Town, South Africa. The name of the restaurant is The Cousins Trattoria and it was actually started by three cousins – Luca, Simone and Andrea Biondi – who came from Italy and somehow ended up in Cape Town.
With the popularity of 'Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy' series we thought it would be fun to add a few recipes based on our own pre- Covid-19 gastronomic experiences in the Emilia-Romagna cities of Bologna and Parma.
My love for Italian food began, as Ed's grandmother had taught him what her mother had taught her and her mother before that .... you know how it goes in regional Italy. One of my favorite - and one of the simplest - dishes remains Nonna's pesto, which we often make with walnuts, but in the hills above Genoa where she lived, pinoli were used.
Enjoying our first dinner during a group tour of Sicily, I turned to our guide and told him that the meal was excellent. This being Sicily, the reply was not all that surprising. “You can steal my money but don’t touch my food,” Alessio remarked. He followed that remark by claiming: “If lunch or dinner doesn’t have at least five courses, it’s just a snack.”
Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce is a quintessential Italian dish known around the world, despite taking many twists and turns on its voyage. Last month I had the unique opportunity to be an observer at a cooking demonstration conducted by Maestro Ivan Bombieri, Chef at Risotrante La Taverna, just outside of Udine, in Friuli Venezia Giulia region. Mr. Bombieri is a soft-spoken, charismatic man of no pretension who like his cooking to speak for itself.
Like many North Americans I grew-up eating lasagna. I recalled how my grandmother, who hailed from Genoa, would explain that lasagna was the name of a pasta, not a dish. Her style of preparing lasagna was to boil the pasta, then layer it with a Tucco sauce (dialect) and Parmigiano–Reggiano cheese, with no baking in the oven.