Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

A DiBruno’s Picnic

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Cured meats, cheese, rustic bread, and assorted antipasti make a pranzo perfetto.

Cured meats, cheese, rustic bread, and assorted antipasti make a pranzo perfetto.

I’ve made a drool of myself at many an Italian food forum. . .Peck in Milan, Volpetti in Rome, F.lli Burgio in Siracusa and now DiBruno Bros. in Philadelphia. Founded in 1939 by siblings Danny and Joe DiBruno in South Philly’s Italian Market, the emporium now has a location in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, mere minutes from a borrowed apartment where Walter and I enjoyed a weekend get-away.

Our intention of picking up a few hard-to-find pantry staples such as salted anchovies and D.O.P. canned San Marzano tomatoes, quickly morphed into “how many of these exquisite goodies can we buy for an impromptu picnic?”

Here’s what we managed: Seafood salad, artichokes alla romana, mozzarella bocconcini, peppadews stuffed with gorgonzola, red peppers stuffed with ricotta, stuffed grape leaves, olive roll, ciabatta roll, winter salami, runny-pungent taleggio cheese and shaved culatello that melted on our tongues. Walter, the king of the panino, actually extricated the culatello from his sandwich to savor each slice on its own.

Culatello is not a salume you see in every deli case. Restaurateur Tony May in his Italian Cuisine: Basic Cooking Techniques describes it as “one of the most prized and expensive cured meats” and a “very particular type of salume, produced in a small area around Parma. . . the most singular aspect of culatello is that it has the same characteristics of prosciutto but is aged into a casing” . . . with a taste “much sweeter and smoother” than prosciutto.

The DiBruno culatello is produced by Armandino Batali (Mario’s dad) at Salumi Artisan Cured Meats in Seattle. And, yes, it is pricey but at $8 for our picnic portion for two, it was money very, very well spent.

DiBruno's encourages an appetite for learning.

DiBruno Bros. foster an appetite for learning.

Next time you’re in the City of Brotherly Love, you may want to indulge in a DiBruno’s picnic.

DiBruno Bros. – Rittenhouse Square
1730 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19013
215.665.9220

For an online taste, visit www.dibruno.com

Bravo, Gourmet

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Sure, times are tough and the weather’s downright cruel. But, when I wrapped myself in the January 2009 issue of Gourmet magazine, celebrating “all things Italian-American,” I felt as warm as the summer sand on a Sicilian beach.

From the greats of Ital-Creole cooking (leaving me seriously craving broiled oysters with pancetta at Irene’s Cuisine) to Gourmet editor Gina Marie Miraglia Eriquez’s Calabrian heritage recipes (such as Marinated Eggplant, Polpette , and Sweet Ricotta Pastries), to an ambitious recipe for making fresh mozzarella at home, Italian American cooking is receiving the respect it deserves.

As editor in chief Ruth Reichl observes, “Italian-American food is not pseudo-Italian, and it is neither the food of the north nor the food of the south. It is the food of the Italian diaspora, an authentic cuisine that has been joyfully embraced throughout the United States.”

To learn more about the Italian-American issue, visit your newsstand, library or www.gourmet.com

The Minestrone Cure

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minestrone

The remedy for holiday indulgence is simmering in the soup pot.

After half a month (heck, who are we kidding? — it’s more like six weeks) of feasting like a Medici pretending that calories don’t count and that rules don’t apply, we all need a cure.

For me, the solace comes in a steaming bowlful of minestrone, a veritable thicket of winter vegetables. Just preparing minestrone makes me feel healthier, cleaner, lighter. To the uninitiated, minestrone may be just Italian vegetable soup but it is so much more than that.

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Top Ten Movies to Inspire Italian Wannabes

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Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck explore the Eternal City on a Vespa in Roman Holiday.

Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck explore the Eternal City on a Vespa in "Roman Holiday."

Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck explore the Eternal City on a Vespa in “Roman Holiday.”

Whether La Befana, the Christmas witch, or good old Santa Claus is doing the shopping, wannabe Italians will swoon for any of these DVDs in their stocking. Our Top Ten “Discover Your Inner Italian” movies, in chronological order, are . . .

Roman Holiday (1953) Beguiling postwar Rome is the real star of William Wyler’s bittersweet masterpiece, although ingénue Audrey, in top gamine form, gives the Eternal City a run for star billing. She did receive the Oscar, after all.

Three Coins in a Fountain (1954) Three single American women in Rome: Each throws a coin into the Trevi to wish for the man of her dreams. As Sinatra crooned, “Which one will the fountain bless?”
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