Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

Flavors of Friuli

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Elisabeth Antoine Crawford traveled throughout Friuli for five years to research her new book.

Elisabeth Antoine Crawford presents an enticing journey through an Italian region that’s not well known by American travelers.

I’ve longed to travel through the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. But the closest I’ve come is wandering through the seductive Flavors of Friuli: A Culinary Journey through Northeastern Italy by Elisabeth Antoine Crawford.

For that day when I do travel to the region, I hope Crawford will have created an app. Otherwise, I’ll be forced to lug her three-pound, 368-page tome with me. It’s an exhaustively researched guide to the mountains, meadows, vineyards, and coasts, all with their own distinctive foods, wines, architecture, museums, attractions, and festivals.

Most Italian regions don’t border anything other than other Italian regions or the sea but not Friuli Venezia-Giulia. It juts north and east of the peninsula. It’s bordered by the Veneto to the west, Austria to the north, The Republic of Slovenia to the east, and the Adriatic Sea to the south. Romans, Venetians, Austro-Hungarians, and Slavs have all ruled this territory over the centuries. Parts of the region weren’t incorporated into the Republic of Italy until after World War I and the cosmopolitan city of Trieste not until 1954.

Middle European influences abound in dishes such as sauerkraut, buckwheat pasta, liptauer, goulasch, and torta Dobos. Yet, the region also produces foods that are recognized around the world as quintessentially Italian: prosciutto di San Daniele, Montasio cheese, and Illy caffè.

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Abruzzo Green Tomato Pasta

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Chopped green tomatoes are seasoned with parsley, hot pepper flakes, garlic, celery, and olive oil in this unusual pasta sauce.

Chopped green tomatoes are seasoned with parsley, hot pepper flakes, garlic, celery, and olive oil in this unusual pasta sauce.

Since I wrote about Miriam Rubin’s delightful cookbook Tomatoes back in May, I’ve been intending to try her recipe for Green Tomato Pasta Sauce from the region of Abruzzo. I was intrigued because I’d never eaten anything like it or even seen a recipe for an unripe tomato sauce.

I panicked recently when the weather forecast predicted an overnight frost. I hadn’t tried the green tomato dish and time was running out. Unlike Rubin, who is a dedicated home vegetable grower and pens the “Miriam’s Garden” column for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, I do not have a patch from which to pluck tomatoes. A generous gardening friend donated some green fruit to enable the test.

onthevineThe sauce is easy to prepare. It’s a lively blending of tart fruit, hot pepper, rich olive oil, and plenty of garlic. I believe it would be a good recipe to use in the winter months with pale, firm supermarket tomatoes. I’m going to give that a try, too.

I’m curious if any SimpleItaly readers have relatives or friends who live in, or are from, Abruzzo who prepare a similar sauce. Please share a Comment if you do.

 

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Southern Italian Desserts

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Crostata al Gelo di Mellone (watermelon pudding tart) from Sicily graces the book's cover.

Crostata al Gelo di Mellone (watermelon pudding tart) from Sicily graces the cover.

I don’t know why Rosetta Costantino’s family emigrated from the small southern Italian hill town of Verbicaro to the San Francisco Bay Area when she was 14. But I am grateful they did.

Had Costantino remained in her native Calabria, I doubt I would be salivating over her new book Southern Italian Desserts. Written with Jennie Schacht, it is a meticulously researched cultural accounting. The book includes 76 recipes for traditional sweets from the regions of Calabria, Campania, Basilicata, Puglia, and Sicily. Some of the pastries, such as Cannoli, are familiar to English-speaking bakers but many, such as Biscotti di Ceglie (almond cookies filled with cherry preserves), are revelations.

With photography by Sara Remington and Ten Speed Press’s signature high-quality production values, the volume is as visually appealing as its recipes are alluring.(Ten Speed also published Costantino’s first book My Calabria.)

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Marcella Hazan

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I never met Marcella Hazan but we spent many an hour together in my kitchen.

Hazan, 89, died Sunday at her home in Longboat Key, Fla. Her beloved husband, Victor Hazan, was with her.

Authenticity and simplicity were the foundations of Marcella Hazan's cookbooks.

Authenticity and simplicity were the foundations of Marcella Hazan’s cookbooks.

The title of her 2008 memoir Amarcord (“I remember” in the dialect of her native Romagna) sums up her career: Marcella Remembers: The Remarkable Life Story of the Woman Who Started Out Teaching Science in a Small Town in Italy, but Ended up Teaching America How to Cook Italian. And teach she did with her first volume The Classic Italian Cookbook and six subsequent titles.

She received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the James Beard Foundation in 2000 and the International Association of Culinary Professionals in 2004, as well as an Italian knighthood. Victor was her inspiration, lifelong collaborator, and writing partner (she wrote in Italian and he translated), himself an authority on Italian food and wine.

Love was at the heart of all she did. When she met Victor, an American who had been born in Italy and lived there as a child, he had returned to Italy to write and to eat. She was a scientist with no interest in food or cooking.

As she told Linda Wertheimer in this 2010 NPR interview, “He was always talking about food. For me, a young woman, you think that someone who courts you would talk about other things, not food. Especially when you’re not interested in food.”

We all thank Victor for his ardor and persistence. Marcella and Victor’s son, Giuliano Hazan, is stirring the pot for the next generation.

Do you have memories of Marcella, her cookbooks, or classes?

The Tuscan Bug

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By Walter Sanders

Sam Hilt and his wife, Pamela Mercer, left Sonoma County to live and work near Siena.

Sam Hilt and his wife, Pamela Mercer, moved from Sonoma County to live and work near Siena.

So what’s a nice Jewish boy from Newark doing in a hospital in Siena, Italy?

Two things: Sam Hilt is recovering from successful heart surgery. Second, he’s using the recuperation time to colorfully describe the effects of an even more life-altering condition—the Tuscan Bug.

Many susceptible people contract the Tuscan Bug when they visit the Renaissance region. Hilt caught a particularly virulent strain during an unplanned jaunt to Italy when he was an undergrad  at Brandeis University.

After returning to the U.S. and earning his degree, Hilt spent nine years in graduate studies gaining a masters in comparative literature, a masters in psychology, and a doctorate in Renaissance studies.

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The Book on Tomatoes

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Love of tomatoes knows no borders.

The love of tomatoes knows no borders.

The south of Italy and the American south are kissing cousins when it comes to their love of tomatoes.

But, as chef and author Miriam Rubin relates in her new cookbook Tomatoes (University of North Carolina Press), the fruit once feared as inedible is native to neither the mezzorgiorno nor the American southland.

“[Tomatoes] come from South America. They were adopted by the Mayans and Aztecs, and then by the Spanish conquerors, who took them to Spain. From there, they spread to Italy and the Mediterranean. Then, through explorers, settlers, and in the pockets of immigrants, they came to the southern United States,” says Rubin, whose food and gardening column “Miriam’s Garden” appears in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“The South is where they were first grown, prepared, and accepted, before their spread northward. And after it was decided that they were not poisonous.”

With her charming and informative prose, plus fifty vibrant recipes, Rubin paints a passionate portrait of the tomato. She offers a bushel basketful of tips and techniques for storing, preserving, and just plain savoring many varieties, including heirlooms such as Brandywine and Cherokee Purple. She even offers exciting options for canned and supermarket hot-house tomatoes.

Author Miriam Rubin cultivates tomatoes in the garden outside she and her husband's 200-year-old log cabin home in Greene County, Pa.

Author Miriam Rubin cultivates tomatoes in her Greene County, Pa. garden.

That said, it’s clear that her hope is to inspire home cooks to cultivate their own tomatoes to enjoy these summer fruits in all their glorious variety. “Nothing tastes better than a sun-warmed tomato plucked right off the vine,” she says. “If you grow your own tomatoes, you’re in control. Well, sort of. You also have to deal with the weather.”

She points out that tomatoes are not all alike. “I like to indicate to readers which tomato I think would work best, and let them know my concept behind the recipe,” Rubin says. “Basically the rules—meant to be broken—are that when you need body and thickness, as for tomato sauce, use mostly or all paste-type tomatoes, which have pulpier walls and less juice. Choose Romas (aka plum tomatoes), Amish Paste, Black Plum, and San Marzano tomatoes.”

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