Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

Chicken Breasts Marsala

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Simmer Marsala wine with skillet juices from sauteed chicken to create an unctuous sauce. reduce

Simmer Marsala wine with skillet juices from sautéed chicken to create an unctuous sauce.

Marsala is a Sicilian wine that achieved international fame when it was discovered by British sea merchant John Woodhouse in the late 18th Century. It has become a pantry staple in Italian home and restaurant kitchens. Because it’s fortified with a bit of distilled alcohol, the wine won’t spoil after opening.

Dry, sweet, and aged (vergine) Marsala wines are produced in the area around the port of Marsala in western Sicily. For savory dishes like these chicken breasts with rich cheese and slightly salty prosciutto, choose the dry version. 

Chicken Breasts Marsala
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Recipe type: Main course
Cuisine: Italian
Serves: 4 to 6
Ingredients
  • 2½ to 3 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breast halves
  • Salt
Ground nutmeg
  • ½ cup flour
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 6 to 8 thin slices (4 to 5 ounces) cooked ham or prosciutto
  • 6 to 8 thin slices (4 to 5 ounces) Gruyère cheese
  • 1 cup dry Marsala wine
Instructions
  1. Lay the chicken breasts, smooth side down, on a work surface. Loosen the tenderloins and open them like a book. With the smooth side of a meat pounder or heavy skillet, flatten the breasts to ¾-inch thickness. Season both sides with salt and a dusting of nutmeg.
  2. Place the flour on a large sheet of waxed paper. Lay an empty sheet of waxed paper beside it. Dip the chicken in the flour to coat both sides. Shake off excess and place the chicken on the empty sheet.
  3. Heat the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat until the foam subsides. Add the chicken in a single layer. Cook for about 4 minutes each side, or until well browned. Top each chicken breast with a slice of ham and a slice of cheese. Add the Marsala to the pan. Bring to a brisk simmer. Cook, swirling occasionally, for about 5 minutes, or until it no longer smells of alcohol. Reduce the heat to low. Cover and cook for 5 to 7 minutes, or until the chicken is no longer pink in the center. With a spatula, place the chicken breasts on dinner plates. Drizzle with the wine sauce.

 

Recipe from our e-book SimpleiItaly Loves Chicken, available for purchase online at the Barnes & Noble Nook store and the amazon Kindle store.

 

My Husband Is In Tuscany

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Is Tuscany a state of mind? It has to be when your husband is there without you.

Mio marito è in viaggio in Toscana. My husband is traveling in Tuscany.

Am I envious that he is in one of the most desirable destinations on earth without me? Or that his last email so exquisitely described a day in Firenze that it seemed surreal?

No. Truly, no. It’s not that I’m that selfless. But I am glad that he’s in a place that gives him so much joy. And—full disclosure—every time I’ve traveled alone on a media trip to Italy, he has been totally supportive. To not reciprocate would make me seem really petty.

The grape vines after harvest at Tenute Silvio Nardi near Montalcino, Tuscany.

Walking this morning, I felt assured that my Inner Italian is always available to transport me. The crystalline September light took me back to my visit in Toscana a couple years back, on a trip sponsored by Donna Franca Tours. The air was crisp and the sun warm even though it was November and the weather had been chilly and drizzly. My group was visiting Tenute Silvio Nardi, a highly regarded wine producer near Montalcino. The grapeless vines shimmered with tinges of gold and burgundy.

We enjoyed an early lunch of salume, formaggi, e focaccia with the elegant Nardi Rosso di Montalcino. It was tasty but the aroma of simmering ragù cinghiale (wild boar sauce) coming from the kitchen was distracting me like crazy. On my way out, I stuck my head in the cucina to briefly meet the cooks Lucia and Marizia who were preparing tagliatelle to accompany the robust meat ragù for an event that evening. (That time, I was envious!)

The Nardi cooks with their hand-rolled tagliatelle.

I purchased a Rosso di Montalcino from a good year as a gift for my husband. One of my trip mates, noticing the price, asked if he’d appreciate the value. “Yes,” I replied with certainty, “he will.”

And he did.

Max, Wally and Lampredotto

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C’era una volta. . . once upon a time. . . Max (Massimo Melani) met Wally (Walter Sanders) in Firenze. Here’s the story in their own words.

The Basilica of Santa Croce holds priceless artistic and historic treasures.

Massimo
First, a few words about the Leather School: Workshop, Laboratory and Show Room of the finest leather goods situated in the old Franciscan monastery of the Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. It was a marvelous place, as were the splendid people working there.

It all started with the Patron Marcello Gori, the owner and director of the Leather School.

Those years in the early 1970s were characterized by a kind of elite tourism. And the Leather School attracted many of these well-traveled, wealthy tourists from around the world. Marcello Gori ensured that his sales and service personnel were first class as well. The staff was multilingual, elegantly dressed, rather good looking and with long experience abroad. I was one of those.

One day in 1972, the owner presented us a colleague, an American boy from Chicago—a certain Wally Sanders, very smiling person, who looked like a survivor from Woodstock or San Francisco–absolutely the first foreigner who was going to work with us.

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The Inner Italian Q & A: Linda Dini Jenkins

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One in an occasional series of conversations with those who try to “live Italian” wherever they are.

"La Principessa" in Perugia

Linda Dini Jenkins is a freelance travel writer and photographer and the author of Up at the Villa: Travels with my Husband (more later on how to win a free copy!). She also blogs regularly about travel and travel writing at Travel the Write Way and teaches creative writing and journaling. She enjoys taking small groups of friends, to explore what Italy has to offer beyond the Florence-Venice-Rome triumvirate, and she can pack her suitcase in 15 minutes.

◊ ◊ ◊

Q: Living “Italian”. . . Is it a great way to live or the greatest way to live?
A: Well, I think it’s the greatest way to live. When you take into account the slower pace of life (outside the big cities!), the immersion in history and art, the fantastic cuisine, the love of design and music, the respect for taking time out to enjoy the simple things . . . whether it’s Italian or Mediterranean or European, it’s how I want to live.

Q: Why?
A: Are you kidding? Start with the food, the design sensibilities, the language, the arts, the vino, the pausa, the passeggiata . . . need I go on?

Q: When did you discover your Inner Italian? What is your Inner Italian named?
A: I always knew about my Inner Italian but, like other children of first-generation Italian-Americans who desperately wanted to assimilate, “being Italian” was something that just happened and was never really encouraged. In fact, I’d heard stories growing up of how hard it was for my father to be Italian in a New York suburb in the 1930s and ‘40s; even being Italian in my first job in New York in the 1970s was something of a liability. And I was always a little ashamed after that of being part Italian (my mother’s side of the family was English/Irish/German) until I met my husband and he took me to Italy in 2000. Since then, I have been a proud and vocal Italian-American. If my Inner Italian has a name and it needs to be something other than Linda, I suppose it’s Principessa . . .

Q: What does “living Italian” mean to you?
A: My grandparents came over from Italy in the late 1890s and they were anything but rich. So for me, living Italian has to do with cooking and eating together, always having crusty bread and wrinkled olives and green olive oil on the flowered oilcloth-covered table. It means not being afraid to be emotional—even if that involves fists and things flying when you’re angry. It means loving music and feeling the arts very deeply. It means trying to have a sense of style—of la bella figura—even if the clothes or table settings come from Target. And it means being a storyteller and a traveler and something of an adventurer.

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Peaches in Wine

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Pesche in vino are an essential accessory for an Italian summer.

As sweet as a child’s hug and as cool as a spray from the sea, peaches in chilled wine is the Italian cure-all for a sweltering summer.

Choose fruit–yellow or white–that’s locally grown and lusciously ripe. Peel the peaches by submerging them in boiling water for 30 seconds before soaking in ice water for one or two minutes. The skin will practically shed itself.

Slice the peaches into a bowl and pour on enough dry white wine, sparkling wine, or fruity red wine to cover. Sprinkle on a little sugar if you like. Refrigerate for several hours—long enough so you can’t tell where the peaches end and the wine begins.

If you can wait for evening dessert, spoon the pesche in vino into a frosted wine glass. On heat advisory days, you may have to spear a slice or two every time you pass the frig.

 

Wining and Dining in Ancient Rome

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Roberto Bompiani's depiction of an ancient Roman banquet from the Getty Museum.

By Emma Sanders

Guest Writer

Want to shake things up at your next dinner party? Take a cue from the early Romans. Pour Boone’s Farm, Yellowtail Shiraz, and a coveted Super Tuscan wine, but don’t offer your guests a choice. Instead, assign each guest to one of the three wines based on how much you like and value that person relative to his or her dinner companions. (Warning: you may lose some friends in the process.)

This kind of overt rank valuation was common at early Roman banquets, according to Dr. Nicholas Hudson of UNC Wilmington, who recently spoke on the topic at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His lecture, Eat, Drink, and Be Merry:  The Changing Identify of Dining in the Roman World illuminates how styles of dining reflect a changing society.

On early Roman banquets, Pliny writes:

“He apportioned in small flagons three different sorts of wines; but it was not that the guests might take their choice: on the contrary, that they might not choose at all.  One was for himself and me; the next for his friends of lower order (for you must know the measures of friendship according to degrees of quality; and the third for his own free men.”

The Romans also applied this behavior to food, as hilariously summarized by the Latin poet Martial:

“Since I am asked to dinner… why is not the same dinner served to me as to you?  You take oysters fattened in the Lucrine lake, I suck a mussel through a hole in the shell; you get mushrooms, I take hog funguses; you tackle turbot, but I brill.  Golden with fat, a turtle-dove gorges you with its bloated rump; there is set before me magpie that has died in its cage.  Why do I recline with you?”

Over time, banquets shifted from the model of assigning guests social worth. Large sharing dishes became more common. These sharing dishes tended to be very similar in color and design to emphasize consistency of food served across a table. This growing egalitarianism of banquets demonstrated a social and cultural shift from the elitism of early Roman banquets.

In late Rome, a fissure grew between Romans who adopted the newer style of banquets and those who clung to elitism. Dr. Hudson espouses that the newer style of banquets ‑‑based on unity and sharing‑‑ even provided an early precedent for the rituals of Christianity.

To read more about Nicholas Hudson’s work,

visit http://www.archaeological.org/lecturer/nicholashudson