Menu: Thin Spaghetti with Tomato-Clam Sauce and Fresh Basil, Cornish Hens with Herbs and Pancetta, Marinated and Sauteed Radicchio, “Zabaglione” with Fresh Berries
Recommended Wine: San Leonardo (a Bordeaux-like red from Trentino)
Venetian cuisine is most famous for seafood and rice, but they are not its sole components. Pasta, though not as popular as rice and polenta, is common, served with all manner of fish and shellfish, or sometimes beans for a vegetarian dish. Meat and vegetable specialties include liver and onions, smothered cabbage, and radicchio. Combined with things like creamed, whipped salt cod and cuttlefish stew, these elements of Venetian cuisine are far from the tomato-heavy dishes popular further south.
Exactly why tomato sauces are so much more popular in the South than in the North when tomatoes can be grown throughout Italy is not entirely clear, but I have a theory. In another cookbook, I found a map showing where each starch (bread, rice, polenta, and fresh and dried pasta) is most common. Overlaid on the map were lines showing where sauces are mostly tomato-based, which bore a striking resemblance to a map of Spanish possessions in Italy in the 16th and 17th Centuries. In other words, Sicily, Sardinia, and the southern half of the mainland were under Spanish control during the two centuries of the Columbian Exchange. Since it was Spanish explorers who first brought these new foods to Europe, it would make sense that these foods would have arrived sooner and spread faster in regions they controlled. While this theory doesn’t explain everything (especially why corn caught on sooner and more thoroughly in the North, which was not under Spanish control), it could have been a contributing factor.
Regardless, tomato sauces are not unheard of in the North. This menu features an interesting one, made with cherry tomatoes and enriched with clams. Clam sauces are not usually my favorite, and after my experience with the deviled eggs I considered omitting them. Ultimately, I’m glad I didn’t. The tomato really cut the “fishiness,” while the clams and a sprinkle of parmesan cheese added substance. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Similar success came with the Cornish hens (an option to use instead of quail), though I omitted the truffle oil. It’s pretty hard to go wrong with chicken, herbs, and bacon.
The radicchio was not as successful. Though it is one of the most popular vegetables in Venice and other parts of Northeast Italy, I found it way too bitter. The balsamic vinegar, shallots, and lemon zest in the sauce helped some, and a small bite of radicchio with each bite of chicken provided a nice contrast, but the bitter taste was still hard to get used to. It must be an acquired taste.
Dessert was slightly modified from the text. It still consisted of fresh berries with a custard sauce, just a different type of custard sauce. The recipe calls for zabaglione, which, as mentioned in previous posts, is a custard made with wine instead of milk. For some reason, the mix of egg yolks and wine thickens more as it’s heated than a milk-based custard does. This particular zabaglione recipe also includes grappa, a type of brandy made from grape seeds and skins, pressed to extract any remaining juice. It was invented in the region and is often used to preserve fresh berries. (Text, pg. 124) Thus, berries with a grappa-infused custard are a natural choice for dessert.
However, as also mentioned in previous posts, I don’t personally care for zabaglione. As replacing the wine with milk produces a very thin custard that doesn’t thicken adequately without curdling the eggs, a replacement was necessary. I chose homemade vanilla pudding as the closest alternative. While not quite the same, it’s a good match with the berries, and a fine ending to a Venetian-style dinner.
Region: Naples/Adriatic South (Along the Adriatic Coast)
Menu: Peppers with Almonds, Basilicata Style, Chicken with Spicy Herbed Tomatoes, Baked Caramelized Onions, Tangerine Sherbet with Lemon
Recommended Wine: Campanaro Fiano di Acellino (from near Naples) or Greco di Tufo Vignadangelo
The Adriatic Coast has a long history. The area was home to a number of Greek city-states in the first millennium BC, as was most of Southern Italy. During the 3rd Century BC, as the Romans moved into the area, the city-states brought in their ally Pyrrhus of Epirus. Despite a series of tactical victories, King Pyrrhus lost too many troops to sustain the war, thus giving rise to the term Pyrrhic victory. The region was subsequently part of the Roman Empire, then the Gothic Kingdom of Italy. In the 6th Century AD, it was the launching point of Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s attempt to retake the Western Empire. Though the Lombards took the region soon after, followed by the Franks under Charlemagne, Byzantine enclaves remained into the 11th Century, when the Normans captured the region.
On a side note, the rise and fall of the Normans is one of the more fascinating stories in Medieval history. After a spectacular rise in the 11th Century, they reached the peak of their power in the 12th. At one point, they controlled not only their native Normandy, but also England, much of Western France, Southern Italy, Sicily, and the Crusader States in the Holy Land. But in the 1180s, territories began slipping from their grasp. After the loss of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187, the rest of the Crusader States followed by 1291, when their final stronghold of Acre was captured by the Mamluk forces, who were based in Egypt. The Anglo-Norman kings lost Normandy itself in 1204. Sicily was lost in 1282. In the late 14th Century, during the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, the Normans living in France began to see themselves as French, while the Anglo-Normans became truly English. By the end of the Middle Ages, the Normans were what they were a few hundred years before: a unique local culture, but restricted to Northwestern France and subject to the French king.
In the 15th Century, the forces of Aragon, who had conquered Sicily in the 13th Century, conquered the Kingdom of Naples, gaining control of the southern half of mainland Italy. Soon after, in 1480, the Ottoman Empire attempted to invade Italy through the region, occupying the city of Otranto. Though the arrival of reinforcements halted the invasion and the death of Sultan Mehmed II ended it for good, hundreds of the local population were martyred during the yearlong occupation. For most of the next 400 years, Spanish Habsburgs and then Bourbons controlled the area. Italy was finally unified in the 1860s.
The cuisine here is much like in the rest of Southern Italy, with lots of olive oil, vegetables, citrus fruits, and some seafood. To be completely honest, this was not my favorite menu, although I would make the chicken again. The spicy tomato sauce added a nice flavor and kept the meat from drying out. As I have in the past, I replaced the pricey seafood (in this case lobster) with chicken. Pretty much any protein tastes good with tomato sauce and cheese, so there’s no reason to break the bank. As the menu seemed to lack a starch, I added some plain pasta to accompany the stronger-flavored dishes.
While typically associated with meat or seafood, sweet and sour sauces can and historically have been used on a wide range of foods, including vegetables. Personally, though, the sweet and sour peppers were not to my taste. There was nothing wrong with them, but I like peppers better in an omelet, stuffed, or in stuffed pepper soup. The onions were also a bit of a disappointment. It may have been due to the type of onions, but they never became melt-in-your-mouth soft in the oven like they were supposed to, even with some extra time. Despite this, the leftover peppers and onions made a pretty good omelet filling the next day.
The sherbet/sorbet didn’t turn out quite like I would have hoped, though some modifications I made may be to blame. To make it non-alcoholic, I replaced the lemon liqueur with a lemon syrup and the wine with sparkling juice. I was concerned that removing the alcohol would make the mixture freeze too solid, but the extra sugar in the syrup was enough to avoid that problem, which is why it was included. If you’re curious, both alcohol and sugar lower the freezing point of water-based liquids. The final flavor was decent, but too sweet to eat on its own, almost like marmalade. When combined with lemon-flavored sparkling water, however, it became like a slush and was fairly enjoyable, though I’m not sure I’d go through the trouble of making it again.
Menu: Caponata, Roasted Red, Orange and Yellow Peppers, Rotelle Pasta Salad with Cucumber Sauce, Sicilian Stuffed Beef Roll, Chicken with Blood Orange and Caper-Anchovy Sauces, Sicilian Cream Cake
Recommended Wine: Vino di Tavola di Sicilia or Corvo Rosso for red, Greco di Tufo Vignadangelo (from near Naples) for white
We remain in Sicily to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption, which falls on August 15 each year. At that time of year, the weather is hot and fresh produce abounds, making a produce-heavy picnic, able to be made ahead and eaten at room temperature, a natural choice for the occasion. To celebrate Sicilian-style, we have a feast full of the region’s famous dishes and flavors: caponata, blood oranges, capers, anchovies, and a cake filled with ricotta, chocolate, and candied fruit. It was a substantial undertaking, but more than worth it for the amazing taste of history.
Caponata, a sweet-and-sour eggplant dish with celery and onions, demonstrates Sicilian cuisine’s history perfectly. The agrodolce, or sweet-and-sour, flavor has a long history. In ancient times it usually came from vinegar and either honey or grape must, which is boiled-down grape juice. The taste for sweet-and-sour continued into the Middle Ages, when citrus fruits and sugar were introduced and verjuice (the sour juice pressed from unripe grapes) became common. As mentioned previously, eggplant was introduced during this period as well. Another sweet and sour ingredient, tomatoes, were introduced a few centuries later, after Columbus, finally making the version here possible. With a homemade tomato sauce to coat the vegetables, the caponata required several steps, but it could all be done ahead of time.
The flavor was good, but the quantity of vinegar added gave it a really sour edge. Maybe I’m just not used to it, but I found it difficult to eat much of it at once. The recommended pieces of toast were really a necessity to balance things out. I used a crusty bakery wheat/multigrain bread, which has more flavor than white Italian bread and can stand up to the vinegary caponata. A bit of cheese, though not called for in the recipe, further balances the punch.
Like the caponata, the roasted peppers could be done beforehand and left to marinate in vinegar, oil, salt and pepper. If you have the book, you might notice that the actual recipe has the roasted bell pepper halves stuffed with tuna mousse. While the ingredients (tuna, butter, and a little cognac) sound reasonable enough, I had no desire to try it. After the eggs with tuna mayonnaise, I’ve learned my lesson. To avoid omitting a dish, I roasted the peppers just like the recipe called for and marinated them unstuffed. And they were great. Since they all got eaten the first night, I would call that a success.
Another success was the pasta salad. While I don’t mind it, pasta salad is not normally one of my favorites, but this was wonderful. Most of the ingredients are pretty typical: pasta, onions, diced bell pepper, vinegar, oil, and herbs. The lack of bottled salad dressing helps, and lots of fresh basil really brightens things up. What makes this recipe unique is the sugar and pureed cucumber in the dressing. The little bit of sweetness doesn’t give a real strong sweet and sour flavor, but balances things out nicely, and the cucumber adds even more freshness. We all loved it. And it was so pretty.
The beef roll, a substantial piece of meat stuffed with more meat, sausage, eggs, cheese, herbs, and a bit of nutmeg, almost certainly has an aristocratic background, though the ingredients are affordable to more people today. This was a bit more technically challenging. After flattening a lean piece of beef, the ground meat mixture is spread over it, followed by sprinklings of cheese and herbs. From what I can tell, the next step is supposed to be to roll it up into a spiral. That didn’t exactly happen. I must not have flattened it enough, since I could only just manage to form a circle around the filling, though the effect was still quite impressive, if I do say so myself. Then I narrowly dodged a catastrophic mishap.
At the time, we were dog sitting for my uncle’s then 9-month-old yellow lab puppy. In other words, constantly looking for food, and big enough to put her head on the edge of the table. I was working on the beef roll while the dog was outside and put the platter on the table, since the stove and counter were pretty cluttered. Then the dog was let in. I decided to keep working while having half an eye on her, but when I turned around for a second, she took the chance to jump up and get her mouth right by the roll, ready to take a bite. After that near miss, I made room on the stove. Then the browning and braising went without issue.
For some reason, the meat was still a little tough. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the roll was too tall for the pan cover to fit on completely. Regardless, it had a good flavor and excellent filling. Unlike the other dishes, which contained lots of basil and/or oregano, this one was flavored with parsley and mint (and probably a bit of canine saliva) and lacked the sweet-sour flavor of the other dishes. After lots of vinegar in the caponata and more in the peppers and pasta salad, this was a nice change of pace. As for the texture, slowly reheating the leftovers in a saucepan with the braising liquid tenderized the meat significantly.
For the next dish, we are back to tart, acidic flavors and I did something that I’ve done a few times in this project: replace seafood with chicken. There are a few reasons for doing this. First, it’s a lot cheaper. The recipe here calls for swordfish, which is traditional to Sicily but quite pricey. While the two don’t taste the same, the neutral flavor of chicken goes with pretty much anything. And there weren’t pieces of swordfish conveniently in the freezer, ready to cook.
Just as the recipe called for, I cooked the chicken with lemon juice, salt, pepper, and herbs. It was served with two sauces: a homemade mayonnaise, tinted with blood orange juice, and a thin vinegar-based anchovy-caper sauce. The chicken was good, but to be honest, neither sauce was my favorite. The homemade mayonnaise was better than store-bought (in the sense that it didn’t gross me out), but still wasn’t to my personal taste, and the blood orange flavor was barely detectable. I would have preferred the juice directly squeezed onto the chicken, where its flavor would be more pronounced. The caper-anchovy sauce was a bit better, but the salty, vinegary, briny flavor was pretty strong, except in very small amounts.
My favorite part of the feast, as is often the case, was dessert, though the pasta salad and beef roll weren’t far behind. Sicilian cassata is traditionally made by lining a bowl with sponge cake pieces, adding a sweet ricotta filling full of candied fruit and chopped chocolate, covering the filling with more cake pieces, then weighting it all in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, it is typically covered with a green pistachio marzipan. This particular recipe skipped the marzipan icing in favor of a simple sprinkle of powdered sugar. It was definitely a bit fiddly to put together, but the end result was beautiful and delicious.
On its own, the sponge cake can be a bit dry, so it really benefits from being pressed overnight with the filling. Scented with vanilla and orange and loaded with candied fruit, it is a little on the sweet side, but making the chocolate bittersweet and adding some extra pistachios balanced it out. This was definitely another of my favorite desserts from the book, though unlike the apricots from the previous post, it is too complicated to make on a regular basis. But that’s fine, since it was never designed to be an everyday cake. The whole menu is designed for a celebration.
Menu: Eggs with Tuna Mayonnaise, Greek-Style Lamb and Vegetables, Apricots with Amaretti Crumbs and Cream
Recommended Wine: Primitivo di Manduria (red from Southern Italy)
Finally, we venture to Sicily, home of some of the most well-known Italian food. There are two sides to traditional Sicilian cuisine. One is the rich, elaborate fare traditionally reserved for the small elite, featuring pies, meats, molded dishes and pastries. The other is the ingenious peasant fare, designed to make the most of humble ingredients. Bread, pasta, vegetables, and legumes, accented with things like vinegar, olives, capers, anchovies and citrus fruits, helped compensate for the low levels of animal protein. Despite the island being a sought-after (and fought-over) breadbasket, featuring some of the most dazzling royal and noble courts from ancient times onward, the peasantry has frequently been among the poorest in Europe.
This may seem like a paradox at first glance, but this pattern is common throughout history. Highly productive agricultural regions, like Naples, Sicily, and the Ile-de-France region around Paris have had some of the wealthiest and most sophisticated elites of their time, but not usually the most prosperous peasants. Higher yields meant higher taxes and greater social inequality. In some cases, commoners had lower standards of living than those in more marginal areas. Throughout its history, Sicily has been one of those cases.
The history of Sicily could fill several scholarly volumes, but here’s a brief summary. As a large, fertile, centrally located island, it was unsurprisingly fought over by every power that passed through the area. From antiquity there were native Italic peoples plus all the usual suspects: Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Romans. The island played a crucial role in turning the tide of the Peloponnesian War, which lasted from 431 – 404 BC, pitting Athens and its not-always-willing allies against Sparta and other states that felt threatened by Athenian expansion over the course of the 5th Century BC. Until Athens overreached with the Sicilian Expedition from 415 – 413 BC, it had generally held the upper hand. After an attempted conquest of Syracuse went disastrously wrong (I’ll go into details in a later post, since it’s a fascinating story), Athens was predominantly on the defensive and was ultimately defeated.
A battleground for centuries between Greeks and Phoenicians, Sicily was conquered by the Romans during the First Punic War between 264 and 241 BC. It was an important and wealthy Roman province until the 5th Century AD, when it was captured by Vandals, a Germanic people who had found a new home in North Africa. The Byzantine Empire (the surviving eastern half of the Roman Empire after the western half fell) under Emperor Justinian I recaptured the island in the 6th Century, only to lose it again in the 9th and 10th, this time to the Arabs. A spectacular flowering of arts, culture, and scholarship occurred during the century and a half or so of Arab rule. It was also during this time that citrus fruits, for which the land is so famous today, were introduced, alongside rice, sugar, spinach, and eggplants. Pasta also appears to have been introduced during this period. Then came the Normans, who conquered much of Southern Italy and the Middle East as well as England. In 1282, a revolt called the Sicilian Vespers allowed the Kingdom of Aragon to capture the island and hold it into the 18th Century.
It was during the late 15th and early 16th Centuries, when Aragon was united with Castile, that New World crops and animals began crossing the Atlantic. While Castile sponsored expeditions to the Americas, Aragon was drawn into the Italian Wars, starting when Charles VIII of France invaded Naples in 1494. Columbus and his men brought plant and animal specimens back to the court of the famed Ferdinand and Isabella, from where they were presumably transported to Naples and Sicily over the next few decades. While not all of the new arrivals were quickly embraced (turkeys were within a decade, tomatoes and potatoes took a few centuries), by the end of the 18th Century, maize, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and chocolate had transformed Sicilian cuisine.
Turning from history to food, we start with the only dish from this project that I truly hated: eggs with tuna mayonnaise. It may not sound too bad if you like hard-boiled eggs, which I do not. Their taste is objectively fine, but the smell is too much for me to get over. The kitchen and fridge ended up reeking of sulfur, and the sauce didn’t improve things. It starts with mayonnaise, another food I don’t like, though the homemade kind used here is better than store-bought. After using egg yolks to emulsify vinegar and lemon juice with oil, canned tuna and capers are blended in. The end result is an unappealing light tan sludge, full of classic Sicilian flavors. If you’re wondering why I made this, given my distaste for hard-boiled eggs and mayonnaise, there are two reasons. First, it’s part of the menu, which for this project I try to follow as closely as possible. Second, these are supposedly a classic Italian appetizer, so I thought they were worth a try. As it turned out, they weren’t. My fellow diner thought they were pretty good and really liked the sauce, but I could only manage a little nibble. While foods that stick around tend to do so because some people like them, nothing suits everyone’s personal taste. Lesson learned, never again. From here, things could only improve.
And they did improve. The main course was a lamb “stew,” cooked in foil packets. The meat and vegetables were flavored with salt, pepper, oregano, and a bit of garlic. I personally thought it could use a little more seasoning, but that’s just a matter of personal preference. Maybe mincing the garlic, rather than just halving it, would help the flavors meld a bit more. Still, the meat was nice and tender and the vegetables were neither under nor overcooked. This dish would be worth making again, experimenting with a few minor modifications.
Finally, there was a spectacular dessert, which is actually why I decided to make the menu in the first place. It features poached apricots, which get their name from the Latin word praecox, meaning early, since they ripen before most other fruits. The fresh variety, which Mr. Famularo recommends, is not always available where I live, so when I saw them in the store, I decided I had to try them. In the original recipe, they are poached in a mixture of wine and hazelnut liqueur and more liqueur is added to flavor the whipped cream. As I didn’t want to buy an entire bottle of either, I substituted grape juice and hazelnut syrup, reducing the sugar to compensate. The result was fantastic. The balance between the sweet-tart apricots, syrupy sauce, cream and amaretti crumbs was just perfect, and the hazelnut flavor infused throughout made the dish. I’m sure that other fruits would work in this dessert, possibly with adjusted poaching time. It is too good to restrict to apricot season.
Finally, we travel to the last region in the book, the southernmost part of the mainland, Sicily, and Sardinia. Like Sicily, Sardinia has been invaded and conquered over and over for the last few thousand years. The earliest inhabitants built huge stone structures called nuraghe that still dot the landscape today. For centuries it was a battleground between Etruscans, Greeks, and Phoenicians/Carthaginians, all vying for locations to set up strategic trading ports. Romans later joined in the fray, followed by Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Pisans, and Genoese. From the 15th to 18th Century the island was controlled by the Kingdom of Aragon and its successor, unified Spain. The Spanish were followed by the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, which eventually unified Italy. All of these peoples left their mark on the culture and food, creating a unique region “not a bit like the rest of Italy.” (Text, pg. 241)
Interestingly, despite their strategic location, the native Sardinians were not major seafarers. While there has always been trading and fishing along the coast, the hills and mountains have historically been at least as important. Pastoralists raised sheep, goats and pigs, fattening the latter on acorns. Perhaps more carnivorous than neighboring cuisines, traditional Sardinian fare includes roasted meat, cured pork, and sheep and goats’ milk cheeses alongside the usual bread, pasta and vegetables.
To that end, we have a Sardinian one-pot stew/casserole, with pork, fava beans, cabbage and fennel. Traditionally pigs’ feet were used, but this recipe uses Italian sausage and spareribs. The meat flavors the bean and vegetable “fillers,” with extra flavor coming from a sprinkle of Pecorino Romano cheese. Presumably this is to be served with bread.
I ran into two problems with the recipe. First, the pot was not big enough. Once the meat, beans, tomatoes and liquid were in, there was not enough room for the cabbage and fennel. I had to add it a bit at a time, waiting for previous additions to cook down a bit before adding more. The other issue was with the texture of the cabbage and beans. Soaked fava beans and cabbage are supposed to be added at the same time. As a result, the cabbage was really overcooked by the time any of the beans were cooked. Further complicating things, the beans weren’t all done at the same time. For some reason, there were fully-cooked, soft beans right next to distinctly crunchy ones.
Still, as long as the diner picks around any undercooked beans, the dish is generally enjoyable. I would make a few changes, however. First, the broth would benefit from a bit of garlic, since it was somewhat bland. And as mentioned before, the cabbage doesn’t need anywhere near as long of a cooking time. Personally, I would only add it about half an hour before the casserole is finished. Finally, I would substitute great northern beans or something similar for the favas, as they are a lot more consistent and easier to find.
Feasting Through Time 