Region: Liguria/Piedmont

Menu: Prosciutto with Roasted Peppers, Fresh Clams with Wine, Green Peas Grandmother Style, Lemony Apple Cake

Recommended Wine: Cinque Terre dry white

Roasted peppers also found in 1000 Foods

            Roasted peppers are a popular appetizer all over Italy. The red variety are especially pretty and tend to be the sweetest. A particularly attractive presentation involves a combination of red and yellow, sometimes with orange and/or green added to the mix. The peppers can be served plain, marinated, in salads, in sauces, or on canapes. Here they have a vinegar-based marinade and are served with on buttered white bread with ham. The recipe calls for prosciutto, but since it is kind of expensive and has a stringy texture, I used black forest deli ham instead. The combination worked very well. Side note: In Italy, pepperoni refers to peppers, not the spicy red salami disks found on pizzas.

            I’m not usually a fan of clams, but after being pleasantly surprised by the tomato-clam sauce a while back, I had high hopes for this recipe. Frozen clams were steamed/braised in precooked wine (to burn off the alcohol), which seemed like it would counter the “fishy” flavor like tomatoes did. That didn’t work as well as hoped. They were edible, but I didn’t necessarily enjoy them.

            People have been eating starchy “field peas” for millennia, but sweet “garden peas” came much later. Most likely, they were developed by Dutch botanists in the early 17^th Century. In France, the court of Louis XIV went crazy for them. Since the French court set fashions for the rest of Europe, sweet peas were soon found across the continent. Presumably the Italians, who had always appreciated vegetables more than most, adopted them quickly. One popular way of cooking them is in the Venetian risotto, risi e bisi.

            There are a number of “homestyle,” or “grandmother’s-style,” recipes for peas. In this case, a small amount of pancetta or bacon is used as a flavoring, and a bit of butter, flour, and chicken broth make a light sauce. Some fresh herbs brighten the dish. Everything is balanced; sweet, fat, and salt, but the flavors are mild and easy to enjoy. There’s nothing here that most picky eaters would have an issue with.

            The best dish in the menu was the apple cake. A sponge cake batter is flavored with lemon peel and extract, apple slices are folded in, and everything is baked in a springform pan. That was an unusual touch, but made unmolding easy. The lemon flavor was a nice complement to the apple, and adding a bit of lemon zest to some whipped cream made an excellent dessert even better. Minus the clams, everything was delicious.

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