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Chow Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Itch.world

A three-minute escape to Italy.

Tuscany, travel, medieval village, Italy, festivals, celebrations, customs, cooking, recipes, living in Italy, moving to Italy, visiting, visit, restaurants, language

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April 13, 2019 In Best Of, Chow, Live, Recipes By Nancy

How I know it’s spring in Tuscany

One of the things I love most about creating Itch is that I’m constantly reminded to keep attentive to what unfolds around me every day. I had so much fun thinking about spring for this post, and the little things that make me know that it has arrived.

1. Fava Beans

In the spring fava beans are suddenly everywhere, but show up in two completely different ways. First there are the fave that you eat. Italians often serve them in a very different way than I’d had in America. I was used to the beans being shelled, the small inner beans removed, and then blanched to make it easier to remove the skin around the inner, bright green bean, which was the only part served. (One memorable exception to this was many years ago in San Francisco’s Mission District at Delfina when they served fried baby fava beans which were eaten whole, outer pod and all. They were delicious.)

Here, even at very nice restaurants, when you order fave you often get a plate of raw, whole beans, along with some thin slices of pecorino cheese, salt, and some olive oil. You then remove the inner pods yourself and eat them raw, along with the skin coating them, accompanied by some oil and cheese. We still aren’t totally convinced that this is as good as just the innermost pod cooked in some delicious way, but this kind of dish makes everything dependent on the essentials: the fave must be very, very fresh and the quality of the oil and cheese is critical.

My sister turned me on to a recipe that involves throwing whole, really fresh fava beans in a plastic bag along with some olive oil, sea salt, red pepper, and garlic, tossing together to coat, and then roasting the beans over a fire until cooked and tender and a bit charred in places. You can eat these whole and we have served them several times as an aperitivo, along with a prosecco.

But fave in markets and restaurants aren’t that unusual in many places around the world. The second way fave are a harbinger of spring is that they are used as a cover crop to restore nitrogen to the fields where tobacco was planted late last summer. All those glorious little beans are plowed under just when they get really promising, unharvested.

2. The Lamborghini come out

If we were to do an MRI of our brain activity with the verbal prompt “Lamborghini” I think our brains would light up in very different ways. The image I conjure up is one of a tractor. After WWII Ferruccio Lamborghini started a company to make tractors out of reconfigured military equipment. He also made heating and cooling equipment and between his businesses became wildly successful. So successful that he started to collect luxury cars, including a Ferrari, which was a constant nightmare to maintain. He decided to start his own car brand in 1963.

Today, in the valley, having a Lamborghini tractor is definitely the cool kid choice and at this time of year the tractors, Lamborghini or otherwise, hit the fields and make them incredibly well-groomed. Soil is also prepped in long, rectangular patches for personal vegetable gardens, called orto, often in the front yard of a house.

3. The dandelions face their natural predator, the horse

We cheated and put a horse cookie in the middle of the dandelions to make sure that Salome would cooperate for the shot, but she ended up ignoring the cookie to concentrate on her favorite thing, fresh dandelion greens.

4. The world turns blue and green

5. Poppies

6. One of my favorite restaurants opens again after a long winter.

Laura and Marco open Il Travato in Monterchi sometime around Easter. I just saw Laura near the piazza and she said that Pasquetta is THE DAY! (Pasquetta is literally “Little Easter”—the relaxed family day after Easter usually marked by a picnic.)

Laura taught us how to make her best-in-Tuscany spaghetti aglio olio e peperoncino, which we often make at home.

7. Bees

March 17, 2019 In Chow, Roam By Nancy

Il Bindi: one table, many courses

In one of my favorite villages in Tuscany, Monte San Savino, a friend spotted a place to eat with just one large table, Il Bindi. I’ve tried to get in several times over the past year, but it’s always booked. I finally managed to reserve on a Wednesday night in February and it was worth the perseverance.

Il Bindi was started in 2006 by Paolo Bindi and is now run by his daughter, Cristina, and her husband. She cooks, with one assistant, and he takes care of the guests. They serve one set menu only and it changes every day. The table seats 20 and the night we went it was all Italians, except for us and three Brits. Because it was mostly Italians any sense of reserve between the different parties around the table quickly melted. The family to my left, who was celebrating the father’s birthday, had a thirteen-year old daughter who had brought along two friends. They were very shy about the fact they hadn’t taken English seriously enough in school and kept asking me to tell them how to say things in English. The lack of pretense, humor, and curiosity of the group was so distinctly Italian that it almost didn’t matter what the food was like.

But it was impressive. They served about twenty different courses, completely made by hand, and all more refined and creative than we’ve found almost anywhere else in Tuscany.

Monte San Savino is worth a trip in itself. Halfway between Siena and Arezzo it has the qualities I treasure in certain villages—it’s a gorgeous, perched hill town from around 1100, but it feels like it has an authentic life apart from tourism.

When we went to pay the bill the total was €60, including a bottle of wine. We will be back, if we can get in.

March 9, 2019 In Best Of, Chow, Recipes By Nancy

Venetian spice cake recipe

Last week when I wrote “The Venice you may not, yet, know” I mentioned that one of my all-time favorite desserts, a spice cake, comes from La Bitta restaurant—and the owner shared the recipe with me. This spice cake recipe is simple, but it has quite the unusual set of ingredients that gives it a comforting and very complex flavor. I truly love this cake. In my experience, it is unique.

Preheat oven to 350° F (180° C)

300 grams butter (1 1/3 cups)

300 grams sugar (1 1/2 cups)
300 grams unbleached, white flour (2.6 cups)
3 eggs
1/2 glass red wine (around 2/3 cup)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon poppy seeds
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon saffron (or 1 packet—that’s the way we buy it here)
1 teaspoon ginger powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
pinch of salt

Butter cakes, like pound cakes, get their soft, fine texture and moistness, called a crumb, by first creaming together fat and sugar, adding eggs, and slowly incorporating dry ingredients into the mixture while alternating with a liquid.

Start by beating the butter in a standing mixer—if straight from the fridge and butter is cold—while gathering up all the other ingredients. If it whips for 10 minutes it will get fluffy and light. (If you don’t have a stand mixer, try to get the butter to room temperature.) Then add the sugar and beat until incorporated.

Add the eggs one at a time.

In a separate bowl stir together all the dry ingredients, then add them to the butter/sugar/egg mixture alternating with the red wine, and beat until just incorporated.

Prepare an 11” pan (28cm)—buttered and floured and lined with baking paper. A spring-release pan is best.

Cook for until it is just firm in the center and a toothpick comes out clean. If it wobbles like jelly when you touch the center with your finger, don’t bother with a toothpick yet.

Start checking at 35 minutes, but it will likely take longer. Try to get it “just done”.

Let it cool in the pan for 5-10 minutes then you should be able to take it out and place it on a cake plate. Serve it warm, dusted with powdered sugar.

February 17, 2019 In Best Of, Chow, Live By Nancy

Three ways Italy is different from California

During a frenzied week back in California, where I lived for most of my life, I was stuck by hundreds of differences between the Bay Area and my adopted home in Tuscany. Here are three of the stranger things I’ve noticed this week.

Dogs

Lola in a restaurant in a high chair. The owner insisted in bringing it out for her so that she wouldn’t have to be alone on the floor.

Right after we first moved to Tuscany our friends’ dogs had puppies, and we got our Lola. Having a dog has been a great window into some of the differences between Italy and the States.

Most Italians love dogs and they are welcome everywhere. Lola comes with us into restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, banks, post offices, trains… She frequently gets served a bowl of water in a restaurant before we even order. Once she and I went into a caffè and she happened to see one of her favorite dog friends. The woman who works behind the bar encouraged us to take the dogs off their leashes so that they could play. Lola and her boyfriend started romping in the caffè, bumping up against people and racing across the floor underfoot. At one point her dog friend got a little over excited and lifted his leg to pee against the bar. His owner and I froze, horrified. The other bar patrons and the owner burst out laughing and she shooed us away as we attempted to clean up the mess and insisted on doing it herself.

A couple years ago I had a minor medical procedure. When I was in the recovery room coming out from anesthesia John mentioned that Lola was tied outside the hospital. The nurse suggested that we bring her into the recovery room so that she could snuggle in bed with me and escape the heat outside. So Lola joined me in bed in the hospital room.

The kids, Lola, and I were enroute back from a long day in Florence and stopped for hamburgers. I had forgotten to bring food for Lola so she hadn’t eaten all day. Donella mentioned this to our waiter, and he and the kitchen staff went into high gear, immediately cooking a burger for Lola and bringing it out on a plate.

I can’t even imagine a parallel to any of these experiences (and there are many more) in California. The additional range of places Italian dogs go, and the experiences they have, seem to make them a bit smarter in the ways of the world, a bit more “emotionally intelligent,” than their stateside counterparts. Probably helps that most Italian dogs I see aren’t purebreds and are bred much more for personality than looks.

Of course not all dogs in Italy are pets. In our rural area I’d guess about twenty five percent of the dogs I see are working dogs—hunting dogs for wild boar and truffles, dogs that protect sheep from wolves. These dogs are not at all coddled and often live outside full time.

Lunch

In Italy lunch is probably the single most important event of the day. The world stops for a couple of hours. Stores and offices close. School ends at 1:30 so that kids can join their families. Streets empty and the pace of life changes. Because everything shuts down it means there’s no social demarcation between people who have time for lunch and those who work through. We frequent restaurants populated by workmen, delivery truck drivers, and laborers, as well as those filled with businessmen and ladies who lunch, all lingering over a meal that lasts over an hour.

The meal is usually two to three courses—pasta, main, and dessert—accompanied by wine and coffee. People linger, talk, laugh, relax. The work day ends at 7 or 8 in the evening, but they have had this total break in the middle.

On one of my first trips back to California after we moved I raced across town to get to Target before 1:30 so that I could get what I needed before they closed for lunch. About ten minutes into my drive I realized I probably wouldn’t have that problem in Emeryville.

In the Bay Area it often feels like lunch is something to be accomplished as efficiently as possible—ideally the optimal mix of organic protein, carbs, and fat, at the right price point, consumed as efficiently as possible—so that you can get back to the “real” business of living, the important stuff that defines us. What if it turns out in the game of life that the really important thing was the lunch with friends?

Coffee

This week I’ve had time to kill between meetings so I’ve been hanging out in various coffee places, chains and independents, and noticing the differences between what it means to get coffee in Italy and in California. There are lots of obvious ones—in Italy you stand at the bar for your shot of espresso. People don’t get coffee to go. Coffee is never served in paper cups. There are no huge cups filled with 1,000 calorie mocha pumpkin unicorn frappuccinos. Cappuccinos are only had in the morning—in the litany of Italian health rules it’s believed that dairy is bad for the digestion after about noon. In California, nobody ordered a caffè corretto (literally a corrected coffee), an espresso with a healthy shot of grappa, sambuca, or some other liquor, often served late morning (or pre-dawn if you are going out with friends and loaded guns to hunt.)

But the biggest thing I’ve noticed is that having a coffee in Italy is a social act. Everyone is talking at once and standing in a group at the bar drinking shots of espresso. A visit to the caffè happens first thing in the morning, mid-morning, and mid-afternoon and waves of people congregate at these times, eager to see what is new with everyone else since when they last saw them a few hours before.

An espresso is 1€, and a cappuccino 1.20€, so people often pay for one another’s coffees. I’ve had mine picked up a lot, often by someone I haven’t even talked to that day. When you go to pay you discover it’s already been covered. There’s no weirdness in this, like there can be if someone buys your drink in a bar, and absolutely no expectation of anything in return. It’s a small flirt that puts a spring into both people’s steps, and all at for 1€. I can’t think of a comparable act in the U.S.

In contrast, I couldn’t help but notice how non-social the act of getting coffee is in California. There are a few people chatting in line, and a tiny minority of tables with people actually talking to each other, but the vast majority of people seem to be alone, focused on their computers or phones, mostly with headsets on, and completely removed from the environment and people around them. The difference is jarring—the only common factor between having coffee in the two worlds is caffeine.

February 2, 2019 In Chow, Recipes By Nancy

Dangerous dinners: Vesuvio pasta

One of my favorite discoveries in the grocery store was Vesuvio pasta. It comes from the South of Italy and has loads of nooks and crannies for a good chunky sauce. It’s a fairly modern pasta made in an area that has been famous for making pasta since the 11th century, Gragnano in Campania. Apparently there is something special about the combination of the durum wheat from the area combined with the water that flows down from Monti Lattari. The shape is made by forcing the dough through rough bronze dies and letting it air dry.

This region is close to Naples, and thus Mt. Vesuvius, which dominates the area. I will never forget walking down a deserted street in Pompeii which perfectly framed the view of the summit of Vesuvius towering over it. I was imagining AD 79, but also realizing that this monster could go again, at any moment. Mt. Vesuvius is one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world as over three million people live in its shadow. Vesuvius has erupted many times in ancient history, with a massive explosion in 1800 BC that buried some Bronze Age settlements. Since AD 79 there have been many times it has blown: 172, 203, 222, 303, 379, 472, 512, 536, 685, 787, 860, 900, 968, 991, 999, 1006, 1037, 1049, 1073, 1139, 1150, 1270, 1347, and 1500, 1631, six times in the 18th century, eight times in the 19th century, and in 1906, 1929 and 1944. It hasn’t gone since 1944, but it’s not a leap of faith to assume that it might erupt again.

We know a bit about the eruption in AD 79 because of the writings of Pliny the Younger. At the time the Romans were not sure Vesuvius was volcanic as it hadn’t erupted for nearly 30o years and the rich soil of its slopes was densely planted with vineyards and gardens. The volcano erupted for two days. After the first explosion Pliny the Younger writes that his uncle, Pliny the Elder, went by sea towards the explosion to rescue a friend and observe the phenomena first hand. He never returned and died on a beach when the winds changed and they couldn’t leave by boat. The others with him survived, so it is assumed that he might have had a heart attack or stroke. Pliny the Younger’s careful descriptions have earned the respect of volcano experts, who named this explosive type of eruption after him, Plinian. We have a fondness for Pliny the Younger because he had a villa somewhere near our home and wrote about our valley.

If you want to add a little danger to your dinner you can order your own Vesuvio pasta through Eataly. It’s great with any recipe that calls for a pasta like a fuselli. Eataly suggests a simple ragu with sausage.

January 27, 2019 In Best Of, Chow, Live By Nancy

Spezzatura di maiale: nose to tail in action

After living in Tuscany for six years we were lucky enough to be invited to one of the most storied family events in Italy—the spezzatura di maiale—or the dividing of the pig. This tradition of using all parts of the pig has inspired chefs from Fergus Henderson of St. John in London—whose restaurants and cookbooks have popularized the idea of “nose to tail”—to Samin Nosrat, who filmed a pig being butchered in Italy for her cooking series “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.” An invitation to spezzatura di maiale offered the chance to go deeper than the popular coverage to see what this tradition is like in a family setting, as it has been done for generations.

For the majority of people in Italy, for hundreds of years, raising a pig was everything. I’ve learned that the ideas we have about the bounty of the Italian countryside are largely a modern construct. For most of history everyone but the aristocracy was barely getting by. Many of the oldest generation still living were raised in conditions of near-starvation because of Mussolini’s agricultural policies—for many years in the 1900s even plain pasta was a luxury. It was difficult to raise a pig to maturity because it required enough excess food to feed it. If at all possible, people raised two, one for their own use and one for the doctor. A kind of early medical insurance.

The pig is slaughtered in the winter because it is colder—the whole world becomes a refrigerator. A day or so after the pig is killed the spezzatura happens, which is a full day of work for four men (this seems to be an almost exclusively male task). Since the middle ages there have been butchers, called norcini, who traveled from town to town during the winter to do the spezzatura. Their skill with knives also made them the default surgeons and dentists.

After the intricate and precise work of cutting up the pig and making sausage, pancetta, salumi, prosciutto, and other things pork, there is a feast shared with friends and neighbors. When other families kill their pig it is their turn to host the festa. According to the family we joined this tradition has been largely unchanged during their lives, and it provides an opportunity to have some favorite foods, which are only available on this day.

We had no idea what to expect, and being a morally conflicted meat eater, I braced myself to be unnerved. But there was something about the atmosphere—the complete focus and attention of the men, the immaculate room, and the use of nearly every last part of the pig—that left me with feeling more of deep respect for the animal than anything else. This is an event that is not taken lightly. Very little of the meat is consumed fresh. The majority is preserved for use throughout the coming year. At the end of the day there were a couple of bones left, and that was it. Organs, skin, fat, cartilage … everything else was carefully used.

A bonus is that a breed of pig that was endangered, the Tuscan cinta senese, is now safely off the endangered list and thriving, because so many small farms, including this family, are raising them.

January 11, 2019 In Chow By Nancy

A very fine vintage

In the nearby farm stand where they grow organic vegetables in fields outside the door, and will harvest to your request, they also serve lunch. (The subject of another edition of Itch.) John and I had lunch there several days ago with friends and talked to the owner about the red wine he was serving, made from grapes he had grown and harvested. Our friend wanted to know what type of grapes were in it—pretty much the first question for any wine-maker. The owner responded that he had no idea. They were grapes that were growing on his property. And that he had added some white grapes into it as well.

December 26, 2018 In Best Of, Chow, Recipes By Nancy

How Santina makes agnolotti

Our reason for wanting to talk with grandmothers about cooking is to delve into a slice of Italian life: the role that nonne play in the family, traditions that are almost lost, and what all that means today, in modern Italy.

When we interviewed Santina about making agnolotti, a traditional Italian filled pasta, our goal was to capture more than just how to make it. Which we did. But those elements did complicate the edit. We decided to create an addendum to yesterday’s video, showing more practically how to actually make this wonderful dish, for those who want to roll up their sleeves.

So, here it is.

December 25, 2018 In Best Of, Chow, Recipes By Nancy

Making pasta with a grandmother

We are starting to develop our series on grandmothers cooking. Curious about what special things grandmothers make for the holidays, we were led to Santina, a pasta-making phenomenon. She always has fresh pasta she has made on hand to give to her family, including grandchildren, and great nieces and nephews. They frequently drop by for meals and keep her informed on the latest news in their lives.

We thought we’d be focusing on how Santina makes a filled pasta, agnolotti, but as is often the case here the people turn out to be more interesting than just what they do. Santina has inspired us to do two videos. This video gives you a sense of her special spirit, the role that a nonna often plays in Italian families, and what Christmas feasts are like in this small village. We wondered if there is a secret that Italian grandmothers have to keep their families legendarily close. We were surprised (and delighted by) the unexpected direction the answer to this question took, because of her wit.

Tomorrow we will share Santina, Part II, with some coaching and hints you need to make agnolotti, or any other fresh pasta, at home.

December 8, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

Italy in London?

On a recent trip to London I visited an Italian restaurant, Bernardi’s, which I’d read about in a Bloomberg review.

A starter arrived with some focaccia and olive oil and I started to talk with the waiter about the oil, which was surprisingly fresh and peppery. He told me was from Puglia, the only source for real olive oil, according to him.

He’d moved to London five years ago, and was soon to make his first trip back to Italy since he’d left. During the five years his extended family had visited nine times, including his 98-year old grandfather, who was a builder (“muratore,” or literally “builder of walls”) and is illiterate. His grandfather had never traveled much in Italy, let alone been on a plane, until his grandson moved to London. He’s now confident in airports, and loves to come to London, where he walks for hours, comparing building techniques. My waiter friend had just bought his first flat in his new home. Somehow his move had not only worked out well for him, but given a gift of adventure to his whole family.

Even in the middle of Marylebone I realized, yet again, what I love about the Italians. I remembered John telling me about the Italian woman he’d met on a plane, who had moved to Australia, who said that the thing she’d noticed most about the Italian diaspora is that they always land on their feet. I think that has something to do with a certain lightness about life.

On my walk to the restaurant I happened to pass a hotel where I’d stayed with my parents when I’d first moved to London for a year right after I’d graduated from university. Seeing the hotel brought back the feeling of fear my parents and I had in our stomachs that week—at the time, London was as foreign to my family as Mars. Looking back I can’t believe that my parents had the kind of trust in me (and the universe), support, and courage to let me listen to my heart and move. I am sure they knew in their souls that what they were seeding would eventually take me far away from them. That year in London ended up being one of the greatest adventures, and most important experiences, of my life. And it did result in my moving far away, permanently.

Bravi to the parents, and grandparents, who have the courage to set their children free to find their own paths, and find ways to expand their own worlds. May I be as bold.