Archive for September, 2007
When I think about putting my past years together into a cookbook, I think about what goes around the recipes. What is particular about my experience in my Italian kitchen that makes it any different to any other expatriate from any country at all who came here and cooked?
I can’t know the answer to that until I have talked to every expatriate cook, but I can figure out what’s been driving me.
First of all, I discovered that what I thought I knew about Italian cooking was mostly wrong. Even when I got halfway to right, it was still wrong. Most of the Italian meals I made for friends in the United States were comparatively complicated, heavy and depended too much on pasta. I thought finding prosciutto meant my job was done. I thought using blocks of Parmigiano Reggiano was the necessary step forward. I thought Pecorino was Pecorino. If I found and bought all the vegetables and creams and oils in the recipes, I felt like a winner.
Second, I thought making it right was difficult and that making it mine was essential.
Third, I thought fresh pasta, homemade or purchased was always superior to dried pasta.
What has happened to me is that step by step I walked into kitchens, asked questions and listened hard. That was essential for sure when I didn’t speak the language all that well. My neighbors got used to my dropping by at 12:30 and asked “What are you cooking today?” I was always invited to eat, and I always said no. I didn’t want them to quail the next time I knocked on the door. I just wanted to know what ordinary Italians really ate for their main meal of the day. I made a friend of the woman who is the best cook in the region and talked about food with her nearly all the time we spent together.
I went to culinary school to find out what was in the repertoire of kitchens that weren’t making dinner for ordinary Italians, and what techniques were used to make expensive foods practical.
I traveled to some other regions to taste their foods the way they make them on the spot.
I read histories of everyday life and what people eat, where and why. I learned to understand why a dish was considered strictly local, what made it perennial and why it got its name.
I then went into my own kitchen and with ingredients I bought from people who grew them, as much as possible, I cooked. I used, abused and experimented with one ingredient after another to see where I could take it without leaving Italy in the mind. And then I thought I was ready.
Other cooks still said, “I can’t do that!” or “My family would want cheese on that.” I pleaded that they would try the recipe as written once before throwing cheese at it. I deconstructed the recipes and divided the chores involved into the simple steps that comprise cooking. If a dish takes four hours to cook, I tried to point out ways that three and a half of those hours could be spent ignoring, or almost ignoring the cooking. After all, your oven won’t complain at being left alone, but your child, your work or the pool man might.
I’ve ended up with over one hundred recipes that make pure, clean and unfussy foods that are delicious. So am I done? Am I ready to index this thing and get it published. It seems not.
Read this and weep for me. The upshot seems to be that if you aren’t already in the public eye, there’s no market for your cookbook. Frankly, it sounds like even if you are, there may be no market. And if you have the right book, the public wants top quality pictures, but won’t pay the price for them. Maybe magazines are doing too good a job at providing wonderful pictures for a few bucks a month? (I find, however, a lot of magazine recipes are too complicated and have so many ingredients that the tastes are muddled.)
I admit to being a little discouraged, but then I read this and got a good laugh. A good laugh is sometimes all you need when life feels tough to take.
So off to Florence and back soon. Think on it.
September 22nd, 2007
he International Herald Tribune published a tip sheet on what your digital camera can do without a lot of input from you. The last paragraphs suggest an exercise that sounds really useful to me.
One of the readers here has sent me an email with photo help and I can’t wait to read it. It is unfortunately 19.1 mb and I haven’t been able to get it to download yet. It gets almost there and then resets. Boom. It means I haven’t been able to get any other mail, either, because they are all caught behind the big one.
September 21st, 2007
Jessica Brogan of In Search of Dessert, link always on your right, is February in the National Geographic Glimpse Abroad calendar!
I love it when I find the people I know are winners. I can remember when almost everything I knew about the world outside of Maine was what I saw in National Geographic. Go have a look at her photograph of the fish market in Barcelona.
September 21st, 2007
From Saturday to Saturday I will be in Florence with eg. Camera in hand I am ready to show what I see. The Mercato Centrale, yes, and the San Leandro market, but what else do you want the fashion crazed cook to report on?
September 20th, 2007
Or scraping hard to come up with something worth showing — really. When looking at today’s photos, my thought was, “Does she or doesn’t she; who cares?” What I’m seeing is very seldom covetable, and yet not ridiculous enough to post for a laugh, and certainly not interesting enough to spark off any philosophical debates. If it doesn’t sharpen up, Paris is our last hope.
I divided what I’ve seen into some categories. First category is nutty cousin. Have we not all got a friend or a relative who has nice clothes and is hopeless at putting them together? Are you related to any of these girls?
Didn’t Hermione actually dress better than that?
The next category is say what?
Even I wouldn’t wear that hat.
Last is things you might wear. Whew! I was afraid that London would be nude next year, and you know what their weather is like.
I actually love this one.
I could see the point here.
Is this the cousin or wearable? I’m not sure.
All photos are from the UK Telegraph coverage.
September 19th, 2007
Or anything else on Christopher Kane’s spring and summer runway show.
I’m watching every show coming out of London’s Fashion Week, but so far I haven’t seen much I’d pay money to wear.
UK Telegraph carries it all
September 18th, 2007
I am learning to use the new camera. Once I figure out what all the settings are, I should produce better photos, but this camera has possibilities the 10 year old one never dreamed of, and there’s definitely a learning curve. So yesterday I decided to make a very simple pasta and use the camera to illustrate the process while also exploring what I’ve read on the blogs of much better photographers than I.
The pasta is almost “aglio e olio” which is almost as simple as it gets with pasta. The only ones I can think of that are simpler is with just butter or with just oil.
These are the ingredients I used with the pasta.
I bought those cherry peppers to see how hot they were. Barb and I were discussing this only last week. The answer is pretty hot, but not atomic. I used half of one for one serving and it was pleasantly piquant for me, and maybe too hot for most Umbrians. The cherry tomatoes are from a Puglian vendor and are just as sugary sweet as I recall them being in Puglia. That could be a problem in some dishes, but it won’t be in this one. The photo was taken outside in full sun. Most good photographers recommend that, and I love the shadows and the flooding light. I wouldn’t love my pasta so much if it had to go outside before eating it.
I heated the water to boiling, salted it and put the penne in to cook before I started the sauce. The penne I used are from Gragnano, which is a word you should look for. It’s a place where they still do dried pasta the traditional way, and it doesn’t cost more. It actually costs less than better-known pastas. It takes up to 10 minutes (they say) to cook penne, but I think between 8 and 9. That’s how long it will take to make the sauce.
I heated the frying pan and added good olive oil, then the minced half of the cherry pepper and about 1/4 teaspoon of salt to sauté for a few minutes. I then added one minced clove of garlic and a ladle full of the pasta water, which is about 1/2 cup. Five minutes into the cooking of the pasta, I added cherry tomatoes which I had halved or quartered, depending on the size, and this is what it looked like at that point. Note that I see the steam, but the lens isn’t steaming up. I wonder if that is because it is so much smaller than the previous lens?
Once the pasta was done to my decidedly al dente taste, I drained it and quickly added it to the simmering sauce, plated it and put a little aged, grated Pecorino on it. I later added more, but I didn’t take the chance that it wouldn’t taste right and my pasta would already be covered in it. There are many things I will do for this blog but eating really bad food is not one of them.
That’s the least successful of all the photos. I haven’t yet really got a handle on doing close-up shots yet and the part that is in focus is in the middle of the plate while the leading edge is out of focus. I bought this camera largely for it’s superior ability to deliver macro photography, so obviously I need to read that part of the manual a few more times.
But the pasta was good, maybe even great. I could have eaten the same bowl twice, as a matter of fact. As they always say, the first law of Italian cookery is to choose the ingredients right and to respect them. It turns out that cherry peppers and very sweet cherry tomatoes make pleasant companions in the mouth.
It would also work to toss in some cooked white beans toward the end. What I’ve made here is the beginning of many Puglian pastas, to which are added the vegetables and fish which are the important things in the Puglian kitchen. This spiced oil would end up with beans and mussels to make the single best thing I ate last Spring in Puglia. I am going to offer this to Ruth for Presto Pasta Night, but shan’t be hurt if she turns it down, because it is just as much about a camera as it is about pasta.
I need to go back. To Puglia
The next day: Today I did the same thing only added beans instead of pasta. That was yummers!
So then I wandered over to Olga’s to talk about what an Umbrian would do with these peppers, and there were all the roofers taking coffee in her kitchen. They all had chili stories!
When they left, Olga and I decided to see where the heat is. We slivered off first flesh, nope. Then seeds, nope. I found it in the membranes and had to be stuffed with bread because I was ON FIRE!
September 17th, 2007
Net a Porter is a site that could be more practical for the non-rich than the latest copy of Vogue. Agree with the choices or not, an attempt is made to present things real people can actually wear. Varying levels of courage may be required. Prices are baldly stated.
For me, however, it is a lesson in practicality. My budget doesn’t stretch to €1000 skirts. When I clicked to see all the skirts, most not €1000, certainly, my thought was, “If I want almost anything on that page I could make it or get someone else to make it.” Most skirts are the easiest article of clothing to make. Not, unfortunately, stitched down pleated skirts, which are the one skirt flattering in the correct length to almost everyone and still offering complete freedom of movement. But all the rest are easy. You choose the fabric, the style, the length and it takes from one to three hours to get it onto your body.
And yet, very few of us bother. Why is that? A good seamstress can even relocate darts and seams to take pounds off or to accommodate our peculiarities, whereas even for €1000 an off-the-rack skirt isn’t designed to do that for anyone but the fitting model. Who is perfect.
Most people have never even thought of hiring a dressmaker to make anything other than a prom dress or a wedding dress. Many people have sewing machines gathering dust unless there’s a household repair to be done. Unlike this woman, most people don’t even think about creating inspired fashion for themselves, but if they love clothes instead save up their pennies to buy a longed-for item or wait for the shops at a mall to knock it off.
And yet, once upon a time, women couldn’t wear what they couldn’t make. I don’t want to go back to those days! I do wonder why we can’t do a little more, though, just as we do in the kitchen. Only a privileged few can eat at The French Laundry but many can buy the cookbook and make some of the food.
This is all wondering out loud. I do have one message for the day. If you don’t think your legs are slim enough, don’t wear the now-stylish opaque black tights, but instead wear black tights with whatever level of transparency suits you. Opaque tights make tree trunks of legs, translucent tights cast shapely shadows. Really.
September 16th, 2007
I had a conversation with a woman in the market this morning. We were talking about which plums were the best to cook, and I mentioned having made the torta with plums and goat cheese.
Said she, “Oh, a savory torta. As a side dish?”
I assured her that it was a dessert.
“But with goat cheese in it? How can that be?”
All I could do was shrug, because the American taste for salty with sweet makes what are to me winning desserts, but most Italians think if it isn’t all sweet, it isn’t dessert. I fight them all the time to prevent them changing pie crusts to sweet crusts. When I make the original American pies, like lemon meringue, apple, peach, they love them. Swept away. But give them the recipe and they will make the crust sweet, cook the meringue separately so that it is dry and crunchy, they have a hard time breaking away from their kitchen culture.
I suspect that we do, too. I think you could tell me lots of ways in which my Italian recipes sound wrong from within your kitchen culture. I hope you will tell me, because this fascinates me at the moment.
September 15th, 2007
I have lived here for just short of seven years. For all those years I have shopped for vegetables and fruits in the street markets, on Thursday and Saturday, and the covered market everyday but Monday. Local stuff abounds in growing season, but although we’re warmer, we are at about the same latitude as Maine, which means the days shorten and things stop producing very well if at all.
I was kicking myself because for one reason or another, I’d missed a lot of the season’s produce. Tomatoes are just about over, even though we’re still far from frost. But a couple of weeks ago when there was a market displacement due to a feast for St. Bartolomeo, I found that the trucks that sell outside the walls are from Puglia. They may be bragging, but Puglia says they have a seven month summer. I dropped by today and goodness gracious, great balls of fire! What incredible produce!
I dragged home three different kinds of plums, a small sack of hot cherry peppers and three kilos of tomatoes. Everything is being washed now in preparation for various preserving techniques. I was also given a beautiful bunch of the most honey-like grapes I’ve ever tasted. I tried to buy them, but the boy shrugged me off with a smiling, “Enjoy.”
Just yesterday an old man at the parking in Pienza let me out without payment. Was it just the joking about why he wasn’t there when I drove in? Or am I becoming a cute little old lady who is given things as she moves through life? I’m really not sure what to wish for.
September 15th, 2007
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