you have to be an expatriate from anywhere who blogs from Italy. Valerie of 2 Baci in a Pinon Tree wants to make an expat bloggers map of Italy, so run on over there and compete … with me natch. If I win I keep the chocolate and I know just the person to give the Artusi book, which I have had for many years now.
Add comment December 14th, 2007
I have this theory, and I am willing to be told I am wrong in this. My theory is that the familiar foods we call comfort foods can make us fat. Why would that be? Because we invest those foods with emotional content. We pull them out when life is hard, when the weather is terrible or when we feel bad for some reason. It’s often the first thing that comes to mind when we want to comfort a friend, too.
So, if it’s been a hard week and things haven’t gone our way, we make mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, stew, or whatever we find comforting and that reminds us of easier times. These are all things we know very well. Our tongue responds with impulses to the brain that open the doors to good memories and good feelings.
And then we overdo it. After three to five bites we’re relying on experience, and our taste buds take a rest, but we don’t stop.
Foods don’t really have emotional content. They have triggers to parts of us that have remembered emotional content. Whether the memory is good or bad, we connect to it. I once had a liverwurst sandwich hours before coming down with a bad flu, and I have never had another liverwurst anything since, although I used to love it.
Knowing that this is true for me, I don’t fix comfort foods of my past when I feel down. I, instead, try something outside of my experience and try to lose myself in learning new tastes, which for me is as distracting as mashed potatoes.
I do not believe that nothing says loving like something from the oven. Things from the oven are a delight. They are not love, but might inspire a memory of love, and not a thing more. If I am capable of thinking, I can inspire memories of love that don’t have anything to do with doughnuts, brownies or even holiday roast turkeys. If I am incapable of thinking, I take an orange or an apple and get over it.
I am 5’-1 ½” tall. As much as I cook, I could easily weigh 200 pounds if I let food and love get mixed up. Since I have the opportunity every four weeks of carrying 50-pound bags of salt, I know how I would feel if I gained even only 50 pounds. It wouldn’t be nice. Sometimes it even hurts my back for a day or two.
Divest yourself of habit and your mouth will deal with surprise. You’ll taste more. If food is an adventure rather than a happy-pill, you’ll know when you’ve had enough and won’t keep putting it in your mouth to keep the love going. Unless it is just an extraordinary thing you’ve happened on, in which case you may need a life coach to pull you off the plate. That would be me with the Sardegnan risotto with vinegared pork, which I ate yet one more time yesterday in Florence! You know what? My recipe is pretty good. I need to leave the pork in the vinegar longer, two days, I’m told, and make a more interesting tomato sauce as well.
That brings me to spaghetti sauce, which is a rather stupid term in Italian. There is no one sauce, as you know if you read this blog. I have recently found, however, that in the USA people do tend to think that there is something called spaghetti sauce and that their recipe is it. They also think you can buy it in a jar or a can. Well, you can buy various sauces in jars, cans and the refrigerated cases in Italy. The best I can say of any of them is: it’s alright. I never said that in the US, because they were too sweet.
There are thousands of ways to serve pasta wherever you are. Sometimes it’s even spaghetti. Most of the ways to serve pasta can also be used to sauce cooked grains or polenta, too. Just a glance at Presto Pasta Night ever Friday should convince you that this time I’m right.
Here is a modernized ragù that I like more often than the original recipe by Artusi, a meat sauce I find very rich and that for me lacks the brightness of modern foods. I like the spike of a little acidity from tomatoes, the slight smokiness and the reduced fat. I am still a dedicated Artusi fan, and I will still on occasion make his ragù, but this is my new fall back recipe, because it lends itself to other foods besides pasta, and yet is a wonderful thing with pasta, too. This is a spag bol, a polenta sauce, and today I ate it on boiled farro or spelt. That looked bad, but it was delicious. I used a tiny bit of Parmigiano Reggiano, but not much, because it was full-flavored on its own. This is a sauce to make up in quantity and freeze in portions that make sense for your home. It takes about 15 minutes to chop the vegetables, another 15 minutes to sauté them, perhaps ten minutes to cook the meat, and then, other than the occasional visit, it cooks itself.
A 21st century Ragù
1 cup of chopped onions
1 cup of chopped carrot
1 cup of chopped celery and leaves
2 cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of salt
1 small chili pepper (peperoncino) broken in half
1 tablespoon dried oregano or 3 tablespoons of fresh basil – if you use fresh, add it toward the end of cooking
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
100 grams (3.5 ounces) diced smoked pancetta or bacon (cook it first and then drain the fat if you use bacon, then pick the cooking up from the oil *and proceed)
2 pounds (1 kilo) of lean chopped meat – all beef or vitellone or part that and part pork
A glug of fortified wine like Sherry or Marsala
About 1 cup of milk—fat free is fine
Water
1 can (14 ounces, these days) of peeled canned tomatoes or a similar quantity of peeled fresh tomatoes
Salt to taste
Nutmeg to taste
Heat a large frying pan with the oil*. Sauté the chopped vegetables and the pancetta or cooked bacon with the salt very slowly until they are starting to brown a bit. Add the wine and cook until it dries out. Add the dried herb and the chili pepper, and then the chopped meat. Stir it up to mix while the meat loses its red color.
Add milk almost to the top of the mixture, lower the heat and walk away until you can hear it sizzling again. This took about 30 minutes for me. Then add hot water to cover and leave it alone again, checking back every 30-40 minutes to keep it wet until it has cooked about two hours and then allow the juices to evaporate away. The meat should then be very tender.
Add the tomatoes and break them up with a wooden spoon. Simmer that mixture ten minutes, then taste for salt and correct for it.
Allow it to cool in the pan, and then fill plastic freezer bags with the quantity you think you will use.
When you thaw and reheat it, grate nutmeg at the end until it suits you. Some like a lot, some none.
This recipe made 4 packages of something over a cup for my freezer.
There’s nothing tricky or out of bounds about this recipe. It’s a great thing to have in your fridge freezer, ready to pull out when tagliatelle, cooked grain or polenta is the right thing to eat. It will make a lasagna much richer than my taste, but certainly a tasty one.
Give it a try. You have nothing to lose but the handy extra jars from the Prego you thought you liked.
7 comments December 14th, 2007
