AUNTIE PASTA: Back of the Box Recipes

CHIAVARI, Italy - Even before the idea for this blog was fully developed, I knew I wanted the Auntie Pasta page to be about food, but not necessarily about recipes. Since then I have included recipes on this blog, and in going through my collection of recipes the other day, I found there were others that I would like to share with you as well.

 Piansano, Italy - Where It All Began

What got me thinking about recipes was a review of new cookbooks in the New York Times, including one cookbook that claims to teach you what your grandmother didn’t. Grandmothers seem to play an important part in the cooking lives of a lot of people, including me.

My Grandmother was a goddess in the kitchen. I can still taste her tripe in tomato sauce with just a hint of nutmeg, her crisp roasted chicken with lemon and the roasted potatoes she served with it, the plump Roman artichokes stuffed garlic slivers and mintuccia from the Old Country, and the list goes on. Yet I never saw her open a cookbook. In fact I don’t think there were any cookbooks in her house. She just seemed to know what to do. Like most women of her generation, she learned to cook by watching and doing what she was told when she was a kid growing up in Italy.

 Obviously Not Me, But You Get the Idea

Preparing food was serious business in Italy at the turn of the 20th century, there wasn’t a lot of it and there was no messing around in the kitchen. She carried that philosophy with her to the New World as a young bride and mother, and when she told me to watch the pot of simmering snails on the stove and make sure none of them escaped, you’d better believe my five year old eyes were glued to that pot lid.

By the time I was given the responsibility of guarding the snails I had eaten, and helped prepare all types of greens, tripe and octopus, rabbit and venison, I had rolled meatballs, cut fresh pasta into strips of fettucine, chopped parsley and knew the difference between regular mint and the mintuccia that Aunt Mary sent from Italy. I was a cook in training and didn't know it.

 

 Not Really Child's Play

Sometimes it was difficult not to start playing with the gooey mess that water and flour make before it becomes pasta dough, or pressing ground meat around my ten little fingers and playing an imaginary hamburger piano. It wouldn’t take much to keep me in line though; a look would usually do it. That was the culinary discipline part of my training.

When I was a young bride I would often call my mother and ask her for recipes. She was not a patient person and her instructions were short and to the point. Sometimes I would get recipes from my aunts, scribbled on scraps of paper with vague proportions and approximate instructions. They were my mentors, and even though I was young and had a lot to learn, they treated me as an equal, cooks talking to another cook.

 A Future Top Chef

In those days before Gourmet Magazine and Food and Wine, before Julia Child made culinary history with her French Chef television series, and long, long before the advent of celebrity chefs, that is how we all learned to cook.

A certain amount of knowledge was always assumed and the key points of a dish were often all you needed, i.e. clean and boil artichokes before you season them and put them in the oven to bake - a small, but crucial detail that results in being able to eat them rather than throw them away, as I did on my first solo flight into the wonderful world of artichokes.

The Recipe is Short and Sweet

Now that I live in Italy I try some of the recipes I find on the back of boxes of pasta and packages of things I buy, but I’ve hesitated to include them in this blog because the instructions are often vague and the measurements not just approximate, but often in code. But I’m wrong. You are cooks and if we speak cook to cook, I think it will all work out. With that in mind, here is a Sicilian fish recipe that uses frozen codfish, but you can use any firm, white fish, fresh or frozen.

Fiori di Merluzzo di Capperi (Cod Filets with Capers)

 

Defrost the fish. Chop a bunch of parsley and two garlic cloves. In a frying pan heat 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil and when it is barely hot, add half of the chopped parsley, garlic and the fish. Season with salt and pepper. When the fish filets have cooked on one side, turn them over. Add ½ glass of dry white wine and when it has evaporated add a can of chopped tomatoes.

Let the fish and tomatoes cook for about 15 minutes and then add the remaining parsley and garlic, a pinch of dried oregano and two teaspoons of capers. Cook for an additional 5 minutes. The recipe suggests serving the fish with mashed or boiled potatoes but I prefer serving it over white rice.

 It Kinda Looks Like This

Two suggestions: (1) use capers that have been preserved in brine, not in salt, and rinse them well; and (2) I found that if you fry a sliced onion in the olive oil before you add the parsley, garlic and fish, it gives the dish another layer of flavor.

AUNTIE PASTA: The Color of Summer - Aubergine

CHIAVARI, ITALY - One of Italy’s most famous salads is Sicilian caponata, a sweet and sour mix of aubergines, aka eggplant, celery, tomatoes and onions. And like much of Sicily’s cuisine it was brought to the island by the Arabs, or in this case the main ingredient, eggplant, was brought to Sicily by the Arabs. The Arabs have contributed much to the enrichment of Sicilian food and the Sicilian language as well, and continue to do so.    

 

 Street Market in Palermo, Sicily

You see it not just in the ingredients such as lemons and oranges, rice and saffron and sweet and sour combinations like caponata, but in the way the Sicilians combine fruit, meat, nuts and vegetables.  Sugar and almonds, and the techniques to make sweets using those ingredients, like confetti, were also brought to the island by the Arabs, along with sorbetto.

From the very beginning eggplant had a difficult time being accepted in Europe. In fact in Italy it was called mela insana, or crazy apple, which later linguistically morphed into melanzane in Italian. People really thought they would become insane if they ate it, so they didn’t. Part of the problem was that eggplant is not a vegetable you can eat raw like carrots or celery, it doesn’t taste good and it really is slightly toxic, so it is easy to understand their reluctance to pick up a fork and dig in.

 An Eggplant Plant

One interesting bit of trivia I found was that during the Second World War, the leaves of the eggplant plant were dried in the sun and used as a substitute for tobacco, and cigarettes and cigars were actually manufactured using the eggplant leaves. 

 

A few years ago I made caponata for a party organized for and by a group of New Yorkers in Milan. At one point I remember asking one of the Italian guests, a Sicilian, what she thought of the caponata, not letting on that I had made it. She said, quite bluntly, that it was ‘schifo’ – in other words pretty bad. Needless to say I was crushed as most of the time my food is pretty good. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong.

It turns out I hadn’t really done anything wrong, it was a decent caponata, it just wasn’t the type of caponata she was used to. I had added peppers to the mix and classic Sicilian caponata doesn’t call for peppers.  Even the tomatoes are a relatively new addition, well, new in Italian time which could mean anything from yesterday to 500 years ago. It’s a good thing I didn’t make Sicilian "Baroque" caponata which calls for a sprinkle of powdered unsweetened Modica Chocolate before serving. I wonder what kind of reaction that would have gotten from her.

 

Caponata - The Real McCoy

Today’s recipe was taken from an old recipe book by Arabella Boxer titled Mediterranean Cookbook. I chose Ms. Boxer’s recipe because it has the same ingredients and amounts as Italian caponata recipes with the added benefit of European and American measurements.  However, because the Italians do things a little differently than Ms. Boxer, I’ve also included caponata making suggestions culled from several Italian cooking sites that you might find interesting.

Ingredients

1lb/450 g eggplant

1 medium onion

Approx ¼ pint or 150 ml extra virgin olive oil

2 stalks of celery (without leaves)

½ lb/225 g tomatoes

12 green olives (no pits)

1 tablespoon of capers (well rinsed of salt or brine)

Black pepper

1 tablespoon of sugar

2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar

Cut the unpeeled eggplants in cubes about ½ inch/1 cm square. Lay them in layers in a colander and sprinkle each layer with salt. Cover with a plate and place in a bowl large enough to collect the bitter juice from the eggplants, and weigh the plate down with something heavy, like a 2.5kilo/5lb bag of sugar or beans and let sit for at least 1 hour.

Chop the onion and cook it gently in 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a sauté’ pan. Dice the celery and add to the onions when it starts to color. Let them cook together for a few minutes. Then skin and rough chop the tomatoes and add them to the celery and onion mix. Cook gently until it thickens, then add the olives, capers, sugar and vinegar. Do not add salt.

In another frying pan, heat the remaining oil. Rinse and dry the eggplant cubes and sauté them. When they are brown and soft, lift them out with a slotted spoon and mix them in with the other vegetables. Pour the caponata into a shallow dish and allow to cool to room temperature. Do not chill. Serves 4 or 5 as a side dish.

Keep caponata in a covered dish in the refrigerator, and bring to room temperature before serving.

Here are some of the suggestions given by the Italians. You’ll notice they also add pine nuts which gives the dish a nice texture.

1.  Boil celery chunks for a couple of minutes, drain them, dry them with paper towel, and cook them in a little olive oil. When they are cooked put them in a colander over a bowl to allow the excess oil to drain off.

2.  Fry onion in olive oil then add capers, pine nuts and olives.

3.  Add fresh tomatoes, cut into pieces more or less the same size as the celery

4.  Cook over medium high heat for at least 20 minutes.

5.  Rinse the eggplant cubes after they have drained for an hour, and dry thoroughly with paper towels. Fry them in olive oil in a separate pan. When the eggplant cubes are cooked, and browned, add them to the onions.

6.  Add the cooked celery chunks

7.  Then add the sugar, which has been dissolved in ½ glass of vinegar, and cook it with the vegetables, stirring often, until the vinegar smell is less strong. Let sit for at least one hour. Serve at room temperature.

LIFE: Awww, Nuts

SARONNO, Italy – Now here is a perfect example of why it took Italy more than 2,000 years to unite. Last week I posted a recipe for nut sauce (http://thisitalianlife.blogspot.com/2012/02/auntie-pasta-nuts-to-you.html) that was credited to Bartolomeo Stefani, chef to the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua. It was a typical Renaissance dish served in the princely court of Mantua. 

Freshly Peeled Walnuts

I don’t remember saying that the Mantua nut sauce was the ONLY nut sauce in Italy, and so I don’t know what the Ligurians  are so worked up about. Everyone knows that the Ligurian nut sauce is way older than the Mantua nut sauce, which may make it the first nut sauce developed on these shores. The key word is may. 

 Sicilian Nut Pesto and Pesto Rosso

If you do an internet search for “nut sauce” you’ll find more than one web site offering recipes for nut sauce including http://www.makepesto.com/classics/sicilian-nut-pesto/ which offers a nut and basil pesto recipe which is even more stripped down than mine. Here, take a look.

Sicilian Nut Pesto

Ingredients: 

1 bunch basil, leaves picked
1 – 2 cloves garlic, peeled & chopped
1 cup cashews
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
squeeze lemon

Whiz together in a food processor. Eat.

They even call their sauce “pesto” which rankles the Ligurians no end. Truth be known any sauce that you make by pounding the beejeebers out of a bunch of ingredients can legitimately be called “pesto” since pesto comes from the verb “pestare” which means to pound.

Except for the fact that the Sicilian nut pesto recipe calls for cashews, which don’t grow in Italy, the connecting thread for all of these nut sauces is that when they were developed at a time when people made food out of whatever ingredients they found in their area. If they were rich, like the Gonzaga Dukes, they could afford to add exotic bits like cinnamon and nutmeg and jazz the dishes up a bit but otherwise they were limited to what grew outside their door. Think about it, if you walked out your door today and tried to put together a meal using what you found growing about your house or apartment, how successful would that be?

For me it would mean a gloppy soup of chopped grass and boiled twigs. Not particularly appetizing, so I give the Italians a lot of credit for what they managed to do with a handful of nuts.

For the sake of equality of all, here’s the Ligurian recipe,  “Tocco de nux”, which is delicious served with Genovese pansotti (little bellies), a Ligurian version of ravioli.

Ligurian Tocco de Nux

Ingredients

Garlic  - 1 clove  

Milk - 250 ml

Marjoram – small bunch of fresh

Walnuts – 250 grams

Extra virgin olive oil – ½ glass

Crustless bread – 40 grams

Parmigiano Reggiano cheese – 40 grams

Pine nuts – 30 grams

Salt q.b. (you know this means to taste, right?)

First blanch the walnuts in boiling water for about 5 minutes (1), or long enough that the skins peels off easily. After 5 minutes, drain the nuts and let them cool.  In the meantime cube the crustless bread and put it in a bowl along with the milk (2) and when the bread has absorbed the milk squeeze them and set them aside, saving the milk.(3).   

 Peel the walnuts one by one (4) and put them in a food processor (or pestle), together with the pine nuts, garlic, paremesan cheese (5) and the oil (6) .  

Add the bread, sprinkle in the marjoram (7) and whiz together adding a little milk (you can use the milk you soaked the bread in), and mix until the cream is dense (8) then add the salt. The nut sauce (9) is now ready to serve over plain pasta, ravioli (not meat filled) or pansotti.  

Note: It’s a lot easier to just buy already peeled walnuts, which is the way all packaged walnuts are sold.

AUNTIE PASTA: There's Something About ...

SARONNO, Italy - There is something about the sunny flavors in caponata that conjure up thought of sun and sea and Sicily. While the dish gets its name from one of its ingredients, capers, its main ingredient is eggplant (aubergines). Maybe the dish should be called melanzatta instead.

 Sicilian Caponata

Caponata is another example of a Sicilian dish whose origins lie in the Middle East. Like much of Sicily’s cuisine, caponata was introduced to the island by the Arabs. They ruled Sicily from the year 827 to 1061 and through their highly effective irrigation techniques, they brought water to the cities and the fields, a crucial element to farming in this arid land. In Palermo you can still see the subterranean waterways known as ‘qanats’. 

Street Market, Palermo, Sicily

They ruled Sicily for a little more than two centuries but their influence was nothing short of monumental. Under their administration, the island's population doubled as dozens of towns were founded and cities repopulated. By introducing irrigation techniques to the island, they were able to totally change what the Sicilians grew and ate. It was the Arabs who brought sugar cane, cotton, eggplant, dates, oranges and other citrus fruits to Sicily. And while you see their influence in many Sicilian recipes, more significantly, they changed Sicilian society itself. To this day, many social attitudes found in Sicily are direct decedents of the Arabs who ruled a thousand years ago.  

Eggplant on the Vine

There are a number of caponata recipes including those that call for artichokes or sweet peppers. But regardless of which recipe you use, the primary ingredient is eggplant, followed by celery, green olives, tomatoes (a modern addition), onions, capers, virgin olive oil, vinegar and sugar. The ingredients must be prepared carefully. The celery, for example, should not be overcooked and must remain firm. The cured or salted capers must be thoroughly rinsed. The eggplant may be slightly steamed and then sautéd, though some purists prefer frying.

Here's the basic recipe.

Ingredients: 8 medium size aubergines (eggplants), 200 grams of peeled mature tomatoes, 2 medium size sweet white or yellow onions, the heart of a large celery, 200 grams of pitted large cured firm green olives, 200 grams of capers (if salted soak in water and drain to remove salt), extra virgin olive oil, white vinegar, sugar, salt.

Preparation: Cut the unpeeled eggplants into chunks of about one inch (or two centimeter squares). This is not a “written in stone” recipe, so feel free to make adjustments. Cook the cubed eggplant by steaming it in a large, covered pot until completely cooked, but still firm. (Don't boil them.) Drain well and set aside. 

Chop the tomatoes into small pieces or a thick pulp, without discarding the juice or seeds. Chop the onions into medium pieces or thin slices. Cut the celery stalks into pieces about one inch long. Discard leaves. (It’s really best to cut eggplant, tomato and celery in more or less the same sizes, it makes it easier to eat). Cut the olives in half. 

In a large pan, saute the onions and celery pieces in olive oil. The celery should be lightly cooked, firm but not raw. Add the tomato pulp and bring the mixture to a boil, then simmer for a few minutes until the sauce changes color to a lighter red. At this point, simmer over low heat for another 4-6 minutes. Add the eggplants, olives and capers to the mixture. Also add a few tablespoons each of olive oil, vinegar and sugar. Stir gently and allow to simmer covered (steaming) for about five minutes over medium-low heat until mixture thickens but doesn't burn. 

Remove from heat and allow to cool. Salt to taste. Then chill for at least four hours before serving.

Caponata is also good as a vegetarian meal served over rice or couscous. 

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