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.
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.
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.
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