LIFE: Montallegro

SARONNO, Italy – There is a special place high above the town of Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera, that has fascinated me for all the twenty plus years I have lived here. It’s called Montallegro. There isn’t much up there, a church and a couple of hotel/restaurants and some hiking paths through the woods that lead to Portofino on one side and Chiavari on the other, but I am continually drawn to it. 

The View from Il Pellegrino

It’s a very peaceful place, beyond the reach of the hustle and bustle of the posh seaside towns below. Behind the church there is a path through the woods with the stations of the cross, and at the end of the path there is a small hotel/restaurant. But more about that later.  

Up, Up and Away to Montallegro

The centerpiece of Montallegro is the Sanctuary of Montallegro and the many ex-votos that hang on its walls. It was built during the 16^th century, a time when Rapallo was attacked and sacked by the Ottomans and Barbary pirates. Rapallo was only a village of about 1,300 people, so it was easy for the famous Turkish pirate, Alì Dragut Rais, to overtake the small army, sack the village and capture a good many of the town inhabitants and take them off to Algeria to sell as slaves.   

The Sanctuary of Montallegro

It was a devastating event. The townsfolk then built a castle/fortress near the waterfront, got themselves a cannon, and from that point on were able to protect themselves from further attacks. Both the castle and the cannon are still there even though the pirates are long gone.

But less than ten years after the attack by Ali Dragut Rais, Rapallo once again became a battleground. This time the war was between the two local noble families, the Bianchi and the Del Torre, who were fighting each other for control of the territory. At the same time, an equally dangerous threat was that of the plague, which had killed thousands of Europeans, and was spreading throughout Liguria. If by some miracle you managed to avoid dying from the plague, you then had a good chance of dying from small pox or TB and if not those diseases then of hunger because of  the famine caused by the fact that no one was tending the fields which were flooding because of the torrential rains.   

Rapallo, Sea Front and Castle

In other words, life was tough. It was during this period that a farmer, Giovanni Chichizola of Canevale, claimed that the Virgin Mary came to him while he was tending his goats in the hills above Rapallo, and told him to build a church on that site. There’s actually more to this story, but I’ll save that for another Sunday. The point is the church was built and even during the period of construction, life seemed to miraculously improve for the people of Rapallo.

The townspeople thanked the Virgin Mary for their improved fortune and began showing their thanks by bringing ex-votos to the church and putting them up on the walls. Farmers would give thanks for healthy crops, the merchants and artisans for continued success. Even seamen and fishermen would go to the church and make their vows and pray to the Virgin Mary to keep them safe at sea. 

A Sailor's Ex-Voto

Just because the pirates weren’t attacking the town any more didn’t mean that they were not lying in wait behind one of the many coves that line the Ligurian coast, ready to pounce on the ships hauling cargo or bringing in treasure from far- away places.  And let us not forget the ever present danger of storms at sea and what that represented to fragile fishing boats or sailing ships propelled by men pulling oars when the wind blew hard from more than one direction.

So yes, if they did survive, even the salty sailors would trek up the mountain and show their gratitude with a heart or a painting or a souvenir brought back from where ever they were. From its position high above the town, Montallegro was the perfect place to sit and give thanks to the Virgin Mary for their survival for they knew just how precarious their journey had been.  

A Silver Ex-Voto

But I’m not a sailor or a merchant or even a farmer, I’m not even a believer but there is something spiritual about being up in Montallegro that brings me peace. I cannot think of a better way to spend an afternoon than  sitting out under the trees at Il Pellegrino and just thinking about things and enjoying that feeling of renewal that I get when I’m there.

AUNTIE PASTA: Sardinian Sapore

SARONNO, Italy – My cousin Joanne wrote to me a while back asking if I could convert the metric measurements in some of the recipes I post on the blog to American measurements. It’s a problem since I live in a place where everything is metric and I’ve never really had much faith in the conversion tables, so my suggestion to her was to buy a small, inexpensive food scale. 

Italian Tuna Fish

Believe me, living in a metric world has been difficult for me as well, and to this day I still don’t know how tall I am or how much I weigh, a small detail that seems to make Italian medical professionals a little suspicious of my mental capacity. I found it depressing that my dress size has gone from a perfectly acceptable 11 to a monstrous 48 and my bust line grew from a 34 to a whopping 86. It was the same with the lira, which took me forever to adjust to and just as I was getting the hang of thinking of 20,000 lira as pocket change, they went and converted our currency to euros. So I get it. I’m just not quite sure what to do about it.

I’ve tried to solve the problem by offering recipes that don’t need exact amounts, recipes that you can customize to your taste by adding a little more or a little less of an ingredient depending on what you have on hand. One of my favorite flexible recipes is pasta with tuna. This is an absolutely delicious thing to eat if, and it’s a big if, you use Italian tuna fish packed in olive oil. I know the trend in the U.S.A. is to use low fat, low salt, packed in water tuna, but unfortunately it has absolutely no taste. No, I take that back, it does have a taste, it tastes like cardboard, which is why you usually have to gop it up with mayo and other flavor enhancers.

The Real Deal

Today’s recipe calls for Malloreddus, (gnocchetti sardi)  a type of small pasta that originated in Sardinia. You can use any type of pasta you want, including spaghetti, but small, firm pasta, like Malloreddus, are really the best. If you don't mind paying a little more, buy Ventresca tuna. This tuna comes from the belly of the fish, it’s what sushi bars call toro. It has a creamy texture and a deep, buttery flavor and the less you do to it the better. This recipe also calls for pesto. If you have it on hand, great, use it, but it is not essential. What is essential is a top quality virgin olive oil, preferably from Liguria.  

This is an easy, no cook (except for the pasta) recipe that you can whip up in 10 minutes. 

PASTA with TUNA

Ingredients for 4 people

350 g of Malloreddus pasta (Sardinian gnocchetti)

200 g of tuna or ventresca packed in olive oil

 5  cherry tomatoes

 120 g of pesto

 Extra virgin olive oil  

salt

Preparation

Drain the tuna or ventresca and cut it into small pieces. Wash the cherry tomatoes and cut them in half or in quarters, depending on how big they are. Put the tuna and the tomatoes in a large serving bowl and add three teaspoons of extra virgin olive oil and a pinch of salt. Mix well.

Cook the pasta in boiling water. When cooked, but not overcooked – they should be al dente – drain them and add them to the tuna and tomatoes. Add two teaspoons of extra virgin olive oil and the pesto. Mix and serve immediately.

LIFE: Valentine's Day

SARONNO, Italy – Tuesday is Valentine’s Day. It’s a rosy hearts and flowers kind of day where women expect  a romantic card and gift from their significant others, and guys know they’d better not knock on the door empty handed. 

The Birth of Venus, the Roman Goddess of Love  by Sandro Botticelli

Valentine’s Day wasn’t always called Valentine’s Day though. In the beginning, around the 4^th century, it was a pagan rite of passage, a tribute to the Roman God Lupercus. Every spring the names of teenage girls were placed in a box and randomly drawn out by teenage boys. The girls would then become the “companion” of the boys who drew their name, and they would be together for mutual entertainment and pleasure, until the next spring when another the process would be repeated and everyone would change partners. 

As Christianity began to spread, the Church was determined to put an end to this eight hundred year fertility rite, and started researching for a “lovers” saint to replace the Roman God Lupercus.  They settled on Valentino, a bishop who had been clubbed to death and had his head cut off two hundred years earlier.

Valentino had made the mistake of enraging the mad emperor Claudius II by protesting Claudius’ edict forbidding marriage. Claudius believed that married men made poor soldiers because they were reluctant to leave their families for battle. Since the empire needed soldiers, Claudius, never afraid to do what he thought was best for the empire, outlawed marriage.

As the Bishop of Interamma, Valentine, (Valentino), invited couples to wanted to marry to come to him in secret. When Claudius learned about this ‘friend of lovers”, he had the bishop brought to Rome and gave him a choice:  convert to paganism and worship the Roman Gods, or have his head cut off.  

Saint Valentino

Valentino turned down the Emperor’s offer and was soon thrown in prison to await his fate. While he was waiting to be executed he fell in love with the jailer’s blind daughter and, it was said, miraculously restored her sight. Just before he was taken away to be clubbed, stoned and decapitated, he wrote her a farewell note and signed it, “from your Valentino.” 

From the Church’s point of view, Valentine was the ideal candidate as a replacement for Lupercus, so in 496 A.D. Pope Gelasius outlawed the mid-February  Lupercian festival.  But because he knew how Roman’s loved games of chance, he kept the lottery, substituting the girl’s names for the names of saints. For the Church’s celebration, both girls and boys could draw the name of a saint and then they were to emulate the life of that saint for a year. 

Admittedly it took a long time for the Romans to give up a year of free sex for a year of piety, but in the end Christianity won out. Actually the only part of the Lupercian festival that remained was the tradition of men offering women they were interested in a handwritten note of affection on Feb. 14^th, and in the 16^th century the Church tried to do away with that as well.  They didn’t succeed.

Cupid,

The cards became more popular and more decorative and often embellished with a drawing of the naked cherub Cupid. Cupid, from the Latin cupido, meaning "desire") was the god of desire, affection and erotic love, and is sometimes portrayed as the son of the Venus, the Roman goddess of love and either the god of war, Mars or Mercury, the messenger of the Gods. It seems she was friendly with both of them.

AUNTIE PASTA: Sunny Side Up

SARONNO, Italy – Here it is almost the middle of February, a time when the mimosa should be thinking about budding and the view from my window should not be white and snowy, but  neither of those things are happening. Maybe it was because I was thinking about bright yellow mimosa and warm sunny days that I got a hankering for gnocchi. How I got from mimosa to gnocchi is a mystery even to me, but I’ve learned that cooking logic is not like regular logic and I don’t worry about it anymore.

 Saffron Crocus

Unfortunately I used all of my potatoes yesterday when I made braised turkey with potatoes, onions and carrots for lunch, so I had to dig around for a potato-less gnocchi recipe. What I found was an easy recipe for gnocchi with saffron, and there it was, the connecting yellow thread between saffron and golden mimosa. 

Saffron is derived from the tiny thread like strands of the stigma of the crocus flower. Each stigma is very small and it takes tens of thousands of them to make up an ounce of saffron. Because saffron is one of the most expensive natural products we use in food, selling for more than $300 an ounce, it is usually sold by the fraction of an ounce.

Saffron production is labor intensive

This spice has been around since the days of Cleopatra, but the Egyptians didn’t eat it they used it in religious purification ceremonies. The Greeks thought it reduced the effects of a hangover and cured insomnia, while the Arabs, who introduced saffron cultivation in Spain in the 10^th century, realized it was best utilized in cooking. Still today, no self-respecting Spanish chef would put forth a paella that wasn’t perfumed with saffron.

In the 16^th century Venice grew rich importing and selling the spice. At that time saffron was worth its weight in gold, which led unscrupulous merchants to cut it with other spices in order to increase their profit margins. If the merchants were British, living under the rule of King Henry VIII who was mad about saffron, they could very well have been condemned to death for doing so.  

GNOCCHI WITH SAFFRON

Ingredients

Flour, 250 grams

Milk, 200 ml

Nutmeg, pinch

Breadcrumbs, 140 grams

Parmigiano Reggiano, 80 grams

Boiled ham (Parma if possible) 100 grams – finely chopped

Salt, Q.B. (quanto basta – to taste)

Eggs, 2 whole eggs and 2 egg yolks

For the Sauce

Butter, 60 grams

Onion, 1 small

Heavy cream

1 package of saffron powder

Pepper, (white if available) pinch

To Finish

Parmigiano Reggiano, 30 grams

Chopped parsley

On a pastry board or in a bowl, sift the flour, mix in the breadcrumbs and add in the eggs and egg yolks (1). Then add the finely chopped ham, the grated cheese, milk, nutmeg, a pinch of salt (2) and knead the dough until smooth and homogeneous (3).

 Form a dough ball, cover with plastic wrap (4) and let stand in a cool place for at least one hour. Then cut ¼ of the dough ball and roll it into a strip the width of a finger, then cut into 2” pieces (5). Roll the pieces on a fork or a special gnocchi board, to form the characteristic ridges which help to hold the sauce (6).

Once you have cut and rolled all of the gnocchi, put them on a floured surfaced (7). In a large frying pan, melt the butter and then add the finely chopped onion (8) and let it cook for about 15 minutes over very low heat until it becomes transparent, but not colored. At this point add the fresh heavy cream (9).

Add the package of saffron powder (10), salt and a pinch of white pepper, stir and let thicken slightly over low heat (11). Bring a large pot of water to boil and when boiling put the gnocchi in to cook (12) and when they rise to the surface.

 

Remove them from the pot with a slotted spoon (13) and add to cream sauce (14). Let cook over very low heat for a few seconds, then turn off the heat. Add grated cheese and chopped parsley (15), stir and serve hot.

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LIFE: Snow Challenged

SARONNO, Italy – Before I can start this story you have to know that the street I live on is only as big as this apartment building, and it is blocked off at one end to prevent through traffic.  I think it must have been part of the old street system prior to the expansion of Saronno during the post-war building boom that took place in all of Italy, which has nothing to do with this story, and all I’m trying to say is it  is a very short street.

Sempione Park, Milano

Anyway, it snowed in Saronno the other day. In the past when it has snowed, this little street never saw a snowplow. Ever. The collective thinking was that the snow never lasts very long, so what’s the point of paying someone to do what mother nature is going to do for free in a day or two anyway. You just have to have a little patience.

 Downtown Genova

 But yesterday, lo and behold, a Tonka Toy size truck with a blade attached to the front of it, began going up and down our street. It would pull in as far as the cone shaped concrete barriers, and then back out and then start all over again. I could hear the truck going back and forth, actually for quite a while, and I remember thinking, “great, it’s about time they plowed here.” 

For such a short street, it seemed to be taking a very long time to plough.  When I looked out I could see that while the driver was making all the right moves, the blade wasn’t down far enough to move anything, let alone the 3” of snow and mush. So all of his comings and goings were for naught. 

The Vatican

 I thought about yelling out, “hey buddy, try putting the blade down,” but I don’t know the Italian equivalent for “buddy”, nor are people accustomed to being yelled at by old ladies standing on their balconies dressed in what look like pajamas in the middle of a snowy February afternoon. 

There is something about snow and Italy that just doesn’t work. Oh, it’s fine up in the ski areas of Trentino  and over in Val d’Aosta, where they make their living running ski resorts. But the Milanese who watch the snow bulletins as closely as they watch the stock market, and head for those mountains every weekend to play in the snow, don’t seem to know what to do with it down here. 

Perugia - Sign says: Street Closed Because of Snow

 I still laugh thinking about the ‘snow removal’ crew that was sent out to clear the snow off the sidewalks in front of my apartment  when I lived in Milan. The crew was made up of five North Africans led by an Italian crew leader. They were decked out in bright orange jumpsuits and armed with stick brooms, the kind witches usually ride, and they were fluffing the snow here and there and everywhere except off of the sidewalks.  It was obvious they had no experience in snow removal, but then again I don’t know how much snow they get in sunny Morocco. Probably none. 

But I can’t say it’s only the Milanese who are “snow challenged”.  It snowed in Genova my first winter in Italy. A freak storm they said, and I sincerely hoped so. I had moved there to get away from the wintery weather of Philadelphia and I wasn’t prepared for snow on the Riviera. Apparently neither were the Genovese. 

Call out the Marines - Street Cleaning in Rome

I was living in a small apartment about a ½ hour ride out of the center, way up in the hills behind the city. After seven months of unemployment,  I had just landed my first (illegal) job, teaching English in downtown Genova. When my class ended at 9PM, I got myself over to the bus stop as quickly as possible, anxious to get home, get warm and eat dinner. As the bus slowly made its way up the snow covered hill, I could hear the tire chains gripping the heavy snow – they don’t plow the streets in Genova either. 

The bus was just barely crawling along  with the windshield wipers running a dizzying speed. Unfortunately they were just about useless against the swirling snow. At a certain point, I figure about half way up the winding mountain road the bus driver pulled over and announced that he wasn’t going to go any further. I looked out the window  at the blizzard and turned to him. “Why didn’t you tell us down in Genova you weren’t going to go all the way up to Quezzi?” I yelled. “I would have gotten a hotel room in town. Now what?”

 Fountain at Villa Olmo, Lake Como

The driver just shrugged and waited as one by one we all got off the bus, he closed the doors and disappeared. What I think is he drove himself home and left us to fend for ourselves. At any rate, passengers were zipping off in different directions and I was left  there  standing  with two other ladies. “Okay,” I said, “why don’t we hitchhike?” Every now and again a car would go by, and what cruel soul could pass up three ladies stranded in a blizzard?  I wasn’t too interested in getting into a car with some stranger by myself, especially since I didn’t know where I was, but there is safety in numbers, no? 

Lake Como

The women looked at me as if I was crazy. Hitchhike? “You’ve got to be kidding,” they said. “Do you know what our husbands would do to us if they saw us getting out a car driven by a stranger?”

“But we are in the middle of a blizzard and there are three of us, surely they wouldn’t want you to die along the side of the road like a dog, would they? Isn’t it better to take a ride with a stranger than walk up this mountain?”

 Tevere, Rome

 Evidently not.  They turned their backs on me and headed into the brush. It was cold, it was dark and it was snowing like hell, and since I had no idea where they were going I decided to play it safe and stay on the road. All I knew was I had to head up the mountain and hopefully at some point  I would arrive in the crossroads of Santa Maria Quezzi, with its three apartment buildings, one bar, one deli and one fruttivendolo. 

Arrive I did. Frozen to the bone, feet wet, head wet, hands like ice cubes, I could barely put the key in the lock. All I remember thinking was those women were crazy, and their husbands were even crazier.  It wasn’t long after that, that I moved to a street named after the many palm trees that line it, a street of orange trees and sweet smelling jasmine bushes, a street that lead right to the beautiful, blue Mediterranean sea. 

Think Summer, Think Liguria

And as I look out my window today, at the snow covered garden of the Padre Monti school, which I’m sure you all remember from the Via Campi Chicken War story, I’m thinking  about that blue sea, and those palm trees and those sweet smelling jasmine bushes and wondering how fast can I pack up and get myself back down to where I belong. 

P.S.  Witaj Polska, Witam na moim blogu.  

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AUNTIE PASTA: Greetings Y'all From Sud Tyrol

SARONNO, Italy - If there was ever a recipe for a cultural, culinary stew, you’d find it in Italy’s  northern Trentino-Alto Adige region. It’s a spoonful of German, a half a cup of Austrian, a teaspoon of Venetian, and a large pinch of Italian all mixed together. Road signs are in German, a slice of the population speaks Ladin, described as a Rhaeto-Romanic dialect of the Engadine in Switzerland, whatever that means, and there are special educational scholarships for those who speak Italian. Where is this place? It is up in Italy’s most northern corner, situated in the Italian Alps between Verona and Innsbruck. 

The Breathtaking Italian Alps

The local cuisine is unlike any other in Italy, rich in rabbit, pheasant, deer, chamois and other four legged furry animals, and fresh water trout. What you won’t find is regular pasta. Instead you may be offered ravioli, often made from rye flour and filled with potatoes or other vegetables and served with butter and smoked ricotta cheese.  

But the most popular pasta type dish is knodel, dumplings made from stale bread, white or brown, mixed with other ingredients like onions, parsley, bacon or in South Tyrol, liver. The dumplings are served in broth or with melted butter. 

Knodel

Another popular dish is barley soup, called gerstensuppe, which is flavored with bacon or ham bones, and in the Province of Bolzano, they take a frittata, cut it into strips and serve it in broth, and call it frittatensuppe.  

One of the more Italianized recipes calls for pigeon wrapped in sweet pastry. This particular recipe has been around since the sixteenth century when it was originally created to restore the exhausted Cardinals who had gathered to try and change the wild and wooly ways of the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in the town of Trento.

You thought I was kidding about the Smacafam truck, right?

This is mountain country, and when those cold winter winds start to blow though the mountain passes, nothing tastes better than a steaming dish of pasta and beans or polenta. One particularly popular polenta dish is ‘smacafam’ or ‘ammazzafame’  which means hunger killer. It’s a simple dish of polenta topped with bacon and sausage and sold from ‘smacafam’ food trucks as well as in restaurants. There is also a sweet version made with raisins, walnuts, pine nuts and milk. 

Another popular, distinctively Central European dish found throughout the Sud Tyrol is goulash, a meat stew cooked with fried onions and seasoned with cumin and paprika. It is can be served with potatoes, which are added during the cooking process, or boiled and served separately, but dumplings or spatzle are more common.

Barley Soup aka Gerstensuppe

Game is found on most restaurant menus, usually marinated in red wine and cooked with onions, raisins cinnamon, pine nuts, grated lemon peel and sugar – very Austro-Hungarian.  Another version marinates venison in red wine and spices, but then vinegar and sour cream are added. 

Just as it is throughout Italy, pork is popular, especially probusti, smoked sausages made from a mixture of pork and beef. These tasty sausages  are first boiled and then served with sauerkraut and mustard. In this mountainous province, sauerkraut is the classic side dish for sausage. To prepare it, cabbage is cut into thin strips and arranged in layers in wooden containers , sprinkled with salt, cumin and pepper and left to ferment for about two months. Then it is ready to be cooked along with a piece of bacon or a ham hock and white wine. Cabbage prepared this way is also used as a filling for ravioli.

A Sud Tyrolian Sausage and Spek Producer

If you've worked up an appetite reading this post, here's an easy recipe for knodel that will put you in a Sud Tyrolian mood. 

Knodel
2 tablespoons butter, plus more for sautéing
1 chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped parsley
2 tablespoons chopped marjoram
1 tablespoon salt
1 pound baguettes or big, soft pretzels, cut or broken into ¼- to ½-inch cubes
2 cups whole milk
4 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup bread crumbs
1 clove garlic, chopped (optional)
Pinch of  pepper

1. In a large skillet, melt the butter over medium heat and sauté the onions until they are translucent.
2. Stir in the parsley and marjoram; cook briefly and then set aside to let the mixture cool.
3. Place the cubed bread in a large bowl and season, if desired, with salt. (If you use fat, soft, salted pretzels (not crispy pretzels), you may not need to season at all.) In a small saucepan, heat the milk almost to boiling and pour it over the cubed pretzels/bread. Set aside to cool and go relax for 15 minutes.
4. When the bread-milk mixture is cool, mix in the onion-parsley mixture and the eggs. Add the bread crumbs, garlic and pepper and mix well. If the mixture seems too soft to hold a shape, add more bread crumbs until it is thick enough. The mixture should be firm enough to form into dumplings that hold their shape.
5. Bring a large pot of salted water to a simmer. Dip your hands into cold water and make a test dumpling, about the size of a large golf ball. Lower it gently into the simmering water and cook. If it doesn't hold up, add more breadcrumbs to the mixture. Once you've found the right consistency, shape the mixture into 20 dumplings.
6. Gently lower the dumplings into the simmering salted water and cook until they are puffed slightly and cooked through, about 7 minutes. When they are boiled you can brown them in a sauté pan with a tablespoon of butter and some extra chopped parsley or serve them in broth.


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