Every Italian region has dishes that exist nowhere else in the world and that, made correctly, are as complex and satisfying as anything in the French canon. The pici cacio e pepe of the Sienese hills. The bigoli in salsa of the Venetian bacari. The cùnscia of Valtellina, which uses buckwheat pasta and local cheese in proportions that should not work as well as they do. The bomba di riso of Piacenza, which involves a rice crust filled with pigeon and porcini and is almost never made outside a domestic kitchen.This section approaches traditional Italian dishes with the seriousness they deserve: documented from primary sources, with regional variations noted, historical context included where it illuminates the recipe, and enough practical detail to make them at home without pretending that the result will be the same as the one from the nonna who has been making it for sixty years. It will be close. That is worth something.
A network of ten museums scattered across the plains, hills and Apennine forests of Parma province tells the story of a territory whose culinary identity…
Baccala -- salt cod preserved from the North Atlantic since the 15th century -- is one of the most versatile ingredients in Italian cooking, from…
Pasta alla Norma -- fried eggplant, tomato, and salted ricotta -- is the defining dish of Catanian cuisine and a gateway to the rich Sicilian…
Ribollita is the Tuscan bread soup of cannellini beans, cavolo nero, and stale bread that improves with reboiling -- a defining example of cucina povera…
Cacio e pepe is three ingredients and a demanding technique -- an entry point to the Roman pasta canon that is as difficult to do…
Ribollita — twice-boiled vegetable and bread soup — is the great winter dish of the Tuscan peasant tradition, a preparation of extraordinary depth that begins…
Three ingredients. Infinite complexity. Cacio e pepe is Rome's most deceptively simple pasta — and one of the most technically demanding preparations in the entire…