My Italian food
If you look at a map of Italy, you may be surprised to realise that almost half of the country is made up of peaks and mountain ridges. The Val Comino belongs to this lesser-known and still relatively unspoilt Italy: a green and rugged, territory where Lazio, Abruzzo and Molise meet.
Continue reading “Pizza di zucchine della Val Comino (Courgette pie from the Comino valley, in southern Lazio)”
Last novembre, on a cold sunny day, we drove from Lucca into the Garfagnana region, to catch the woods in their autumnal splendour, before winter settled in.
Sillico was our destination: a minuscule, picture-perfect village, perched 700 meters above sea level on the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, surrounded by chestnut woodland.
Lunigiana is the austere mountainous area where three regions meet: Toscana, Liguria and Emilia Romagna. From the administrative point of view, it is now part of Tuscany, but historically and culturally it has always been a terra di confine, a border land, where the identities of those three regions, and of its people and food cultures, meet and seep into each other.
The tosco-emiliano Apennine runs through it, with its majestic woodland of chestnut trees, but one is also never too far from the sea. In Lunigiana, the butter of Emilia Romagna food culture meets the extra virgin olive oil of Liguria and Tuscany.
Mountains and sea, butter and oil.
Lucca, June 2022 .
London, August 2022. This has been the best, most rewarding recipe of this summer. Just love it
I am a bread collector. All those stale loaf-ends (apparently called “the heels”) that cannot be eaten but cannot be turned into breadcrumbs either, I put aside – “I will make a bread pudding or a pancotto, an Italian bread soup”, I solemnly declare. P and Lucia roll their eyes, because they know their chickens: often these grand plans are not acted upon and, after weeks of ignoring it, I bin my bread, with a bad conscience.
This time, I looked at my collection of odd ends of bread and I decided to make polpette di pane, bread polpette and what an inspired decision that was. Over the last month I have cooked them a few times, actually buying and collecting bread with this purpose in mind.
Continue reading “Polpette di pane – bread polpette or breadballs, if you insist”
A savoury pie typical of Garfagnana and Lunigiana, those mountainous areas in between North Tuscany, South Liguria and west Emilia Romagna, sparsely populated, traditionally poor (hence their rather sombre style of cooking), thickly covered in chestnut tree woods (hence the many dishes based on chestnuts, once called “the bread of the poor”, because they were free and highly nutritious) and where mushrooms and wild boars are still abundant. It is farro, however, or emmer (Triticum dicoccum), a type of wheat, that is perhaps the most celebrated produce of this part of Italy.
Continue reading “Torta di farro della Garfagnana (emmer savoury pie from Garfagnana)”
Italian home cooking 