Cucina conversations: back to school with amaretti morbidi
Summer has come to an end and so has much of the time we spent together during the days in that season. Instead, Monday to Friday, morning and afternoon, we make our way down tree-lined…
Cucina conversations: pansotti liguri
When the Cucina Conversations ladies and I decided to dedicate this month’s edition of our roundtable to dishes named after body parts, I immediately made a beeline for two books. One was Mary Taylor-Simeti’s Sicilian…
Cucina conversations: carciofi trifolati
There they were, standing in a bucket with just enough water to keep their stems hydrated. My in-laws had just spent a month enjoying the bounties of nature only spring in Liguria can provide and…
Bonet: crème caramel’s Piedmontese cousin
In The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson wrote, “In the latter part of the 20th century, crème caramel occupied an excessively large amount of territory in European restaurant dessert menus. This was probably due…
Farinata and other food myths
Marco Polo discovered pasta at Kublai Khan’s court in China and brought it back to Europe. Catherine de Medici brought forks, artichokes, peas, asparagus, broccoli, truffles and sorbets to France and changed the way her…
Lettuces, Rags and Lies for Carnival
“Vuoi una bugia? (Do you want a lie?)” my flatmate asked me one February evening, indicating a platter with some flat, sugar-coated fritters on them. “A lie?” I replied puzzledly. I had arrived in Turin…