Italian

Baked apples are a favorite treat and comfort food in Trentino–Alto Adige as they are here. This recipe emphasizes the treat aspect, since the apples are draped with melted chocolate, chopped walnuts, and Amarena cherries. Many apple varieties are good bakers, including Cameo, Cortland, Empire, Jonagold, Northern Spy, and Rome. Granny Smith and Golden Delicious are always reliable, too.

These rolled-up scallops of beef (involtini di manzo) are fun to make, lovely to serve, and pleasing to eat, with the tangy surprise of a whole pickle (and other vegetable morsels) inside. They’re a practical choice for a special meal, too, since you can assemble and cook the involtini in advance, leave them in the pan, where they’ll stay moist, and reheat them when your guests are seated. And if you need more than six servings, the recipe can be multiplied easily. I like to serve these with Whole-Grain Spaetzle (page 16) to mop up the sauce.

Beef chuck, or shoulder, offers excellent cuts for stews and braises, because the meat is extremely tasty and, over long cooking, all the connective tissue adds flavor and body to the dish. For this braise (and the Sugo alla Genovese, page 112), I especially like the compact chunk of meat cut off the top of the shoulder blade, which is known by many names, including “top blade” or “top chuck shoulder” or “flatiron.” This piece is usually sliced and packaged as steaks, but ask your butcher to give you a whole top blade, as a roast. The more common beef chuck or shoulder roast, which comes from the underside of the shoulder, would be fine in this recipe, too. (It might be called “chuck pot roast” or “under blade chuck.”)

In Trentino, this lively condiment of cooked apples and fresh horseradish is served with boiled beef, poached chicken, and all kinds of roasts. It’s great with many of the dishes in this chapter, especially the beer-braised chicken and beef and the fried and baked potato–celery root canederli. Since it is so easy to make in large volume, I serve it with roast turkey or ham at the holidays, and I hope you will, too. Cream is customary in the salsa (it counters the sharpness of the horseradish), but the flavor is good without it. And you can use more or less horseradish to suit your taste for its pungency.

Here’s another fine winter salad, pairing one of my favorite, underappreciated vegetables—celery root—with fresh apples. The mellow, tender cubes of cooked celery root and the crisp apple slices provide a delightful, unexpected combination of flavor and texture. To turn the salad into a light lunch, add a few slices of prosciutto and serve it with some crusty bread. A firm, crisp apple is what you want for salad, and fortunately there are many varieties in the market that have that essential crunch, with flavors ranging from sweet to tangy to tart. I like to use a few different apples, rather than just one type, for greater complexity of flavor and vivid color in the salad. In addition to the reliably crisp Granny Smith apple, I look for some of the old-time firm and tart apples, such as Gravenstein, Jonathan, and Rome, and a few newer strains, like Cameo, Gala, and Fuji.

Crunchy, flavorful, refreshing, nourishing, and colorful, this salad makes a fine meal by itself. Its assortment of vegetables, apples, nuts, and cheese should be fresh and well prepared. It is especially important to use a top-quality table cheese, because it is a major contributor of taste and texture. In Trentino–Alto Adige, this salad would always have a fresh local cheese, most likely an Asiago pressato, made with milk from farms in the province of Trento (and the neighboring Veneto region). Aged only 20 days, this young cheese has a sweetness and soft, chewy consistency that’s perfect in salad. If you can’t find genuine Italian Asiago, don’t buy the inferior cheeses called Asiago produced in other countries (including the United States). Choose instead Montasio—a favorite of mine from my home region, Friuli—similarly soft and sweet, though richer and more complex than Asiago. Cubes of fresh Grana Padano (which also is made in Trento) or even good American cheddar, younger and on the mild side, would be great here as well. You can dress this salad in advance and set it out on a buffet. In that case, though, I suggest you add the walnuts just before serving, so they remain crunchy.

This is a terrific salad for your repertoire, especially in winter, when vegetable choices are limited (though I like it any time of year). It is tasty and versatile, good as a side dish for grilled chicken, lamb chops, or pork chops, and substantial enough to be a meal in itself. It doesn’t wilt and is excellent for a buffet table or picnic. Best of all, you can make and dress it ahead of time—in fact, it gets better if you do.

These tasty canederli are fried and baked rather than poached, with a potato-cake crustiness that is delicious any time of day. Serve them with eggs for a special breakfast or brunch, with a salad for lunch, or with juicy meats, like the Roasted Chicken with Beer (page 17), or Beef Braised in Beer (page 19). And they are also good (though not crusty) if you poach them—follow the procedures for the preceding canederli di speck.

Savoy cabbage is typically served as a cooked vegetable, but here the raw cabbage, shaved into thin shreds, makes a wonderful salad with great, resilient texture. Crisp rendered strips of speck (or bacon or prosciutto as alternatives) are a great complement, and the hot vinegar dressing is delicious. For shredding the cabbage, I like to use a mandoline slicer. These versatile cutting implements were once quite costly and usually found only in professional kitchens. Today, though, you can buy a decent simple mandoline for under $20, and I recommend that every home cook have one.

Genuine imported speck is the meat of choice for these canederli, but you can substitute either thick cut bacon or prosciutto—in particular, the fatty prosciutto from the end of the leg—and get excellent results. Or you may omit the meat entirely and still have quite satisfying canederli. Poached canederli are best served as soon as they are cooked, but you can cook them in advance, and reheat them in hot stock.

Every region of Italy has a fagioli (bean) soup, often quite filling, with potatoes and pork and either pasta or rice. Interestingly, it was in Trentino–Alto Adige, renowned for the heartiness of its soups, that I had this unexpectedly light bean soup, cooked with fresh apples and delicately spiced. It is vegetarian (also unusual), nourishing, and quite scrumptious. The combination of apples and beans is marvelous, and one of the pleasing features of this recipe is that simply by using less water you can make a great bean-and-apple side dish, a perfect accompaniment to roast pork, duck, or ham.

This is a different sort of frittata, not the neat golden round of well-set eggs that’s probably most familiar. Here the eggs are in the skillet for barely a minute, just long enough to gather in soft, loose folds, filled with morsels of asparagus and shreds of prosciutto. In fact, when I make this frittata or the “dragged” eggs—uova strapazzate, page 143—I leave my eggs still wet and glistening so I can mop up the plate with a crust of country bread. That’s the best part of all.

To save yourself some chopping, look for bags of mixed, pre-cut braising greens, available at some supermarkets. (Buy spinach separately for the gremolata.) Serve with warm bread for a filling main course.

Bomboloni—small round Italian doughnuts—is almost as much fun to say as they are to eat. It's like a party in your mouth when you repeat the word, which you will be doing over and over between bites of these balloon-light spheres of the tenderest yeast dough. Bomboloni are the new hot item on restaurant menus these days, and you'll instantly understand why when you taste your first. It won't be your last, that's for sure, which is why we've accompanied them with three different sauces for dipping. Each is delightful on its own, but if you want to go all the way with all three, you'll find they play well together, too.

I love apples. I have this recurring dream where I leave the stress of the restaurant world behind and start a cider house, making exquisite hard cider. I start at sunrise and I finish in the mid-afternoon and retire to the farmhouse to cook a dinner for Mary and the girls. Apple brown betty is like a crisp made with bread crumbs. It's a wonderful dessert that is so simple and so rewarding in results. This is a good one for roping the kids into helping. Those apples aren’t going to peel themselves. Zabaglione is also known in France as sabayon. It is a custard-based dessert, cooked with a dessert wine. I stabilize mine with whipped cream and serve it cold, whereas in Italy and France you often see them served warm. Kind of like an eggnog in heaven.

This pesto if very simple, and its mild, herbaceous flavor makes it the ideal companion for just about any of the meatballs. While many pesto recipes call for pine nuts, we prefer the flavor (and lower price) of walnuts. Try finely chopping them and adding them right at the end for a nice, crunchy texture. We also love this as a healthy party dip, especially because it has no raw garlic—your guests will thank you too! Just cut up some carrots, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, and celery and you're ready to go. You can swap arugula for spinach if you prefer. Pesto freezes well and will keep for up to three months in the freezer.

Since everyone has his or her version of this sauce, we spent a lot of time getting this one right. No surprise, the best results came from using the best ingredients. When it comes to tomato sauce, using poor quality canned tomatoes can leave an acidic or tinny taste in your mouth. So while it is a bit more expensive, we like to use Pomi brand chopped tomatoes (you know, the ones that come in a box). The sauce starts with a careful "sweating" of onions (cooking them slowly, until translucent but not brown, to extract as much flavor as possible), and the flavor continues to build from a nice, long, low-heat simmering after the tomatoes are added.

Here they are—the top sellers at The Shop and sure to be a big hit at home. Most traditional meatball recipes call for Parmesan or pecorino cheese. While we're big fans of these stronger cheeses, we prefer ricotta. It's our secret weapon. The mild and creamy consistency of this fresh cheese gives the meatballs a unique light texture. Beef has a subtle flavor, and the ricotta is a great way to add fat and moisture to the recipe without the overpowering flavor of a sharper cheese. These are quick to prep, and baking rather than frying makes this a fast comfort food even during the busiest of weeks.