Food Processor

This is a wonderfully flaky, buttery pastry. For a single-crust pastry, use half the ingredients, but don’t halve the egg yolk. You will need slightly less than half the amount of ice water to mix the dough.

For pizza lovers, here are eight varieties to choose from. The basic dough makes two pizzas. The dough is easy to mix in the food processor.

This focaccia adds onions, olives, and dried tomatoes to the top. Cut into bite-sized pieces, it’s a great appetizer. The dough mixes most easily in a food processor.

This old-time dessert is still a favorite today. It’s really a streusel apple pie baked without a crust.

This recipe makes a large batch of malloreddus, enough to serve eight. You don’t need to cook it all, because it freezes easily and keeps well. Malloreddus can be dressed simply with butter and grated cheese or almost any sauce you like. My favorite version, though, is the first one I ever had, in Porto Cervo many years ago: malloreddus with sausage and tomato sauce (recipe follows).

If you are traveling in Sardinia, this is the dish to have. And if you want a taste of Sardinia at home, this is the dish to make. Pardulas resemble large ravioli, stuffed with sliced provolone. They’re not cooked like pasta, though, but fried until crisp and oozing melted cheese. They’re like grilled cheese sandwiches—kids love them. In fact, everybody does. Pardulas make a great appetizer flanked by some tossed salad or sliced tomatoes. For a more elaborate and substantial turnover, add some blanched asparagus or broccoli, or prosciutto or ham, to the stuffing; just cut down a bit on the cheese to make room. And if you make them half-sized, they’re a terrific hors d’oeuvre to pass at a cocktail party. They are traditionally served drizzled with honey but are delicious just fried and plain. For convenience, make and fill pardulas in advance and fry them when your guests arrive. If necessary, you can fry them up to 30 minutes ahead of time and keep them warm in the oven.

Like many traditional Lucani dishes, this one is fashioned from the handful of ingredients one would find even in the most humble peasant pantry: dried peppers, yesterday’s bread, a chunk of hard cheese, olive oil, and garlic. Minimal yet delicious. The fire in fiery maccheroni, of course, comes from dried diavolicchio, the hot chili peppers so beloved in Basilicata and other southern regions. Here, whole dried peperoncino pods are soaked until soft, then puréed into a pesto to dress the pasta. Toasted bread crumbs play an important role in this dish, too, when they’re tossed in just before serving. They pick up the paste and garlicky olive oil, cling to the strands of pasta (preferably bucatini or perciatelli), and give crunchy, fiery sparks of flavor to every enjoyable bite.

In the dialect of the Lucani (as natives of Basilicata are known) maritare means “to wed,” and I have always thought that this wonderful soup was so named because it was customarily served at wedding celebrations. Recently, however, while doing some research, I came upon another explanation of why it is called maritata—because it weds vegetables (in the soup base) with meat (in the polpette), and with this added protein it becomes a complete and balanced one-course meal. I like both interpretations of the name and believe they’re compatible. Certainly a young couple, on the brink of their first night as newlyweds, can use this fortifying nourishment! There are many ways to prepare and serve a soup with multiple elements like this one, and you can of course play around with the recipe here. One variation is to fry the meatballs rather than poaching them. Though it takes a bit more work, it does give another layer of flavor (see my recipe for Meatballs in Broth in the Umbria chapter, page 196, for instructions on frying little meatballs for soup). Another option is to add cubes of provola to the soup just before serving. If you can get a good-quality Italian provola (mild provolone), this embellishment is superb. I’ve included instructions for this step at the end of the main recipe.

Just a small amount of saffron can imbue extra-virgin olive oil with the spice’s captivating perfume and distinctive flavor. This versatile condiment is a great way to bring a light and seductive touch of saffron to your dishes, without overwhelming them. It makes a delicious (and colorful) dressing for maccheroni alla chitarra (page 236) or other pasta, or to season almost any mild-flavored dish.

I love ground-meat sauces that cook slowly for hours, allowing an exchange of flavors between the meat, cooking liquids, and seasonings and concentrating them into a dense, delicious dressing. Emilia-Romagna is famous for such sauces, the classic Ragù alla Bolognese (page 382) and Ragù di Carni Bianche (page 137) among them. This Abruzzese sauce is quite similar in its procedures, though it uses only pork rather than a mixture of ground meats. It also has some of the typical flavoring touches of the region, notably a generous dash of peperoncino and a greater volume of tomatoes, rendering it a bit more acidic and definitely more lively than a conventional, mellow Bolognese. It’s a great dressing for homemade maccheroni alla chitarra, and wonderful with other pastas, too. At home, whenever I’m preparing a dish like this that takes a long time—and yields such delicious results—I make more of it than I need for one occasion. Another great, effortless meal is a good reward for the hours and effort devoted to cooking the sauce. That’s why I have formulated this recipe to yield enough ragù to dress a pound of maccheroni or other pasta on the day it is cooked, with an equal amount to pack away in the freezer.

This recipe actually gives you two flavorful sauces, to use as a dressing for pasta or to give a fresh accent to all sorts of dishes, from steamed vegetables to roasted meats. The basic sauce is a simple, loose parsley pesto, quite good and easily whipped up any time of year. In summer, I cut ripe, sweet tomatoes into small pieces and mix them into the pesto. The juices and flesh of the tomatoes merge with the parsley sauce, creating a new dressing with multiple dimensions of flavor and texture.

A minestra paesana of humble ingredients, this is a delightfully satisfying and flavorful soup. The soup base is built on a pestata, a bit of tomato, and, if you have one, a piece of hard rind left from grating cheese. (I hope you save these! They are a great addition to almost any soup or stock.) One of my favorite vegetables, celery—and lots of it—gives the soup a delicate yet distinctive taste. And just before serving, a few handfuls of ditalini (or other short pasta) cook in the broth, to provide texture and substance. Don’t add the pasta until you are almost ready to serve, because it becomes soft and soggy left in the soup. In Abruzzo, as elsewhere in Italy, only al dente pasta should grace a soup bowl—and that’s what this recipe will give you.

This distinctively flavored pesto is a superb dressing for maccheroni alla chitarra (page 236), spaghetti, or linguine, or a short dry pasta such as gemelli, lumache, or rigatoni. It’s a great condiment, too: put a spoonful on fish or chicken hot off the grill for a real treat. Make extra pesto when basil and parsley are plentiful, in summer, and freeze it in small containers to use through the winter.

The dough for maccheroni alla chitarra has to be slightly firmer than usual for fresh pasta; it requires a bit more flour, so it will cut neatly when pressed against the chitarra. If you have a kitchen scale, weighing the flour is best: start with 10 ounces of flour, equivalent to 2 cups of unsifted flour, slightly packed, and add more as needed. Though I always tell you that you can make fresh pasta dough by hand (because it is so easy!), here I recommend the food-processor method, to incorporate the greater amount of flour quickly.

This dish showcases the skillful skillet cookery and flavorful pan sauces that delighted me in Umbria. After lightly frying the veal scallops, you start the sauce with a pestata of prosciutto, anchovy, and garlic, build it up with fresh sage, wine, broth, and capers—and then reduce and intensify it to a savory and superb glaze on the scaloppine. Though veal is most prized in this preparation, I have tried substituting scallops of chicken breast and pork; both versions were quick and delicious. Serve the scaloppine over braised spinach, or with braised carrots on the side.

Dress your fresh strangozzi with this meaty, multitextured sauce—ground veal and chopped chicken livers cooked in a tomato base—for a hearty dish that will delight carnivores and pasta-lovers simultaneously. This is also a great sauce to incorporate into risotto. If you are not enthusiastic about the flavor of chicken liver, use only 1/2 pound, for a subtle flavor boost. But if you love the organic richness of livers, as I do, use a whole pound. This recipe makes a big batch of sauce, so you can use half and freeze half (it will keep well for 4 to 6 weeks).

This is a fresh and extremely flavorful preparation for strangozzi. The dressing has two components, tender cooked Swiss chard and an uncooked pesto of fresh basil and mint leaves and toasted almonds. (Other leafy greens, such as spinach, chicory, and arugula, could be used, and walnuts could replace the almonds, but the recipe here is true to the region.) It is best to prepare the greens and pesto shortly before you cook and serve the pasta, but if you follow the recipe steps, the dish is actually quite quick-cooking and simple. It is only the multitude of tastes and textures that are complex and tantalizing!