Food Processor

Filled with nuts and meringue, this lattice-topped tart is quite lovely, quite easy, and typically Italian. In Andria, Carlo Tottolo gets almonds from the area of Toritto, some of the best in all of Italy.

Antichi Sapori, a family-run restaurant in Montegrosso, a few kilometers south of Andria, is where I had some of the best local products and traditional dishes. Pietro Zito, the chef and owner, is tied to the land and works with local seasonal products. One of several memorable dishes I enjoyed there was ceci e tria, this dense soup of chickpeas with the textural interplay of cooked and fried pasta. It’s a flavorful simple dish, very rustic and yet mellow.

It is hard to reproduce an authentic version of a typical Pugliese bread without the special starter and the wood-burning oven for baking. But, as you will find with the following recipe, this memorable focaccia is one that you can bake successfully at home. The topping of marinated onions and cherry tomatoes is simple and delicious. With this dough as a base, however, you can be creative and make a focaccia with mushrooms, leeks, sausages, and cheese in any combination. Keep in mind, though, that a simple topping, with a few distinct and harmonious flavors, is always more successful than a topping that tries to incorporate too many things. Be sure to season your topping ingredients and, where appropriate, cook and cool them before assembling the focaccia, so they don’t just dry out in the oven.

Pasticcerie, pastry shops, also referred to as Catlisch (a name inherited from the Swiss), are a grand tradition in Palermo. The city was greatly influenced by the French and Swiss in their pastry-making. When I am in Sicily, cannoli and desserts made with citrus are my favorites. In Palermo, I always enjoy desserts and a great cup of espresso at my dear friend’s pastry place, Pepino Stancanpiana’s Catlisch. My Sicilian chef at Felidia, Fortunato Nicotra, makes an elegant version of this, Sicily’s favorite dolce, with deep-fried disks of cannoli pastry stacked high with layers of ricotta cream in between. I like to fry squares of pastry in a skillet—no deep-fryer needed—and build a crispy, creamy cannoli napoleon. In Sicily, cannoli filling is made with sheep’s-milk ricotta, which has a distinctive flavor that can’t be matched by ordinary processed ricotta. Fresh cow’s-milk ricotta, which is widely available now, is what I use. Be sure to drain it well, sweeten lightly, mix with chopped bitter chocolate, candied orange, and toasted almonds for real Sicilian cannoli and add a touch of Grand Marnier for additional flavor.

The beauty and delight of this dish is that it is so fresh and clean—and it is a cinch to make. It’s important to make the pesto with the best ingredients, then just toss in the hot cooked spaghetti to coat it, and enjoy.

Babà al rhum is a favorite dessert in Naples, found in most pasticcerie, filled with whipped cream, or crema pasticciera (custard cream), or cannoli cream—or just oozing with syrup. In this recipe, I give you a limoncello syrup to soak the babas, and you can fill them with ice cream or whipped cream, the ricotta filling for cannoli (page 307), Espresso Zabaglione (page 156), or the cream for Limoncello Tiramisù (page 120). If you don’t have baba molds, you can bake the cakes in small (not mini-) muffin pans. You could also use two small Bundt pans.

This tart is a specialty of Calvizzano, a town near Naples, made with the mastantuono pear, which grows there. You will have to visit Calvizanno to taste the mastantuono—a small round yellow-green pear—but several of our American varieties, such as small Seckel pears or medium-sized Anjou or Bosc, are perfect for this great tart. In this recipe, the fruit is first cooked and saturated in a natural syrup, then baked in a pastry crust. Make sure to use pears that are still firm. This tart is delicious with a dollop of whipped cream, or served warm with some vanilla ice cream. I also like it with sour cream.

Driving north from Naples to Rome, you are bound to come to Gaeta, and you should make a point of sampling some tiella there. Every time I am in that vicinity, I stop by and enjoy some tiella with Nonna Lisa Corrado, my son-in-law’s maternal grandmother. According to him, she makes the best tiella in all of Italy. Tiella is made in Naples and throughout Italy, but it is a specialty in Gaeta, a beautiful seaside town on the border of Campania (Naples) and Lazio (Rome) regions. So what is tiella? It is a thin-crusted deep-dish pizza, stuffed with different combinations of vegetables and fish—escarole, broccoli rabe, octopus, olives, ricotta and Swiss chard, artichokes, and any other vegetable that is in season. It is topped and sealed with the same dough and baked until golden. Every time I stop for a piece of tiella, Nonna Lisa teaches me another filling. I take notes, and then I enjoy. I now make them at the restaurants and at home in New York, for my son-in-law. He enjoys them with a touch of nostalgia and following are two for you to enjoy.

You must be familiar with timballo from the film Big Night—maccheroni dressed with a wonderful sweet tomato sauce set in a big round form of pâte brisée to bake. A sweet crust with savory pasta might seem an unlikely combination, but the timballo is delicious and represents much of what is left of the Neapolitan kitchen from its aristocratic days under French-Spanish rule. These delightful pizzelle—small half-moon turnovers of raised sweet dough, stuffed with braised escarole, garlic, and sausage—are a wonderful and much simpler rendition of the timballo. The bitterness of the escarole and savory flavor of the meat, enveloped in the sweet crust, reach a perfect balance. These pizzelle make a great hors d’oeuvre, passed around still warm from the oven. They will win you much praise, and you do not need to labor over them at the last minute. You can make the dough and filling a day before. Moreover, the assembled pizzelle can be frozen and then baked when needed.

Here is a delicious pasta recipe, another example of the Roman affinity for offal. Whether tripe (trippa) or paiata (pasta sauce made with the stomach of a suckling lamb); or oxtails braised with tomatoes, celery and carrots (coda alla vaccinara), a true Roman meal is bound to include one of them. So what’s a little chicken liver with pasta, as in this dish? The Romans love it and have been enjoying it for centuries, so why shouldn’t you?

One would think that fresh pasta is a northern-Italian phenomenon, and in general northerners do eat more fresh pasta than dry, whereas southern Italians consume more dry. But the Roman tradition is to have freshly made tagliatelle as a Sunday treat. And in most cases it is served with cibreo—the giblets of a freshly killed chicken.

As with the preceding duck recipe, either a whole rabbit or rabbit pieces can be used for this sauce. If you’re getting a whole rabbit, ask the butcher to cut it into eight or ten pieces, or do it yourself, just cutting between the joints. (If you have my book Lidia’s Family Table, look at the photos on page 321 to see how to cut up a rabbit.) If you can find rabbit legs, hind and/or front, they would be even better for this recipe. As with the duck, the legs have more meat, are easier to handle, and cost less. Serve this sauce with pappardelle, following the procedures in the duck recipe, or with gnocchi, polenta, or dry pasta.

When duck is braised for sauce in Maremma, pappardelle is the pasta of choice. Therefore, I encourage you to make your own fresh pappardelle, following my recipe here. (Of course, the sauce will be delicious on other fresh pastas, gnocchi, or polenta; and pappardelle is great with other dressings too!) I also recommend using duck legs for this dish rather than a whole duck, as I think they’re tastier and make a better sauce. If you don’t see packaged duck legs, ask your butcher to special-order them for you.

Tortelli are ravioli by another name—a square, filled pasta. And though they vary greatly, like all pastas, tortelli often are filled with fresh ricotta and spinach or other greens, herbs, or vegetables. In Maremma, where carnivorous appetites rule, such a meatless approach is not typical. As you’ll find in this set of recipes, tortelli maremmani have meat inside and outside—and lots of it. Fried chopped chicken livers plump up the tortelli, in addition to ricotta and spinach. Once cooked, the tortelli are dressed with a typical ragù maremmano, made with three chopped meats slowly cooked in tomatoes. My friend Alma likes best boar, chicken, and pork, but here I call for veal, pork, and sausage, because I find that combination comes close to the complexity of the boar. Of course, if you can get boar, by all means use it. This is a great pasta, and worth all the stirring and stuffing. However, it is not necessary to make everything here and put the ingredients together in just one way. The components of tortelli maremmani give many options for delicious meals (and convenient advance preparation). For instance, it’s fine to make the filling and the pasta for the tortelli and leave the ragù for another day. You can sauce your tortelli simply with sage butter, pages 49–50, or just shower them with Tuscan olive oil and Pecorino Toscano. On the other hand, go right to the ragù recipe—skip the tortelli—and make this marvelous sauce to dress any pasta, fresh or dry, or polenta or gnocchi. Indeed, the ragù recipe makes enough for two or more meals. Toss a couple of cups of ragù with spaghetti for a fabulous (and fast) supper one night, and freeze the rest. It will still be perfect whenever you do get a chance to roll and fill those plump tortelli maremmani.

This hearty vegetarian soup gets superb flavor and texture from the long-cooking chickpeas and dried and fresh mushrooms. But the secret to the great taste is the paste (pestata) of aromatic vegetables and herbs, ground in the food processor. Before adding it to the soup however, you give the pestata even more flavor by browning it in a skillet—which makes it, in culinary Italian, a soffritto. As you will see in the coming pages, this pestata/soffritto step is used in many Maremma recipes, in sauces and stews as well as soups. In the country, such a soup is often served with grilled bread, making a whole meal. Adding rice or small pasta to the soup pot during the final 10 minutes of cooking is another way to enhance it. Or drop some good Italian sausages into soup for the last 20 minutes of cooking. Slice them right into the soup, or serve the sausages separately as a second course.

Acquacotta literally means “cooked water,” a traditional term for a soup of just a few ingredients cooked in boiling water. But the pale name in no way reflects the savor and satisfaction of this vegetable soup. It has great depth of flavor, and when served Alma’s way, with a poached egg and country bread in the bowl, it is a complete meal. In country fashion, Alma cracks a raw egg right into each portion of hot soup and inverts another bowl on top, as a cover. You have to wait (mouth watering) for a minute or two before removing the top bowl, to find a beautifully cooked egg. Here I transfer the soup to a skillet and poach the eggs over low heat, to be sure they have cooked thoroughly. Since this soup is so quick, inexpensive, and nourishing, local women would make it often, especially when extra farmhands came to help to harvest the grapes and olives and to work the land.

Cornmeal cookies are a favorite all over northern Italy: the Veneto has its zaletti, in Friuli we have gialetti. In Piemonte, you will find crumiri, piped into distinctive crescent-moon shapes. They are deliciously crumbly and just sweet enough.

When you have a white truffle, enjoy it just as they do in Alba, with golden tajarin. If fresh truffle is unavailable, packaged truffle butter makes a nice dressing for the pasta too (see Sources, page 340). Should you have no truffle at all, tajarin with only butter and Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano will be simply luxurious, if not quite ethereal.