Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Feb 5, 2012, 10:12 am
Not everyone associates hamburgers with Italian cooking, but Italians have a long tradition of using ground beef in imaginative ways, for meatballs (polpette) and meatloaf (polpettone), as well as as a basis for the classic ragù alla bolognese. So it should really come as no surprise that they've a...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jan 29, 2012, 7:21 pm
I was so very pleased to read in the paper the other day that frying need not to be bad for you, especially if you fry in olive oil. The news didn't come as a surprise—I had always figured if Angelina managed to live to be 98 eating fried foods all the time, it couldn't be nearly as toxic as moder...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jan 14, 2012, 3:39 pm
Salmoriglio is a typically Sicilian sauce that adds great flavor to fish, particularly that most typical of Sicilian fishes, swordfish. The fish is grilled or otherwise simply prepared and napped with sauce before serving. Salmoriglio looks like and plays a culinary role similar to the salsa verde ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jan 8, 2012, 4:56 pm
I am not a baker. Never have been. I have always found stove-top cooking fun and easy but baking is a very different art. Cooking lets you stir and taste and adjust as you go along to get things to come out just right. But with baking—once you close that oven door, your success is in the hands of ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jan 1, 2012, 5:03 pm
The proper dressing of a salad has got to be one of the most overlooked techniques in all of cookery. For many people, a salad is something so common that it hardly merits thinking about. But there is actually a kind of art to this everyday task that can really transform your salads from the pedest...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Dec 28, 2011, 8:28 am
I love recipes that combine meat (or fish) with vegetables. In Italian cooking terms, it combines secondo and contorno in a single dish, and if you serve the dish with some good bread, it becomes a one-pot meal, especially appreciated after the holidays when many of us are probably "cooked out". C...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Dec 20, 2011, 8:15 am
Among the dizzying variety of stuffed pastas in the Italian repertoire, perhaps none—with the exception of ravioli—is more famous than the ring-shaped tortellino. These bits of bliss are ambassadors of Italian cuisine abroad and these days they (or aberrant facsimiles) can be found on the shelve...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Dec 4, 2011, 9:18 am
Pasta and ricotta make for a perfect impromptu meal or weekend dinner. The mellow flavor combination of tomato, ricotta and a bit of parmesan cheese is vaguely reminiscent of southern-style lasagna. But, like many simple pasta dishes, it'll be done in less than 30 minutes—the time it takes to brin...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Nov 27, 2011, 9:37 am
When you want something filling and warming but don't feel like spending a lot of time in the kitchen, cheese fondue is your ticket. 'Fondue' means melted in French and, indeed, cheese fondue is basically melted cheese, flavored with just a hint of garlic and thinned out a bit with white wine and ki...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Nov 20, 2011, 8:47 am
 It's hard to believe, but in the two and a half years that I've been writing this blog, somehow I've managed to avoid writing a post about Italian beef stew. I suppose that's a tribute to the vast variety of Italian cooking or perhaps a reflection of the somewhat secondary role that beef plays in ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Nov 6, 2011, 9:18 am
 Is there anything quite so comforting, after a chilly day's outing, as a cup of hot chocolate? It almost makes me look forward to the cold weather. But, if you ask me, most hot chocolate you can find commercially, either entirely pre-made or from a mix, is either too thin or too bland or too sweet...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Oct 29, 2011, 6:08 pm
Where would Italian food in the US be without Marcella Hazan? As much as I treasure my Campanian and Puglian food roots, I am forever thankful for the horizons that Marcella's 1973 Classic Italian Cooking opened up for me. And even almost 40 years later, she continues to inspire. Here is my take on ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Oct 22, 2011, 9:56 am
I've been convinced for a long time now that really good cooking basically comes down to two things:  technique and balance. The first requires some skill but can be learned by most people with enough practice, practice, practice. The second is more subtle and elusive. Yes, there are some basic rul...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Oct 16, 2011, 10:16 am
Autumn is really in the air these days here on the East Coast of the US. The sun is shining, the air is crisp and cool and redolent with the scent of freshly fallen leaves. The markets are full of all the wonderful produce of the season: curly chicory, radicchio, Belgian endive, chestnuts, a panoply...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Oct 9, 2011, 10:12 am
 As regular readers will know, this blog is focused on authentic Italian home cooking, the kind that you would eat in Italy itself. But it is also, in some sense, about the Italian diaspora, so it is only fitting that, from time to time—at least once a year—we feature an Italian-American dish, ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Oct 2, 2011, 1:48 pm
Is there anything more comforting than baked pasta?  If there is, I haven't come across it yet. And while some baked pasta dishes in the Italian repertoire—especially the two 'star' lasagne dishes, the South's lasagna di carnevale and the North's lasagne alla bolognese—are elaborate affairs, th...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Oct 2, 2011, 1:47 pm
When you mention Italian meat sauces, most people will immediately think of those monuments of Italian cooking, the ragù alla napoletana and the ragù alla bolognese, sauces that require hours of cooking and fairly elaborate preparation. These time-consuming ragù are, quite rightly, reserved for s...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Sep 24, 2011, 7:36 pm
Fregola (also called fregula) is a kind of pasta, typical of Sardinia, that looks and tastes much like Israeli couscous. Arselle are tiny clams that live under the sand right on the shore line. Although you might be surprised by the pairing, this odd couple makes for some delicious eating. Ingredie...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Sep 18, 2011, 10:18 am
Just a few weeks ago we looked at my grandmother's pollo e patate (chicken and potatoes) and last year it was agnello e patate (lamb and potatoes). Well, fish is also exquisite oven-roasted with potatoes as well, and while the chicken and lamb were 'down home' dishes pesce al forno con patate is ele...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Sep 10, 2011, 8:47 pm
Eggplant isn't the only vegetable that you can make alla parmigiana, fried and baked in layers with a light tomato sauce, mozzarella and grated parmesan cheese. Zucchini, another typical summer vegetable, also enjoys the same treatment. It is a fine way to exalt the sometimes rather bland vegetable....
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Sep 5, 2011, 9:08 am
The weather this Labor Day weekend hasn't been too congenial for a cookout. It seems Mother Nature has been in a changeable mood, sunny for a while, then cloudy, then stormy, and hot and muggy the whole while. So I took the chicken I was meaning to grill indoors and gave it an old-fashioned treatmen...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Sep 3, 2011, 8:47 am
Gentle reader, It's been a while. As mentioned in the last post, your correspondent has moved kitchens (and other rooms as well) from the city to the suburbs. The change has been exhilarating but exhausting as well. Between packing and unpacking, renovating and repairing and generally re-ordering ou...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Aug 7, 2011, 9:33 am
 The cooking of Puglia, the region that encompasses the 'heel' of the Italian peninsula on the Adriatic Sea, deserves to be much better known. It practically defines the Mediterranean diet, with a strong focus on simply prepared fruits of the sea and fresh produce like fava beans, cime di rape and ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Aug 3, 2011, 7:00 am
Insalata di riso, or rice salad, is another staple of Italian summertime cooking. It's quick and very easy to make, it can be made ahead—in fact, it only gets better after a day in the fridge—and it's light on the stomach. And it lends itself to variations limited only to your imagination. Last...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jul 29, 2011, 4:48 pm
Frittata is another one of those dishes that lends itself well to the dog days of summer: quick and easy to prepare, amenable to eating hot or cold, and it keeps well, overnight or even longer. And, of course, it can accommodate an almost infinite variety of fillings that can change with the seasons...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jul 24, 2011, 3:09 pm
I don't know about you, but when temperatures rise into triple-digits (on the Fahrenheit scale) as they have lately in much of the Northern Hemisphere, even my enthusiasm for cooking begins to lag. That, and our impeding house move, has meant that any cooking that I do indulge in these days is as qu...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jul 13, 2011, 7:41 am
 A quick note on a fine and fun way to enjoy cherries and lots of other summer fruits—su ghiaccio or 'on ice'. Fill a bowl a third or half full of ice, place your fruit—however much you're having—over the ice and add water to come, say, halfway up the fruit. Serve. Yep, that's the 'recipe'! I...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jul 10, 2011, 10:35 am
I once knew a charming couple from Milan named Omer and Maria Grazia. My memory of them is a bit hazy by now—sadly, we lost contact and it's been years since I've seen them—but two food-related memories still stick out in my mind. The first was the time I made them minestrone alla milanese and t...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jul 1, 2011, 10:34 am
One of the great joys of summer is the appearance of juicy, ripe tomatoes in the marketplace. Tomatoes that, for once, actually taste like tomatoes! And, of course, think about tomatoes and you'll immediately think about pasta. There's something about fresh tomatoes and pasta that was just meant to ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jun 27, 2011, 1:00 am
 Folks, we've reached another milestone. Hard to believe it's been two whole years since we began this humble tribute to the fine home cooking of nonna Angelina. But it's true... And so it's fitting to take a moment, once again, to thank all our readers for your kind readership. I can only guess w...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jun 18, 2011, 8:57 pm
Even if I love some of the island's most emblematic dishes like pasta alla norma—and who doesn't like cannoli?—Sicilian food has always been something of a mystery to me. Many of the dishes remind me of Angelina's Campanian cooking—and Sicilians actually lay claim to melanzane alla parmigiana,...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jun 5, 2011, 11:20 am
For most of us, pizza means just one thing: a round disk of dough topped with tomato, mozzarella and other goodies and baked in a hot oven. But the word 'pizza' can also refer to a sweet pie, typically made with ricotta and eggs, flavored with sugar and other things, called pizza dolce di ricotta. ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Jun 5, 2011, 11:20 am
For most of us, pizza means just one thing: a round disk of dough topped with tomato, mozzarella and other goodies and baked in a hot oven. But the word 'pizza' can also refer to a sweet pie, typically made with ricotta and eggs, flavored with sugar and other things, called pizza dolce di ricotta. ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - May 21, 2011, 4:24 pm
 The scalloppina (in the plural, scalloppine) and its manifold variations may be the most common secondo in Italian cooking. To me, it is typical of that Italian knack for using a bland main ingredient as a foil for a flavorful sauce. Pasta is the example we all know and love, but in this case una ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - May 17, 2011, 10:56 pm
 Here's a really quick note on a combination that may surprise you but was simply meant to be: pineapple and the Italian anise liquor called sambuca. Sprinkle a few drops of sambuca over freshly sliced pineapple, just enough to exalt the flavor of the fruit without drawing attention to itself, and ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - May 15, 2011, 11:17 am
Asparagi alla milanese, or Milanese-style asparagus, might just be the best known asparagus dish in the Italian repertoire. True to its Northern roots, it features butter and cheese, whose sweetness is the perfect offset to the somewhat astringent, slightly grassy taste of asparagus. A 'sunny side u...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - May 1, 2011, 9:41 pm
About this time of year we often find ourselves facing the same culinary conundrum: what to do with leftover lamb? I have always thought that throwing food away was almost criminal, but, truth be told, it is hard to know what to do with leftover lamb. It tends to develop a strong and, to my mind, no...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Apr 22, 2011, 12:03 pm
The trifolati technique is one we've seen before on this blog. And although it is probably most often associated with mushrooms, you can make many different non-leafy vegetables using the same basic technique: slice it and sauté it in garlic and oil, and season with salt, pepper and finely chopped ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Apr 8, 2011, 6:31 pm
A perfect light lunch or dinner for those times when you don't feel like making anything too complicated, these Neapolitan 'eggs in purgatory' take perhaps 25 minutes and practically make themselves. Ingredients (for 2 people) 4 eggs 1 small (14 oz.) can of tomatoes (or passata di pomodoro) 1/2 oni...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Apr 3, 2011, 6:54 pm
Recently, a Belgian colleague of mine (who is also a regular reader of this blog) was kind enough to give me a copy of her favorite Belgian cookbook written in English, entitled the Everybody Eats Well in Belgium Cookbook. Notwithstanding the hokey name, it really is a gem, with 250 classic recipes ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Mar 25, 2011, 3:28 pm
Baby milk-fed lamb or abbacchio is one of the wonders of Roman cooking, in particular in the spring. Lamb that young is not often found in markets in our neck of the woods, but the same techniques work well with mature lamb as well. So the other day I took some lamb shanks I had in the freezer, brai...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Mar 20, 2011, 11:02 am
Being a Catholic country, Father's Day is Italy is celebrated on March 19, the feast of St. Joseph. The feast is associated with a number sweet and savory dishes, but none more so perhaps than the  fancy, sweet version of zeppole usually called, appropriately enough, zeppole di san Giuseppe. Romans...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Mar 11, 2011, 6:22 pm
A reader who I'll call "Nancy T." wrote me recently to tell me about a dish called zuppa that her Piedmontese grandmother used to make. The word is one of several in Italian that mean 'soup' (see our Glossary for details). A zuppa is rustic soup, typically the kind that you are meant to have with ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Mar 6, 2011, 8:35 pm
I wasn't much on sweets even as a kid, but these little sugar-dusted ribbons of fried dough—variously known as chiacchiere, nastrini, stracci, cenci, frappe and a myriad of other names—were my one weakness in the sweets department. They are a traditional treat for Carnival, a time for over-indul...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Mar 5, 2011, 11:37 am
Tuscans are known for being the biggest bean-eaters in Italy, so much so that they are sometimes called mangiafagioli in Italian. But Romans are no slouches in the legume department, either. They love fava beans, of course, and they make a mean pasta e lenticchie, for example, even if the Roman vers...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Feb 27, 2011, 6:12 pm
Folks, we've hit another major milestone. There's been a surge of interest in the blog in the past few weeks, and we now have over 23,000 followers through the various readers and social media! That's more than double the number we had just a few months ago. It all happened so fast that I didn't hav...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Feb 25, 2011, 11:14 am
You could probably devote a small cookbook just to Italian veal chop recipes, but with the price of veal being what it is, I usually do what many Italians do and turn to pork. The taste of pork is different, of course, but most veal recipes translate quite well into oinkier versions. I was reminded ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Feb 21, 2011, 6:40 pm
My great-aunt, second from right, visits family in our ancestral home town of Apice, in the province of Benevento. Dear readers, Those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis may have noticed a few changes around here—all aimed at making your experience here richer and more enjoyable, and ...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Feb 19, 2011, 12:35 pm
A not-so-distant cousin of Provençale brandade de morue, baccalà mantecato is one of the signature dishes of Venetian cuisine and a staple of those wonderful hidden-away Venetian bacari, or wine bars. The name of the dish comes from the verb mantecare, which is a culinary term meaning to 'beat' o...
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Frank Fariello posted an article on Memorie di Angelina - Feb 13, 2011, 7:32 pm
Well, now that you know all about the varieties of Italian cooking and how to tell real Italian cooking from the fake, you may want to take your knowledge to the next level: making authentic Italian food at home. The good news is, it is really very easy to do. Authentic Italian cooking, as I have sa...
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