With all its ‘qs’ and ‘us’ the word squacquerone looks impossible to pronounce. However, if you are travelling in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna you need to get your act together and learn how. If not, you’ll be missing out on one of the most delicious things the region has to offer.
Apart from a brief appearance in Inferno, I am really surprised that Dan Brown hasn’t written a book set in Venice. Dotted around the city are hundreds of carved symbols, most of which look like they would make a perfect treasure hunt for Robert Langdon, who is after all a ‘symbologist’, to follow. Most of them go unnoticed by tourists and visitors but if you understand them they offer a fascinating insight into daily life in the Venetian Republic and what the city would have been like prior to the 18th Century.
Venetians are not just Venetians but are also defined as being from the sestiere—the six divisions of the historic centre—they were born or live in. The sestieri form the city centre and don’t include the islands and mainland areas of the city. A castelàn is a person who from the sestiere of Castèlo (Castello in its Italianized form). Today Castello is considered one of the most authentic parts of Venice and is still largely residential. However, as we shall see, there are many famous buildings and museums in the sestiere.
Today, Rome’s Jewish quarter is one of the more colourful spots in the city. Walk down the Via del Portico d’Octavia at night, and you’ll witness the waiters competing with each other to attract clients into their restaurant because it’s the oldest, the most authentic, the only one where the chef is a real Roman Jew, the one run by a nonna or the only one that Anthony Bourdain ate at. The atmosphere and the food are unlike those anywhere else in the city. The truth is that all the restaurants offering Cucina Giudaico Romanesca (Roman Jewish Cuisine) are pretty good. It’s why the area is popular with locals, Romans, and tourists.
There is a popular conception that Italians are very conservative when it comes to their food. However, this isn’t always true and certainly the younger generation, while being very respectful to their nonnas’ way of doing things, are happy to experiment even if they often go back to the old way of doing things. I created this recipe for gnocchi as an experiment, to try and revisit an old one. As you will read, it revives a now lost nineteenth-century way of doing things with a modern twist.
Most people are familiar with potato gnocchi, those small fluffy pasta substitutes which are a staple of most Italian restaurant menus. The name, which is thought to derive from the word for knuckle, nocca, is consistent with an Ancient origin. These dumplings resemble the animal knuckle bones which the Ancient Romans used as dice. The potato version, obviously does not have a Roman origin since the potato only reached Europe in the 16th Century. However, there are older versions of the recipe that don’t use potato at all.
On the banks of the Canal Grande is a strange oriental looking building. It has pair of low towers linked by a two storey colonnade running the length of the facade. This is the Fontego dei Turchi, today Venice’s Natural History Museum but once the home of the Turkish community in Venice and an emporium for goods from the East.
