This is the first in a week of Easter themed recipes since we’re only ten days away from the big day. I’ve already shared my recipes for pastiera napoletana and torta pasqualina on the Great Italian Chefs website, so now it’s time for some Easter recipes here.
This recipe is from Tuscany.
Polpettone, aka meatloaf, is one of the dishes I remember my mother preparing as a child. She in turn, had been taught to make it by my real nonna, who I never met since she died before I was born. My mother’s polpettone was delicious, roasted in the oven with lashings of parmesan cheese and perfect potatoes, all held together with a tomato sauce. What memories!
This post was inspired by my fellow blogger Vanessa who has a site I enjoy very much called Food in Books. It deals with the two things I love more than anything else: eating and reading. Vanessa scours the world’s literature looking for references to food and then she develops a recipe based on the one in the extract, so you can eat along with your favourite literary characters.
This article is about Calabria.
‘Nduja (pronouned ‘in-doo-ya’) is an incredibly spicy salame from the Calabrian village of Spìlinga. It’s made from pork mixed together with a high proportion of Calabrian chile (peperoncino), which gives it a bright red colour and fiery taste. It’s very soft which makes it easily spreadable on bread, which is one of the most popular ways to eat it, a bit like spicy pâté.
For a long time, one of my favourite food blogs has been Keep Calm and Fanny On!, in which we are introduced the to the wonderful 1970s world of the British TV cook, Fanny Cradock. For those of you that don’t know her, Fanny was like a terrifying caricature of Julia Child, who corralled the British public to share her affection for all things French, France being ‘the acknowledged Centre of the Gastronomic World’ (Cradock 1973: 6). In fact, this was so true that ‘In our almost endless travels we have again and again come upon some strange dish whose name is totally unfamiliar to us, only to discover that it is a French dish … under another name.’ (Cradock 1973: 6).