Autumn in central Italy is sagra season. These are local food festivals and with so many typical products coming into season in September and October—grapes, mushrooms, olives, and truffles to name but a few—there’s a choice of sagra to attend every weekend. The two last weekends of October are the time of for the small Tuscan village of Caprese to have its chestnut sagra: the Festa del Marrone di Caprese.
Even if the legend of Marco Polo bringing pasta back to Italy from China weren’t disproved by the documented presence of pasta in Sicily exactly 100 years before his birth, the fact that there is only one truly traditional pasta dish from Venice might do the job. If the famous Venetian had introduced the delicacy, you’d expect it to be Venice’s national dish. Venetians are always proud of their contributions to general Italian culture and would be telling it to anyone who’d listen. But no. Bigoli in salsa, long pasta cooked in a tasty fish sauce, is the only inclusion of pasta in the city’s traditional cuisine. Sorry Marco Polo fans.
It’s pumpkin season again and the shops are full of all shapes and sizes of squash ready to be made into soups, risotti, gnocchi and so on. Italians love pumpkin, or zucca as they call it, and there seems to be no end to their inventiveness in cooking them. So, I thought I’d share with you one of my (and my dinner guests’) favourite recipes: tortelli di zucca.
Tortelli is a word used mostly in north-central Italy to describe two very different pasta shapes. In Tuscany, it’s used to describe a shape like ravioli. In the province of Arezzo, tortelli di patate, ravioli stuffed with mashed potato—eaten boiled or often deep fried (yes, you read that right)—are a local tradition. Elsewhere, such as in Emilia-Romagna, the word is used for large tortellini, which are often called tortelloni outside the region.
The problem with choosing a restaurant in Rome is that you are spoiled for choice. Much like any European capital you can choose from a wide variety of cuisines, including some of the best Asian restaurants in Italy, but from time to time only authentic Roman food will do.
In restaurants around the world, Italian food is forced into the menu straightjacket of Starter, Main Course, and Dessert, a holy trinity that doesn’t exist in Italy. The result is that dishes are found on the wrong part of the menu, leading the diner to fundamentally misunderstand how Italian food is, and is meant to be eaten, as well as missing out on the much vaunted benefits of an Italian diet.
Polpette biscotte al finocchio
Italian food may be simple, but often it’s not fast: but that’s one of its charms. Good ingredients, cooked well. It’s no surprise therefore that the Slow Food movement started in Italy. Traditionally, a lot of the more time-consuming dishes would have been cooked by housewives while their husbands were out at work, and so often consist of dishes which can cook more or less unattended while you get on with other chores. A good example is the authentic ragù which would be cooked slowly for about three hours. If you’ve ever tasted a three-hour ragù, you’ll appreciate why.