Eggplant, aubergine, melanzana: it doesn’t matter what you call it the taste is always the same. But what an easy vegetable to cook badly. When cooked badly, it’s a bitter, rubbery mess; when cooked well, it’s culinary alchemy. The secret? Not to undercook.
There is something almost spiritual about making fresh pasta. Seeing the combined ingredients turn from disorder to order under your hands is an age old kitchen miracle, witnessed by generations before us. It puts you in touch with them. Respect for them pushes you to make the effort to knead the dough for that extra minute. The pride you feel on seeing that ball of dough, as smooth as marble, in front of you is the same pride they felt, connecting you through the ages.
The New Year is almost upon us and in Italy people are starting to think about preparing their dinners for the 31 December. Many Italians will go out to dinner on that night, and restaurants up and down the country provide special meals, often quite costly, to celebrate with music and dancing. Whether people go out or stay at home, there is one thing which is usually on the menu: cotechino e lenticchie (a kind of pork sausage served with lentils).
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.
