Memorie di Angelina

  Mayonnaise may have been invented by the Spanish and popularized by the French, but Italians make maionese, too. The Italian method is not very different from elsewhere, but, not surprisingly, it is made either partially or entirely with olive oil (as was the original Spanish version) and is kept very basic: mustard and other flavorings […]

Chimichurri, a delicious if curiously named garlic and parsley based sauce from Argentina, is a wonderful way to dress up steaks. It reminds me a lot of the salsa verde used in Italian cooking for boiled meats, and given the large Italian diaspora in Argentina (upwards of 60% of Argentinians are of Italian ancestry) I […]

> I’m all for convenience when it actually makes life simpler, but it’s always been a mystery to me why people buy those jars of wretched “spaghetti sauce” that line our supermarket shelves when you can make real tomato sauce with only a tiny bit more time and effort. I suspect that many people are […]

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 special occasions. Ragù alla napoletana is often called ‘Sunday sauce’ among […]

I guess it’s Mexico week here at Memorie di Angelina and why not? If you think of it, some of the foods that most typify Italian cooking—tomato, zucchini, peppers, pepperoncino, corn for polenta, just to take a few examples—all come from the New World and more specifically from Mexico. (Potatoes, another New World import, are […]

While versions of it are made around the rim of the western Mediterranean, from Spain all the way to Sicily, this garlic sauce is best known in its Provençale incarnation known as aïoli. It is a commonplace to refer to aioli in English as garlic mayonnaise, but it is really something rather different. You begin […]

  One of the most famous sauces in all of Italian cookery, ragù alla bolognese—known in English as ‘Bolognese sauce’—is one of those archetypical sauces simmering for hours and hours on the back of the stove that so many people associate with Italian cooking. It is the northern equivalent of that other famous ragù from […]