Memorie di Angelina

A short post this week. Things are crazy. Here’s another great snack you can make starting with a basic pizza dough, whether homemade or store-bought: spread it out on a cookie sheet or shallow rectangular baking pan, poke it all over with your fingers, then top with rosemary, sale grosso, pepper and a good drizzle […]

One of my fondest taste memories from my childhood was a bread we used to call “Anzogna bread” (the name, I am told, is a dialect word for lard). My grandparents would buy it at a local bakery in the Italian neighborhood they lived in. These days, sadly, you can’t buy it any more. Italian […]

  I am not a baker. Never have been. I have always found stove-top cooking fun and easy but baking is a very different art. Cooking lets you stir and taste and adjust as you go along to get things to come out just right. But with baking—once you close that oven door, your success […]

I don’t know about you, but when temperatures rise into triple-digits (on the Fahrenheit scale) as they have lately in much of the Northern Hemisphere, even my enthusiasm for cooking begins to lag. That, and our impeding house move, has meant that any cooking that I do indulge in these days is as quick as […]

A reader who I’ll call “Nancy T.” wrote me recently to tell me about a dish called zuppa that her Piedmontese grandmother used to make. The word is one of several in Italian that mean ‘soup’ (see our Glossary for details). A zuppa is rustic soup, typically the kind that you are meant to have with bread, […]

In the days when freshly baked bread was a staple of everyday life, a plethora of recipes grew up for using leftover stale bread. This classic Tuscan recipe is, to my mind, the very best of the lot–pappa al pomodoro, literally “mush with tomatoes”. (Sounds better in Italian, doesn’t it?) To make this dish, you […]

As many readers will know, panzanella is a classic Tuscan bread, red onion and tomato salad. Well, the other day I had on hand some old bread and a few ripe tomatoes, but I also had bits and pieces of other ingredients fit for a salad–olives, cucumbers and half an avocado. And, why not?–I made […]