Memorie di Angelina

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: is there anything more primally satisfying than fried dough? If there is, I haven’t come across it yet. The Neapolitans have come up with all sorts of tidbits made from fried dough, of which we’ve already seen two examples, zeppole and calzoncini, where the dough acts as […]

Being a Catholic country, Father’s Day is Italy is celebrated on March 19, the feast of St. Joseph. The feast is associated with a number sweet and savory dishes, but none more so perhaps than the  fancy, sweet version of zeppole usually called, appropriately enough, zeppole di san Giuseppe. Romans  make their own homier version […]

Zeppole are so easy to make—after all, they are basically just fried pizza dough balls—it is almost embarrassing to post about it, but since it was one of my favorite snack foods that Angelina made, it deserves pride of place on this blog. And, in any event, who doesn’t like fried dough? Zeppole can be […]

While Italian or other European dishes appear on our table most days, once in a while I do like to cook a dish from the New World, too. American food has a less than stellar reputation abroad. For many Europeans, it usually brings to mind junk food, fast food and just plain bad food. The […]

Is there anyone who doesn’t like fried chicken? Nice and crispy on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside… I can get hungry just thinking about it! Tuscans have a particularly savory and simple way to fry chicken: you cut up a young frying chicken, called a pollo novello in Italian, into smallish pieces, […]

I was feeling sort of nostalgic today for the fried vegetables my grandmother used to make. They were almost always the start of our family’s six-hour Sunday dinners, laid out (along with a big wedge of provolone) on the table to pick on as we played cards and waited for the main event. Hmmm, they […]

Continuing with our Italian Hannukah dinner, after the first course of riso coll’uvetta, proceed to the second course of chicken which is, of course, fried in olive oil. This dish is popular in Rome and all over Italy for Hannukah. The day before, cut up your chicken into ten pieces (two wings, two drumsticks, two […]