What exactly is ‘authentic’ Italian food? It may be hard to define, but Italians know it when they taste it. To try to get to the bottom of this elusive question, I have written a three part series on the subject: Part I: The Varieties of Italian Cooking This post walks you through the principal […]
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 […]
> 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 […]
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 […]
The proper dressing of a salad has got to be one of the most overlooked techniques in all of cookery. For many people, a salad is something so common that it hardly merits thinking about. But there is actually a kind of art to this everyday task that can really transform your salads from the pedestrian […]
One of the wonders of Italian cuisine is its incredible variety, and much of that variety comes from the mix-and-match nature of so many of its dishes. You take a staple base ingredient like rice or pasta, and you pair that with all sorts of flavoring ingredients and come up with literally hundreds of variations […]
Every cuisine has a collection of dry, canned, preserved and fresh staple ingredients that form the backbone of its repertoire. These staples show up time and again in countless dishes and define the characteristic tastes and textures of the cuisine. Italian cuisine is no different, and enormous regional variations in the cuisine notwithstanding, the Italian […]
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