Memorie di Angelina

Carote marinate are beautiful to look at and wonderfully versatile.  In season year ’round, they serve equally well as an antipasto or side dish, or as part of a buffet spread. Best of all, they take almost no effort to make and can—indeed, should—be made ahead of time. If you ask me, every cook should […]

Carabaccia is an ancient soup, going back to the Renaissance. They say it was a favorite of Leonardo da Vinci—and that, as for so many other classic dishes,  the recipe was brought by Catarina de’  Medici to France, where it evolved into the soupe à l’oignon we all know and love today. You may be surprised at the […]

Pairing pasta and vegetables is common throughout Italy, but it is probably fair to say that no region puts so much emphasis on this classic combination as Campania, the southern Italian region from which Angelina hailed. Campanians are so associated with their love of vegetables that they used to jokingly be called mangiafoglie, or ‘leaf […]

Don’t let the name of this dish fool you, there are no mushrooms in melanzane a funghetto, also known by its Neapolitan dialect name, melanzane «a fungetiello» The name refers to the way in which the eggplant is cooked, reminiscent of the classic sautéed mushrooms. Like so many of the summer dishes from Campania we’ve […]

Potato gnocchi are pretty filling, the kind of food you may associate with the cooler weather. But, in fact, you can enjoy gnocchi all year ’round. They are delicious with pesto, for example, or with a simple tomato sauce. In fact, one of the classic Campanian summer dishes is gnocchi alla sorrentina, or potato gnocchi […]

One of the iconic dishes of Ligurian cuisine, just as typical of the region as pesto, la farinata genovese deserves to be better known. It has a wonderful, mildly nutty flavor that marries well with just about anything you want to serve it with, but it is perfectly delicious on its own, as an antipasto […]

We all know that spinach is full of iron and other good stuff, but it has an undeserved reputation for being … blech. I’m not entirely sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with the school cafeteria spinach I remember from my childhood, stewed within an inch of its life and left […]