Memorie di Angelina

Carpaccio is one of the most famous of Italian antipasti but the version most people are familiar with—thin beef slices macerated in olive oil and lemon, adorned with arugula and shavings of Parmesan cheese— is actually more precisely carne cruda all’Albese, a Piedmontese dish. The true carpaccio was invented by Venetian hotelier Giuseppe Cipiani, of Harry’s […]

I love recipes that combine meat (or fish) with vegetables. In Italian cooking terms, it combines secondo and contorno in a single dish, and if you serve the dish with some good bread, it becomes a one-pot meal, especially appreciated after the holidays when many of us are probably “cooked out”. Chicken, with its mild […]

A not-so-distant cousin of Provençale brandade de morue, baccalà mantecato is one of the signature dishes of Venetian cuisine and a staple of those wonderful hidden-away Venetian bacari, or wine bars. The name of the dish comes from the verb mantecare, which is a culinary term meaning to ‘beat’ or ‘whip’ or simply to ‘stir vigorously’ […]

Here’s another installment from the colorful world of risotto. Last week we featured green risotto, this week it’s black risotto, made with cuttlefish and its ink. The technique for this risotto recipe is a bit different from the more usual one, in that you don’t begin by toasting the rice but rather braising the cuttlefish […]

  A good many people have an aversion to organ meats. Perhaps that’s because they are often not very well prepared—overcooking, which tends to accentuate the ‘mineral’ taste of organ meats and toughen their texture, is all too common. Or perhaps it’s just the idea of eating an organ, although why someone would happily eat […]

Sweet, fresh peas in their pods can be hard to find, but when I spotted some in a local market I grabbed them up to make a delicious Springtime dish from the Veneto: risi e bisi, or rice and peas in Venetian dialect. Although it resembles a risotto, the technique is quite different. Shell your […]

 Baccalà, or dried salt cod, is a favorite meal around our house, even if it only appears occasionally on the dinner table. One of the most delicious ways to make baccalà has got to be in the style of the northern Italian city of Vicenza, slowly simmered in milk flavored with a savory soffritto of […]