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 … Read More
Rouxbe Online Cooking School
Dear readers, Recipes are great things, but without the right cooking skills you won’t get the most out of even the best recipes. That’s why I try to spend time in the posts here on Memorie di Angelina describing technique to you in some considerable detail—to try to recreate for … Read More
The Italian Pantry
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. Enormous regional variations notwithstanding, the … Read More
Brodo vegetale (Vegetable Broth)
With the increased interest in vegetarian and vegan diets in recent times, you will find more and more recipes calling for vegetable broth instead of, or as alternative to, the more traditional meat broths. Ingredients When I make vegetable broth, I always begin with the usual aromatic vegetables that go … Read More
How to make béchamel sauce
Béchamel sauce, which is essentially nothing more than milk thickened with a roux, is widely used in northern Italian cooking. It is not usually used as a ‘sauce’ per se but rather as a component in baked primi like lasagne alla bolognese, cannelloni, polenta pasticciata or crespelle al forno, as well as … Read More
How to Make Homemade Polenta
Homemade polenta is one of the most emblematic dishes of the northern Italian cuisines from the Veneto to Lombardia to Piemonte. It is also one of the oldest foods eaten in Italy, dating back at least to 990 BCE. In its original form, polenta—known to the ancient Romans as pulmentum—was … Read More
How to Make Homemade Broth
Making homemade broth is so easy to do, and the results are so wonderful and so almost infinitely useful, I really don’t understand why it’s almost disappeared from home cooking. Well, actually, I can guess: fewer and fewer people cook anything at all, let along things like homemade broth, which … Read More
Buying canned tomatoes
Update: The top rated brand in this post, Cento, no longer sells DOP San Marzanos. But the information about identifying good quality tomatoes is as relevant as ever. And I’m happy to recommend the other brands mentioned in this post. Here’s a special note for readers in the US, where … Read More