Sunday Recipe: Italian Wedding Soup Re-Imagined

Pietransieri -- the source of great recipes and culinary inspiration

If you aren't Italian and if you didn't grow up in Pittsburgh, you may not even know what Italian Wedding Soup is. It's a sad state of affairs, I know. For the uninitiated, wedding soup is chicken broth, with baby meatballs, greens (usually escarole or spinach) and tiny pasta (generally acini de pepe). But if you you grew up in an Italian family in the Pittsburgh area, you probably had wedding soup at home -- we always had it at Christmas and Easter. I remember that my neighbors, the Polish, German and Slovak ones, didn't eat wedding soup for holidays. Talk about a sad state of affairs.

At some point in the mid-1980's, wedding soup exploded throughout the area and, like the Primanti's sandwich and the pierogi, became one of the hallmark foods of Pittsburgh. [We can only be grateful that they don't race tureens of wedding soup at PNC Park.] Now you can get wedding soup at pretty much any little diner and bar that serves food. It is everywhere. I'm shocked, actually, that Monday Night Football hasn't used wedding soup as their go-to Pittsburgh food image. (If you're not a sports fan, you don't realize that MNF has a gratuitous shot of a local food wherever they are. E.G., in Philly, it's always a cheesesteak; in San Diego, generally they show a fish taco; in Cincy, there is always a lingering shot of Skyline Chili; and in Pittsburgh, it's always, always a Primanti's sandwich. 'They put french fries right. on. the. sandwich!')

Sunday Recipe: Trofie with Perfect Pesto

I distinctly remember the first time I had pesto -- sublime insouciance, a revelation on my tongue. Then the 1990's happened and everybody served pesto on everything. On bread, on fish, on pasta, on pizza, on your breakfast cereal. It was served year round with old, flavorless basil and too much garlic. It turned me off pesto for a good long time. In fact, I don't think I had eaten pesto in more than a decade.

This passed winter, while perusing my mother-in-law's bookshelves, I discovered Waverly Root's comprehensive guide to the regional foods of Italy, titled, simply enough, 'The Food of Italy.' (Published in 1972 by Vintage Books, a division of Random House. I think it is out of print now, but if you can lay your hands on it, give it a look.) At any rate, in Root's book, I discovered that pesto was invented in Liguria (as was ravioli, so I personally owe those crazy sea-faring Ligurians a big debt of gratitude.) Liguria is the province right around the knee-cap of the peninsula that extends out into the Mediterranean as you can see in this map, and the basil grows thick and lush on the hillsides there. From Root's book:

Sunday Recipe: Tuscan Chick Pea Soup

The only idiot I know who ever got food poisoning in Florence, Italy is ... well ... me. To the people of Florence, a modest suggestion -- cook your sausage. C'mon man.

What the raw sausage incident meant in foodie terms is that, when I was finally feeling better and could safely leave the immediate proximity of my hotel room's toilet, I wasn't up for any big time food adventures or in the mood for another gigantic, tuscan seared Flintstones-type steak. I did luck out and find a great little local joint, with no menu, but a selection that varied daily. When I had lunch there, the soup of the day was supa de ceci -- just the essence of chick peas in a bowl and, I would point out, the best meal I had in Florence. Amazing stuff.

Back from the Boot: Spaghetti with a Traditional Bolognese Sauce

I am back from my "gone fishing," trip, which was really traveling through northern Italy, including a too brief but extremely delicious stop in Bologna. Bologna is a fascinating place, with a history that is progressive beyond progressive (the first to free the feudal serfs, home to the first university, which allowed women to study there and pursue careers in the Renaissance) and it remains a college town to this day.

Bologna was kind of an unplanned visit, so we mostly just wandered around aimlessly, enjoying the gorgeous architecture, then took a wonderful, vigorous walk up to the San Luca Sanctuary. Word is that you can see the Apennines from that vantage point high above the city, but there was fog of old testament proportions on this day and we couldn't see more than four feet in front of our faces, so I'll have to trust that the Apennines were, in fact, where they are supposed to be. It's around two miles up to the church, mostly a pretty steep incline throughout. It was misty and rainy all morning. Hardly ideal conditions for a walk, but one of the amazing things about Bologna is that there are miles and miles of sidewalks (paved with either huge paving stones or marble) covered with porticos or colonnades -- glorious, arched porticos, stretching miles in every direction all over the city. In sum, if you want to take a long walk in the rain, Bologna is the place to do it.

Also, and perhaps most importantly for my purposes here, Bologna is an eater's paradise. There are cheese and ham shops on top of produce markets, and more cheese shops, and pastry shops and gelato shops, and more fruit stands, and pasta shops, more cheese shops, and more cafes. I could get seriously fat in Bologna. If I lived there (and I'd consider it), I'd need to climb that hill to San Luca three times daily. At least.

Most importantly, it is the birthplace of bolognese sauce, the subject of this particular post, so on with the recipe. The sauce is not at all hard to make. It takes no special skills or special tools. What it does take is time and patience; you need to complete each step really well to let the flavors develop, so time is the most important ingredient in a good Bolognese. (WARNING: This recipe makes enough to feed a full army battalion, but it does freeze really well.)

You will need:
1 large onion or 2 small, coarsely diced
2 large carrots, coarsely diced
3 or 4 cloves garlic
2 shallots, coarsely diced
2 pounds ground chuck, ground brisket or ground round (or combination thereof)
1 large can of tomato paste
2-3 cups hearty red wine (more on this below)
1 bay leaves
1 bunch thyme
pinch of crushed red pepper

The prep, meet Mr. Time:
In a food processor, puree onion, carrots, shallots and garlic into a coarse paste. Really run these through because you don't want any big chunks -- the vegetables flavor the sauce, but you don't want to be biting into them. Heat a large, deep sautee pan over medium heat and coat with olive oil. Add the pureed veggies; season liberally with kosher salt. Cook on medium or medium-high heat until all the moisture has evaporated and the veggies turn nice and brown. It takes about 20 minutes and you have to stir frequently. This is a key step. Don't try to hurry through it. Let the veg cook. Don't worry if they stick to the pan a little.

Add the ground beef and season again with salt (you want to layer the seasoning throughout.) The beef will release a lot of moisture and you can use this to really scrape up any brown bits from the veg, then proceed to really brown the beef -- about another 20 minutes or so.

Add the tomato paste. Again, brown this - you can brown tomato paste. I usually let it brown for about 10 minutes.

Add the red wine. At this point, you can really deglaze the pan from any sticking, browned bits of beef or veg that have accumulated along your way.

A word about the wine. Some people say you shouldn't use wine to cook that you wouldn't drink. Fiddlesticks. First off, if you have really expensive taste in wine, that's just an untenable way to run a kitchen. Moreover, you can get a perfectly good wine for cooking purposes for under $10 (often under $8, depending on what's on special). Beyond which, I often cook with chardonnays and I wouldn't drink one of those with a gun to my head. Just saying. As to this wine, the wine most often served as the house wine in Bologna trattorias is a valpolicella, so I prefer to use a valpolicella to cook a bolognese sauce; but really, any hearty red will do. Reduce the wine by half, about 5 minutes or so.

Add the bay leaves, crushed red pepper, and the thyme, plus a couple of cups of water to the pan (just covering the meat by 1/2 inch to an inch.) Bring to a boil, then reduce to simmer. Then break out a book or the paper, but give the sauce an occasional stir. It will cook down and then you add more water - about two cups. You repeat that process a ton - adding water and letting it cook down. But this is where the flavor really explodes and you keep doing this for about four hours - adding water, stirring, reducing, then adding more water and on and on. And yes, you did read that correctly -- you do this for about four hours. Remember I said time was the most important ingredient? As you do this, give it a taste to see if you need more salt (or anything else.) At this point, after four or five hours, the meat in the sauce should be like silk. Remove the bay leaves and the thyme (if you used a bundle). Take about half the sauce out and put it in another bowl or another saucepot.

In Bologna, this sauce is often paired with fresh, hand-cut tagliatelle, but you needn't roll out your own pasta to enjoy it. I like it with dried pasta and generally use a thicker cut of spaghetti (i.e., not an angel hair), cooked al dente, of course. When the pasta is just near al dente, finish it in the sauce pot with the bolognese sauce. You can use the extra sauce on your pasta, should you need it. Or, you have a second batch on hand for another night.

I serve it with pecorino romano, but you can use parmigiano-reggiano if you prefer that flavor. Mangia.

Gone Fishing

Gone fishing. Or at least to eat some fish.

Back in a few.

Sunday Recipe: T'rc'nj (Christmas Donuts)‏

Last week, I posted my great-grandmother's abruzzo ravioli recipe. The other thing that we make at Christmas are tricini. Or that's how Gram said it -- 'tri-cheen' -- phoenetically, dropping the end off, as was her habit. So I figured it was spelled 'tricini' or something close thereto. Then my cousin Peter traced Gram's footsteps back, back, back, across the ocean and found her village, the house she grew up in, and some distant relatives. He asked them about tricini, which they said is spelled, as above -- t'rc'nj. [No vowels. Huh, you'd think they were a Polish Christmas tradition, instead of an Italian one with that spelling.]

My mother recalls Gram making them for both Easter and Christmas, but by the time I entered the picture, Gram made t'rc'nj only at Christmas, to be specific Christmas Eve morning, and by morning, I mean at the ass-crack of dawn. She would start frying the dough around 6:00 a.m. or something equally ridiculous, which meant that she had to make the dough around 3:00 a.m., so that it had time to raise, and be punched down, and raise again. As with the Christmas ravioli, I was the designated family sous chef for the t'rc'nj, too, which meant dragging myself out of bed at around 5:30 to help Gram fry. Then everybody would show up, some with milk, some with wine, some with coffee, and eat these little fried donuts of heaven fresh out of the oil.

I had never heard of any other Italian families making t'rc'nj or any other kind of sweet bread around the holidays until a few months ago, I read Jane Ziegelman's wonderful book, 97 Orchard Street, which traces four families through one tenement in New York's Lower East Side. The last family were Sicilians who made a very similar dish called sfinge -- likewise a sweet fried bread which is traditionally made on New Year's Eve, so that the first taste of the new year is sweet. I'm sure all of these traditions dovetailed, overlapped, morphed into and bounced off one other and are inter-connected.

As to my family's particular tradition, the dough is a sweet, egg bread dough with raisins, which are fried stove top and sprinkled with sugar. The shape is not like a donut, but rather you simply pull the dough by hand and, as you lay it in the frying pan, you shape it like a horseshoe (or, as Gram said, "make like a shoe-horse." I'm not kidding. My cousin Pete and I say that to each other every year.) This year, due to everybody's schedules, I'm making the t'rc'nj on December 26th. And we are going to start frying at 8:30, which means that while I still have to get up at the ass-crack of dawn to make the dough, nobody else does. Tradition. It's so tiring.

You can make them at any time of day, though, and for any occasion, although I must warn, they are best when super fresh.

You will need:
5 pounds of all purpose flour (plus a couple extra cups of flour)
1 teaspoon salt
1 large cake of yeast in 1 cup warm water
2 cups of sugar (plus the remainder of a 5 pound bag for sprinkling post-frying)
1 box or less of raisins
4 eggs, beaten

The Prep:
Soak the raisins overnight in several cups of water. In the morning, when you drain the raisins, save the raisin liquid and put it aside. Mash up the raisins a bit with a potato masher. You just want to give them a cursory smash -- you don't need mashed raisins, just kinda smooshed.

Dissolve the yeast cake in a small bowl in warm water, then mix together the dry ingredients - flour, salt, sugar. Add the yeast, raisins, eggs and 4 cups of water. Use the raisin water, if you don't have 4 full cups of raisin water, supplement it with regular old tap water. Mix it all up by hand until it's thoroughly mixed and give it a little kneading. You'll probably need to add a couple cups of flour at this point - you want a nice sticky bread dough, but not epically sticky.

Cover (I use a big towel) and put it aside to let it raise, about two hours. Note, the raising works better if it's somewhere warm, so don't sit the bowl of dough in an area with a draft.

Now this part is important -- go back to bed.

The dough should raise up in 90 minutes to 2 hours. Get your butt out of bed, punch the dough down, and cover it so it can raise again.

Go back to bed for another 45 minutes or so.

After this second raising, the dough is ready. I need constant access to the dough when I'm frying, and the bowl is big, so I put a chair next to me at the stove.

Heat up vegetable oil in two deep frying pans. My great grandmother didn't have any fancy cooking tools, so she always tested the oil with a raisin. When you think the oil is hot, drop a raisin in -- if it starts to bubble and crackle right away, the oil is hot enough. You don't want the t'rc'nj just lounging about in the oil because, really, yech.

Take a small handful of dough and stretch it so that it's about 3 or 4 inches in length, and about the same circumference as a hot dog. Any stray raisins that are poking out, push back in with your fingertip. Drop in the hot oil and don't forget to make like a shoe-horse. Don't mess with them. I use tongs to flip them. When one side is golden brown, flip. Let the other side get golden brown and remove to a paper towel lined plate or bowl and let them drain for a minute or two. Then toss with regular old granulated sugar.

Enjoy! And then take a much deserved nap.

[Pictured above, standing on the stoop in the center is my grandmother, Vera (Petracco) DiPerna, as a young woman. My mother is off to the side with her hair in pincurls and next to her, in the foreground is her cousin Bobby Alcantara (which I suppose that makes him my first cousin, once removed?) That's the front yard of the house they lived in, also on Orchard Street, but in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, not Jane Ziegelman's Orchard Street in NYC.]

Sunday Recipe: Gram's Ravioli

My great-grandmother came from the village of Pietranseri, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, to America when she was just a teen. My cousin Pete has done amazing work in going back and finding old relatives, visiting the village, and even found the house where she grew up. We all, several generations removed, still feel a very close connection with Gram. One of the many things she brought with her from the old country was her family's tradition of having ravioli on Christmas Day (also Easter.) It is the gift that keeps on giving.

Gram's ravioli tradition was passed down to her daughter Vera (my grandmother) and then skipped a generation to me. [My mother is the designated family taster, but I was apparently born to be a sous chef.] I think I'm the only one in the family who still makes ravs, but as long as I can tolerate getting flour caked in my fingernails and kneading the dough until it's 'like silk,' Gram's Christmas (and Easter) ravioli tradition will live on.

I was taught to make the dough by making a flour well and then slowly whipping the eggs with a fork, being careful not to break the well, then bit by maddening bit, working the flour into the well. You can do this if you like, but I have to warn you, it is labor intensive. And, did I mention, maddening? Yeah, that too.

So while I know how to make pasta dough that way, I choose not to. None other than the magnificent Lidia Bastianich now uses a food processor to plow through the first part of the dough making process and, you know what? If it's good enough for Lidia Bastianich, it is good enough for me. You will still have to put some elbow grease into it by kneading the dough by hand for about 10 to 15 minutes afterwards, but the tedious flour well is not necessary. Beyond which, I think I have PTSD from my grandmother telling me every time, "don't break the well." "Yes, Grammie, I know. I've only been doing this since I was 4 years old and I am well aware that terrible things will happen if I break the well." But those days are behind me as the food processor makes the dough process much less labor intensive, less daunting and I've found that I can crank them out these days.

The Abruzzo region of Italy is very mountainous and in Gram's village, there was little accessibility to a port, so they didn't eat much fish, but sheep are common. Also, they were poor. So, the ravs she grew up with were stuffed with ricotta and despite Laura Schenone's assertion that cheese ravioli are the training wheels of ravioli, I'm gonna defend them. I think that people cook with what they have at hand and lots of sheep + poverty = ricotta stuffed ravioli. Beyond which they are fucking delicious.

Enough with the history lesson, on with the cooking.

For the dough, you will need:
3 cups unbleached all purpose flour, or as needed
4 large eggs + 1 extra egg yolk
1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
Warm water as needed

For the filling, you will need:
1 pound fresh ricotta cheese
1 large bundle of fresh, flat parsley finely chopped
1 cup freshly grated pecorino romano cheese
1 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
2 eggs
salt and pepper to taste

The Labor:
Spoon 2 2/3 cups of the flour into a large food processor fitted with metal blade. Beat the eggs (plus the extra yolk), olive oil and salt together in a small bowl until blended. With the motor running, pour the egg mixture into the feed tube. Process until the ingredients form a rough and slightly sticky dough. If the mixture is too dry, drizzle a very small amount of warm water into the feed tube and continue processing. Scrape the dough out of the bowl onto a clean, lightly floured surface. (I do it right on my kitchen counter.)

Knead the dough by gathering it into a compact ball, then pushing the ball away from you with the heels of your hands. Repeat the gathering and pushing motion several times. You want to stretch it as you roll and alternate between kneading and sort of stretching. The dough will take on a smooth, silky texture after 10 or 15 minutes. It should be elastic, too. Test it by pressing your fingertip into it and if the imprint springs back up, you've probably achieved delicious dough. Flour the work surface and your hands lightly any time the dough begins to stick while you are kneading.

Roll the dough into a smooth ball and wrap it in saran wrap. Let the dough rest 45 minutes to an hour at room temperature. (It can rest longer if you put it in the fridge, but if you refrigerate it, let it stand at room temperature for about an hour before rolling and shaping.)

While the dough is resting, mix up the filling. It's easy as pie. Mix the ricotta, the parsley, the romano and parm cheeses, the eggs and a pinch of salt and pepper. Taste it and adjust for salt. However, do not let my mother taste it, because she can eat the entire bowl as is. Refrigerate the filling until you need it.

The Assembly Line:
It should be noted that I use a pasta maker like the one below:
If you don't have one of these, borrow one. You really don't want to be rolling the dough with a rolling pin, unless you have (a) a huge work surface and (b) a huge rolling pin and (c) a helper.

With this handy-dandy machine, you roll out long strips of dough (about 2 inches across) and as thin as you like (I like the pasta dough on the thinner side, but not so thin as it breaks too easily.) I make one at a time with this method. On the long strip of dough, giving yourself about 1 1/2 inches from the start of it, put a dollop of the filling. Fold the dough over and press around three sides. Cut that with a knife. Then press the sides down more firmly with the tines of a fork (pressing in and rolling the fork out.) This seals them so they don't leak in the water when you cook them. Then it's just lather, rinse, repeat. I line them up on floured cookie sheets and set them aside until I'm ready to cook.

Note: you can use an edger, to make perfect crinkled edges like you might get in a frozen variety of pasta or in a restaurant. But mine are rustic. Also, I leave an generous portion of dough at the edges, so when I've finished a tray, they look like this:

Once all the ravs are made, bring a large pot of water to a boil. You want to use a ginormous pot because you want the ravs to have lots of room to move. Salt the water well when it hits a rolling boil. Add the ravs and stir gently, so they don't stick. When they start to float, they're nearly ready (about 5 minutes). Of course, I have the fail safe tester of my mother, but you want the dough to be al dente, not mushy ...

I serve them with a basic tomato sauce (my sauce recipe is here) and freshly grated romano cheese.

Happy Christmas and thanks Gram.

[Pictured above is my great-grandmother, Marie Petracco, as a middle-aged woman. She was in her mid-60's when I entered the picture.]