Sicily Archives - attheitaliantable.com

November 18, 2023 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Italian Cuisine in the World!

Eight years ago, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs started a week-long focus to promote fine Italian cuisine in the world. The multi-faceted focus is on Italian agriculture and food products. The topic of Italian cuisine in the world is so broad that it’s hard to know where to start. From health benefits of the Mediterranean diet to the quality of Italian food products and ingredients, there’s a lot of ground to cover. Let’s begin with the social and economic reasons that so many people migrated from Southern Italy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This mass arrival of immigrants changed nations. We can focus later on how Italian cuisine in the world changed once the Italians settled on the distant shores of North America.

How the Unification of Italy changed the world

As many who have traveled with us recently have learned, the diaspora of southern Italians over a century ago is linked to the unification of Italy in 1861. Northern patriots, with the goal of kicking out foreign rulers, began a civil war to unify the country under one government and monarchy. The Austro-Hungarian empire ruled the northeast, the Vatican owned much of central Italy, the Savoy family ruled Piedmont and Sardinia, and the Spanish Bourbons ruled over Sicily and southern Italy.

Known as The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, this kingdom was wealthier than all the rest of Italy put together. Its two major capitals in Naples and Palermo were filled with riches, art, huge palaces and a large aristocratic class. When they eyed unification, their goal in the south was two-fold: kick out the Spanish rulers and steal the immense wealth for their new country. The Savoy king in Piedmont bankrolled the war and became the monarch of unified Italy.

The development of the new country profoundly changed the southern Italian economy. It led to poverty and joblessness for the majority of people in the south. The nobility was heavily taxed, the coffers were looted, and the power of the ruling class left Naples and Palermo, transferring to the new capital in Rome. In two generations, people who had had jobs and livelihoods were left with nothing but a dream of escape: the New World.

Taking with them what they could carry, as well as memories and recipes from their families, towns and homeland.

The influence of Southern Italians in the US

One hundred years ago, products imported from other countries weren’t readily available in the US. When the southern Italians arrived in America, they didn’t find what they needed to recreate their dishes. Olive oil was unavailable, tomatoes were more acidic than those grown on the volcanic soil of their homeland, red wine was generally french and hard to come by. So the Italians set about making their home in America, planting vineyards in California, adding sugar to tomato sauce, and importing food staples from their homeland.

A ban on importing pork products from Italy opened the door for Italian butchers to produce sausages and salami. Mozzarella cheese is a southern Italian staple that doesn’t travel well, so delis began making it fresh. American soldiers stationed in southern Italy during WWII fell in love with pizza and pasta. Their return aided the explosion of Italian restaurants and pizzerias outside of Italian enclaves.

The use of oregano by southern Italians, originally a Greek herb, became the one herb that made a dish “Italian”. People from different Italian regions intermarried or settled next door and shared recipes. Over generations, American-Italian cuisine developed, often bearing little resemblance to dishes you find today in Italy.

Differences between raw ingredients in Italy and the US

As easy as it is to find really high-quality ingredients in Italy, it’s almost impossible in America. Italian food is simple, relying on the freshest ingredients. Those ingredients must be of the highest quality to stand alone. Two reasons make it difficult to reproduce authentic Italian food in the US: 1. our raw ingredients are grown with herbicides and pesticides and sprayed or gassed for a longer shelf life; and, 2. our processed foods have added fillers, sugars and chemicals.

A good example is ricotta cheese. In Italy, ricotta is fresh and local, made with only milk, cream, vinegar and salt. It is widely available in every grocery store and deli and is a delicious staple in many dishes. Ricotta cheese in America almost always contains additives such as locust bean gum and carraggenan. It’s not delicious and, unlike in Italy, is never consumed by itself.

Glyphosate, widely used as Roundup in America to harvest wheat, is illegal in Europe. Thus, Italian wheat products such as flour, pasta and bread don’t contain this harmful additive. Grape seeds contain high amounts of antioxidants and most grapes eaten in Italy still contain them. But in America, seedless grapes have widely propagated, leaving 80% of grapes sold in the US without seeds, more than any country in the world. Because Italy is so much smaller than America, most fruits and vegetables are considered locally grown and don’t need to be gassed or treated to lengthen the shelf life. Italians still eat with the seasons and so what they consume is fresher and more densely packed with nutrients.

There are so many DOP food products in Italy that have rules and regulations. From the geographic region to ingredients and process, DOP products are a consumers guarantee of quality. But that complex subject is for another article!

Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean Diet means eating locally, eating seasonally and eating foods that haven’t been hybridized or genetically modified.

To wrap it up

Italian cuisine in the world is developing. Many Italians from every region now live and work in America. Imported Italian products are widely available and Eataly stores are everywhere. It’s easier now to learn and create authentic Italian dishes if you pay attention to your ingredients and seek out the highest quality. Traveling to Italy is an easier and less expensive vacation than it was in the past. We love sharing authentic recipes and helping foodies and food professionals grow in their appreciation for Italian cuisine in the world today!

www.eccolacucina.com

April 27, 2017 by Gina Stipo 1 Comment

The case for using whole sea salt and not kosher

Why does every food writer and recipe I read in the US call for kosher salt? It’s so prevalent I find myself wondering who is behind the big push for Americans to be better cooks by using kosher salt? I was reading the recent NYTimes article “The Single Most Important Ingredient” by Samin Nosrat who wrote “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat”, and was super excited to hear what she said about salt. Because it truly IS the single most important ingredient you can use! And there it was – she advocated kosher salt. I was crushed.

Allow me to clarify a few things:

Kosher salt, used exclusively in the US, does not equal whole sea salt. Sea salt is made up of sodium choride (about 85%), as well as dozens of naturally-occurring minerals that help to temper and balance the sodium, both on the palate and in the body. Kosher salt goes through a process that strips all these minerals, denaturing it, leaving 99% sodium to which a chemical is added as an anti-caking agent. It renders a product far inferior to natural, whole sea salt. I call it a “dead salt”.

By the way, it’s called “kosher” because when koshering meat you needed to use a large kernel of salt, not the fine stuff that would melt. So, kosher salt has large kernels, what they call “grosso” in Italian or “gros” in French.

I lived in Italy for 13 years, long enough for my palate to change. After a few years, when I would return to the US for a visit, I was struck by how the addition of kosher salt adds acrid and bitter notes to any dish. The Culinary Institute of America did a study a number of years ago looking for the taste difference that various esoteric and finishing salts bring to food, and to their surprise they found that kosher salt was harsh and bitter, while all the other whole salts were not. I’m on the hunt for that study and will post it as soon as I can get my hands on it.

Kosher salt certainly should not be used in trying to reproduce authentic world cuisine, as suggested by the majority of current US food magazines. The Saveur magazine article on arab influences on the Italian island of Sicily I find especially egregious. The article cites a recipe from the city of Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, where they’ve been continuously farming salt since the ancient Phoenicians 5000 years ago, and yet the Saveur recipe calls for kosher salt! Why? Salt from Trapani is a main export from Sicily and it’s available in the US – in grocery stores (Alessi brand), at TJMAXX, Home Goods and Italian specialty shops near you!

There is farmed whole sea salt available in the US from around the world: France, Spain, Brazil. But even salt mined from a mountain, such as beautiful Himalayan pink salt from the mountains of Pakistan, was once a sea 10-100 million years ago.

Well I for one have had enough and am on a crusade to fight kosher salt and help whole sea salt find its place in America’s kitchen. Join me! You can use your box of kosher salt on the sidewalks next winter! As always, Buon Appetito!

April 19, 2016 by Gina Stipo 3 Comments

Why does every food writer and recipe I read in the US call for kosher salt? It’s so prevalent I find myself wondering who is behind the big push for Americans to be better cooks by using kosher salt? I was reading the recent NYTimes article “The Single Most Important Ingredient” by Samin Nosrat who wrote “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat”, and was super excited to see what she said about salt! Because it truly IS the single most important ingredient you can use. And there it was – she advocated kosher salt. I was crushed.

Allow me to clarify a few things:

Kosher salt, used exclusively in the US, does not equal whole sea salt. Sea salt is made up of sodium choride (about 85%), as well as dozens of naturally-occurring minerals that help to temper and balance the sodium, both on the palate and in the body. Kosher salt goes through a process that strips all these minerals, leaving 99% sodium to which a chemical is added as an anti-caking agent. It’s called “kosher” because when koshering meat you needed to use a large kernel of salt, not the fine stuff that would melt. So, kosher salt has large kernels, what they call “grosso” in Italian or “gros” in French.

I lived in Italy for 13 years, long enough for my palate to change. After a few years, when I would return to the US for a visit, I was struck by how the addition of kosher salt adds acrid and bitter notes to any dish. The Culinary Institute of America did a study that reflected this surprising development in their quest for taste differences in various whole sea salts; I’m on the hunt for that study and will post it as soon as I can get my hands on it.

This denatured salt is then chemically laced to reduce clumping. It renders a product far inferior to natural, whole sea salt. I call it a “dead salt”. Kosher salt certainly should not be used in trying to reproduce authentic world cuisine, such as the Saveur magazine article on arab influences on the Italian island of Sicily. Here is a recipe from the city of Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, where they’ve been farming salt since the ancient Phoenicians 5000 years ago, and yet the Saveur recipe calls for kosher salt! Why? Salt from Trapani is a main export from Sicily and it’s available in the US – in grocery stores (Alessi brand), at TJMAXX, Home Goods and Italian specialty shops near you!

Well I for one have had enough and am on a crusade to fight kosher salt and help whole sea salt find its place in America’s kitchen. Join me! Buon Appetito!

https://www.attheitaliantable.com/kosher-salt-us/

December 21, 2015 by Gina Stipo 2 Comments

Feast of the Seven Fishes

The holiday celebration of the Feast of the Seven Fishes is considered by many non-Italians to be the quintessential Italian Christmas Eve festivity, but in fact it’s much more of an Italian-American tradition. The custom of having no meat comes from the Catholic church’s restrictions on eating meat during advent, and with the abundance of fisherman and fish from the coastal regions of the peninsula, the last day of advent being Christmas Eve, the tradition took hold of eating an elaborate fish dinner before meat returned to the table on Christmas Day.

Since a great majority of immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries came from the coastal cities of Naples and Palermo, the custom of eating fish morphed into a feast of many courses of fish and seafood and entered the Italian American vernacular as the Feast of the Seven Fishes, the accepted way to celebrate the holiday in Italian style.

In my family, where my grandparents came from mountainous areas of southern regions (Potenza in Basilicata and Avellino in Campania), we celebrated with cheese ravioli in tomato sauce followed by a large baked fish and finished with platters of fried pastries. Christmas Eve to me meant my grandma’s fried struffoli drizzled with honey and fried chestnut and cocoa ravioli drenched in powdered sugar. Outside grandma’s house, my family has always celebrated with a huge platter of spaghettini tossed with seafood: rock shrimp, lobster or shrimp, roasted in garlic and herbs – all accompanied by copious amounts of wine!
This year in my new osteria in Louisville, At the Italian Table, we will be celebrating the Feast of the Seven Fishes in the days leading up to and following Christmas. Tiny fried shrimp and calamari, scallop shells baked with seafood, bread crumbs and herbs, drizzled with great Sicilian olive oil; mussels steamed in white wine and tomato, served on toasted bruschetta doused in the new Tuscan olive oil; baked snapper or branzino, drizzled with lemon and orange olive oil from Sorrento – a full evening of delicious southern Italian fish dishes and crisp wines to complement them.
Here’s my recipe for Calamari Arabbiata – squid simmered in tomato and hot peppers – delicious served with bruschetta! Buon Appetito and Buon Natale a tutti!!

Calamari o Polpo con Sugo Arabbiata (squid or baby octopus in spicy tomato sauce)

2 lbs squid, cleaned and sliced into rings and tentacles; or baby octopus

3 garlic cloves

olive oil

hot peppers flakes to taste

2 cups crushed tomato

1/4 cup fresh parsley, minced

1/2 cup white wine

Sauté the garlic in the olive oil gently, add the hot peppers and half the parsley and cook a few minutes, being careful not to brown the garlic. Add the squid or baby octopus and sauté until coated with the garlic and parsley. Add the wine, allow it to cook off and then add the tomato and simmer for 30 minutes, salting to taste. Sprinkle the remainder of the parsley over the dish and serve with bruschetta.

Bruschetta: toast slices of heavy country loaves (the best in the US is Tuscan Pane from Trader Joe’s) until golden brown, gently drag a single clove of garlic over the toast and drench in great extra virgin olive oil.