Memorie di Angelina

17/10/2026

If there’s one product that defines the cooking of the little known region of Basilicata, it’s peperoni cruschi, ripe red peppers, dried in the sun and then flash-fried in hot olive oil until they turn nice and crisp. The taste is fruity and faintly smoky, with no heat at all.

I find freshly fried peperoni cruschi absolutely addictive. You can eat them like potato chips, or crumble them over pasta, pizza or eggs. But one of the most celebrated ways to use them is to pair them with baccałà, or salt cod, to make today’s featured dish, baccalà alla lucana.

Basilicata, a little known region

Basilicata—sometimes also called by its ancient name Lucania, hence the moniker of this dish—is one of Italy’s least-known regions. Tucked inside the instep of the Italian boot between Puglia, Campania and Calabria, the region is best known for the town of Matera, with its ancient cave dwellings. a UNESCO World Heritage Site and European Capital of Culture in 2019. But beyond Matera, much of the region remains off the tourist trail, with a cuisine shaped by rural life and made with few, very good ingredients: these sun-dried peppers, cured pork, hand-shaped pasta and, of course, salt cod.

Italian cookery abounds with different baccalà dishes. Baccalà alla lucana, sometimes styled all’aviglianese after the town of Avigliano where it is said to have originated, is one of the simplest. It’s also one of the tastiest. You gently poach the salt cod, then dress it with warm garlic-scented olive oil and a generous crumbling of crisp cruschi right at the end. A little minced parsley for color if you care for it, and you’re done.

Peperoni cruschi can be hard to find outside of Italy, but they can be ordered online, and I’ve included some good substitutes in the Notes to the recipe. And if salt cod is not easy to come by where you live, fresh cod makes an acceptable stand-in. Whichever way you go, do give this a try. I think you’ll be as taken with those crunchy peppers as I am.

You’ll find a link to the recipe in the comments below.

10/10/2026

As the days start to grow shorter and there’s a bit of a nip in the evening air, my thoughts turn to simple but heartier dishes. And here’s one that really hit the spot for me this week, orecchiette con cavolfiore, the little ear-shaped pasta from Puglia paired with cauliflower.

Most often, orecchiette con cavolfiore is made lean. Much like its better-known cousin orecchiette con cime di rapa, it’s made by cooking the pasta in the same pot as the vegetable and then dressing it with garlic, anchovy, hot pepper and plenty of good olive oil.

Orecchiette con cavolfiore is delicious that way, but since we’ve already covered that approach, I thought it would be nice this time to feature another, less common way of making it. In this version, said to be popular in the provincia di Bari where my grandfather Lorenzo was from, the anchovies give way to lardo, slowly rendered until golden. The dish is then finished with a generous grating of pecorino. The result is heartier and more rustic, just right for a chilly evening.

So if you’re looking for a cozy, satisfying weeknight pasta this autumn, give orecchiette con cavolfiore a try. I think you’ll enjoy this little gem of Apulian home cooking.

03/10/2026

October is Italian-American Heritage month, and long time readers will know that each year around this time we set aside our usual continental Italian fare to feature a dish from the Italian diaspora. This year, I’ve chosen Baked Manicotti, a dish that occupies a beloved place in the Italian-American repertoire—right alongside lasagna and baked ziti as one of the great baked pasta dishes that Italian immigrant families in North America built their home cooking around, especially along the eastern seaboard.

Baked Manicotti bears an obvious family resemblance to cannelloni, the tubular stuffed pasta found in parts of Italy, particularly the area around Naples. It involves the same basic idea—a tube of pasta stuffed and baked under sauce. But the resemblance may be no more than that.

Go looking for manicotti on a shelf in Italy and you won’t find it. What you will find is cannelloni, a smooth-sided. slender tubular pasta, quite distinct from the ridged, sturdier tube sold in North America as manicotti.

In the Italian-American repertoire, what distinguishes manicotti from its baked-pasta cousins is a certain lightness. Whereas Italian-American lasagna and baked ziti typically include a long-simmered Sunday Sauce, thick with meat and simmered several hours to develop deep flavor, manicotti is usually meatless, its cheese filling left to be the star of the dish, dressed with nothing more than a simple, light tomato sauce, the kind Italian-Americans call ‘marinara’. That makes for a touch lighter than its cousins—and, happily, a good deal quicker to put together. This isn’t quite a weeknight pasta, but there’s no real reason to save it only for holidays and special occasions, either.

I hope you’ll give it a try—it’s a wonderful dish for a crowd, and, for the Italian-Americans out there, a fitting way to mark the month.

You’ll find a link to our recipe in the comments below.

26/09/2026

The odd name for this Piedmontese dish, tonno di coniglio, literally means ‘tuna of rabbit’. That name might have you scratching your head, especially when you learn that there’s no tuna in it. Rather the rabbit is treated as if it were tuna: pre-cooked, deboned then jarred sott’olio, in olive oil.

Yet another Italian dish born out of necessity, in this case as a way of preserving meat for the winter, tonno di coniglio is enjoyed today for its own exquisite taste and sumptuous mouthfeel.

The recipe proceeds in two steps: First, you simmer a rabbit in an aromatic broth until perfectly tender. Second you strip the meat off the bone and layer it in a mason jar or other airtight container with garlic, sage, pepper and olive oil and it leave it to cure for a few days so as to let the oil and seasonings infuse the meat with its lovely flavors.

It’s a simple recipe that makes for a delicious antipasto served with toasted bread and perhaps some pickled vegetables, or as a protein rich salad on a bed of lettuce.

For those who are squeamish about eating rabbit, the same method can be used with chicken, with equally delightful results. And don’t throw out the simmering liquid—you can use it to make lovely soups and risotti. The leftover oil, too, can be recycled for dressing salad, sautéing or making sauces.

19/09/2026

Of all the many frozen desserts for which Italy is justly famous, this one is practically unknown: coviglia, a kind of semifreddo unique to Naples.

A coviglia napoletana is made with a rich combination of egg yolk whipped with sugar until creamy, folded together with whipped cream and a meringue of egg white whipped with sugar until thick and frothy, classically flavored with either espresso or melted chocolate. The mixture is then popped right into the freezer. There’s no need for churning, since the air produced by the whipping, along with fat and sugar, prevent the mixture from freezing hard. What you get instead is a rich, velvety and gorgeously dense mouthfeel.

Traditionally, you serve coviglia in small metal cups which gives it its name, which is derived from the Spanish word cubillo, literally a small bucket, a legacy of the long Spanish dominion over southern Italy. Today freeze-proof glass, wax paper or even plastic are more common serving vessels.

You’ll find a link to the recipe post in the comments below.

12/09/2026

Here is one of the signature dishes of the southern region of Calabria, on the toe of the Italian boot: p**i e patate, or Peppers and Potatoes. In its simplest incarnation, it is quite literally just that, peppers and potatoes sautéed together in olive oil and seasoned with salt.

The magic of this simple dish, like so many others in the cucina povera tradition, lies in the quality of its ingredients and the care you take in preparing them.

And here I have to confess a true rendition of p**i e patate requires two ingredients most of us are not likely to be able to source. One is the round, intensely flavored and just slightly spicy pepper from the area around Reggio Calabria called peperoni reggini, or p**i in the local dialect—hence the very name of the dish. The other is the prized local potatoes called patate silane, grown in La Sila, the mountainous plateau that stretches across three provinces in the northern half of Calabria.

Without these two main characters, I should probably call my version of the dish simply peperoni e patate. My Calabrian friends say it’s just not the same dish without the p**i in particular. No doubt.. But if you ask me it’s delicious all the same.

P**i e patate started out as a farmer’s lunch. They would carry bread stuffed with fried peppers and potatoes with them into the fields as their midday meal. The loaf provided a kind of edible lunch box, shielding its savory filling from the sun’s heat while working long hours outdoors. And it added valuable extra calories for the day’s hard physical labor.

While you will still see the dish occasionally served this way, today p**i e peperoni is usually served as a side dish for roasted or grilled meats. That said, bread should never be too far away, better to mop up its delicious juices.

05/09/2026

To my mind, the absolute apotheosis of Roman street food is the whole roast pig called porchetta. With its deep golden brown, crackling skin and meltingly tender meat redolent with garlic and herbs, it’s one of the most delicious ways imaginable to enjoy pork.

Porchetta has been enjoyed since ancient times, when it was quite literally food for emperors. It was said to be Emperor Nero’s favorite dish. But it actually predates even the Romans, with origins in Etruscan civilization.

Back when I was living in Rome, I could find porchetta easily at stalls around town, served as a sandwich. For a special treat, I would head up to nearby town of Ariccia in the Alban Hills, where the area’s best porchetta is made. (Porchetta is made elsewhere in Italy, most notably in Abruzzo and Umbria, as well, but I’m less familiar with those versions.)

Making porchetta at home

These days, alas, a juicy porchetta sandwich is no longer right waiting around the corner. Sure, I can buy a cold cut they market as ‘porchetta’ where I live now, but it pales in comparison with the real thing. Fortunately, though, for us unlucky folks who live far from the Eternal City, we can make a kind of mini porchetta at home.

Homemade porchetta is definitely a project, but it’s not really hard to make. Instead of roasting a whole pig, you take a piece of pork belly and a pork tenderloin, season them generously with salt, pepper, garlic and herbs, roll and truss them up, then roast the roll in the oven.

Porchetta something you make for a crowd, as even a smaller pork belly will weigh about 2-3 kilos (6 lbs) or more, but you can consume the leftovers for days afterwards. And porchetta freezes well, so you can cut yours up and defrost it as needed.

You’ll find a link to the recipe in the comments below!

22/08/2026

Recently sat down with acclaimed cookbook author Domenica Marchetti of Domenica Cooks and Substacker Giovanna Solimando to talk about summer culinary techniques. Here's my run down of our conversation, along with some of my favorite summer dishes.

Talking summer cooking techniques with Domenica Marchetti and Giovanna Solimando

15/08/2026

Poor cucuzza. This Rodney Dangerfield of the vegetable world gets no respect. An extravagantly long and slender summer squash typical of Sicily, it’s the butt of endless jokes. Like the local proverb I learned last time I was there for a family wedding: condiscila come vuoi, è sempre cucuzza! Or in the original Sicilian: Cònzala comu vo’ ca sempri cucuzza è. Roughly translated, it means ‘dress it up however you like, it’s still cucuzza!’ Said of ugly truths that, as much as you try to pretend otherwise, can’t be remedied. Something like our expression ‘putting lipstick on a pig’.

The proverb is a bit unfair. It’s true that summer squashes in general don’t have a lot of intrinsic taste. But if you do dress them up, they can be quite tasty. I can think of no better example than pasta con i tenerumi, a soup of pasta with cucuzza coupled with its tender shoots and leaves called tenerumi, which give the dish its name.

A summer soup may seem like a oxymoron, but this one makes perfect sense. It’s actually inhabits a middle ground between a proper pasta and a soup. And it’s usually served only slightly warm or even room temperature. Like so many summer dishes, the recipe is fairly care-free, requiring only about 15 minutes over the stove. You simmer cucuzza and tenerumi in water to cover, add broken up spaghetti to cook until it’s al dente, then finish with a quick fresh tomato sauce popularly called picchi-pacchi, which you’ve made separately while the vegetables and pasta are cooking. And done!

The main challenge in making pasta con i tenerumi is finding its star vegetable. Here in North America cucuzza was actually pretty popular among the Italian diaspora back in the day, especially those of Sicilian descent of course. Today it’s nearly vanished from our markets. And tenerumi are even harder to find. But there are some decent substitutions you can make for both. It may not taste quite like the original, but it’s delicious all the same.

You’ll find a link to the recipe in the comments below!

08/08/2026

This savory chicken dish, also known as pollo alla romana, is one of the classics of Roman cookery, every bit as quintessentially Roman as the city’s internationally famous pasta dishes. A favorite in Rome this time of year when both peppers and tomatoes are in season, it’s traditional to serve pollo con i peperoni for the Ferragosto holiday on August 15.

There are probably as many ways to make pollo con i peperoni as there are cooks. In this rendition, you brown the cut up chicken in oll, then braise it together with peppers and tomatoes until falling off the bone tender. Simple but intensely flavorful. In other words, very Roman.

This local dish was made nationally famous by the beloved, larger than life actor-chef-restauranteur Elena Fabrizi, popularly known as Sora Lella, when she presented her version of it on national TV in 1967. It is said to be the first instance of a TV cooking segment ever in the country.

Visit the blog for the recipe, and to learn more about this dish, the origins and customs of the Ferragosto holiday, and the life and times of the inimitable Sora Lella. You can ever watch her make her version of pollo con i peperoni during her fabled TV appearance! You’ll find a link in the comments below.