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Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy
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series • cooking
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Stanley Tucci's new book, What I Ate in One Year, is a 12-month journal of eating, meeting, cooking, travelling and reflecting. It is, as you would expect, funny, witty and sometimes deeply personal.
While in the book he travels to different places around the world, in this extract, he details food adventures from a late (northern hemisphere) summer visit to Umbria with his family.
August 12
I am becoming obsessed with the allium. Here in Umbria, on holiday with Felicity, Matteo and Millie, and some friends, I bought Tropea onions and sautéed them in oil, white wine and butter. I incorporated some with potatoes into frittatas. (The rest I saved for the next day and heaped onto carta di musica, a crisp flatbread from Sardegna also known as pane carasau.) Along with a caprese salad and fresh sheep ricotta, they were a hit. It didn’t hurt that we rained black truffle over the frittatas.
Stanley Tucci in Searching For Italy. Credit: CNN
A rather rare allium in which we are now indulging, aglione, is indigenous to Umbria and its environs. (In Italian, aglio is “garlic,” so aglione basically means “big garlic.”) Aglione has anywhere between two and six cloves and when raw, almost no smell. When minced, sautéed very gently to the point of emulsification, and cooked with puréed tomatoes, it creates a wonderful and singular-tasting sauce. The only other ingredients are pecorino Romano, salt, and on occasion pepperoncini.
It is traditionally served with pici, a thick spaghetti-like pasta. In Umbria pici is known as umbricelli. The reason for this is that “pici” is the Tuscan name for this type of pasta, and God forbid an Umbrian should use a Tuscan name for anything, especially pasta. And vice versa.
August 16
Had a drink and appetisers in the little square of the fairy-tale-beautiful town of Solomeo. Its streets are cleaner than my kitchen, which is saying a lot. At a nearby restaurant I had gnocchi with a superb ragù d’oca (goose ragù). Although an age-old recipe, I had never heard of it until Searching for Italy, when we filmed a harvest festival in the Tuscan countryside.
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Tuscany
episode • Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy • cooking • 40m
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episode • Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy • cooking • 40m
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When Italy was a country of city-states controlled by the church and/or royal families, geese (and all good cuts of meat) were reserved for those in power, including the seigneurs, the gentry who owned the fields and farms on which tenant farmers worked. After the harvest, as an act of gratitude, the seigneurs gifted geese to the farmers, on which they would feast for one night. These geese were roasted in large communal ovens. Some would be incorporated into a tomato sauce for pasta and others carved up for a main course.
The night we filmed, geese were roasted in a formidable wood-fired oven by local townsmen. When they plucked a sizzling bird from the oven and presented me with a piece, I exclaimed that it tasted like Christmas in my mouth.
The sauce, made with ground goose and prepared by the local townswomen, was cooked for hours in an enormous pot. An all-consuming aroma wafting from a liquid of oranges, reds and golds foretold its complexity. When eaten on a piece of rustic Tuscan bread, it became more than the sum of its parts, and those flavours are now imprinted indelibly on my taste buds. That simple meal, and the ceremony that celebrates it, is an invaluable gustatory record of the history of that place and those people.
This is an edited extract from by Stanley Tucci (Penguin Books, HB$45).
