Italian Cuisine Quotes

“As soon as we take our seats, a sequence of six antipasti materialize from the kitchen and swallow up the entire table: nickels of tender octopus with celery and black olives, a sweet and bitter dance of earth and sea; another plate of polpo, this time tossed with chickpeas and a sharp vinaigrette; a duo of tuna plates- the first seared and chunked and served with tomatoes and raw onion, the second whipped into a light pâté and showered with a flurry of bottarga that serves as a force multiplier for the tuna below; and finally, a plate of large sea snails, simply boiled and served with small forks for excavating the salty-sweet knuckle of meat inside.
As is so often the case in Italy, we are full by the end of the opening salvo, but the night is still young, and the owner, who stops by frequently to fill my wineglass as well as his own, has a savage, unpredictable look in his eyes. Next comes the primo, a gorgeous mountain of spaghetti tossed with an ocean floor's worth of clams, the whole mixture shiny and golden from an indecent amount of olive oil used to mount the pasta at the last moment- the fat acting as a binding agent between the clams and the noodles, a glistening bridge from earth to sea. "These are real clams, expensive clams," the owner tells me, plucking one from the plate and holding it up to the light, "not those cheap, flavorless clams most restaurants use for pasta alle vongole."
Just as I'm ready to wave the white napkin of surrender- stained, like my pants, a dozen shades of fat and sea- a thick cylinder of tuna loin arrives, charred black on the outside, cool and magenta through the center. "We caught this ourselves today," he whispers in my ear over the noise of the dining room, as if it were a secret to keep between the two of us. How can I refuse?”
― Matt Goulding, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture

“Second, and contrary to what some foreigners seem to think, not every pasta dish should be doused with grated cheese: you must not sprinkle cheese on pasta with any kind of cheese; ... and most Italians would rather die than put grated cheese on pasta made with fresh tomatoes.”
― Sari Gilbert, My Home Sweet Rome: Living (and loving) in Italy's Eternal City

“And there are those who prefer cappuccino, which in turn can be served in several varieties... . Some want it scuro, with less milk, some want it chiaro, with note milk, and some prefer it workout foam, senna schiuma, and there is generally a shaker of cocoa powder somewhere available for those eager for a bit of chocolate. Caffelatte, a hot drink we Americans mysteriously have dubbed a “latte” (which in Italian simply means “milk”), comes in only one variety and is a morning drink, as is a cappuccino.”
― Sari Gilbert, My Home Sweet Rome: Living (and loving) in Italy's Eternal City

“ Each bite is a tidal wave of savory, fatty eel juices...
... made fresh and tangy by the complementary flavors of olive oil and tomato!
...!
It's perfect!
This dish has beautifully encapsulated the superbness of Capitone Eel!"
"Capitone specifically means 'Large Female Eel'!
It's exactly this kind of eel that is served during Natale season from Christmas to New Year's.
Compared to normal eels, the Capitone is large, thick and juicy! In fact, it's considered a delicacy!"
"Yes, I've heard of them! The Capitone is supposed to be significantly meatier than the standard Anguilla."
*Anguilla is the Italian word for regular eels.*
"Okay. So the Capitone is special.
But is it special enough to make a dish so delicious the judges swoon?"
"No. The secret to the Capitone's refined deliciousness in this dish lies with the tomatoes.
You used San Marzanos, correct?"
"Ha Ragione! (Exactly!)
I specifically chose San Marzano tomatoes as the core of my dish!"
Of the hundreds of varieties of tomato, the San Marzano Plum Tomato is one of the least juicy.
Less juice means it makes a less watery and runny sauce when stewed!
"Thanks to the San Marzano tomatoes, this dish's sauce remained thick and rich with a marvelously full-bodied taste.
The blend of spices he used to season the sauce has done a splendid job of highlighting the eel's natural flavors as well."
"You can't forget the wondrous polenta either. Crispy on the outside and creamy in the middle.
There's no greater garnish for this dish."
*Polenta is boiled cornmeal that is typically served as porridge or baked into cakes.*
"Ah. I see. Every ingredient of his dish is intimately connected to the eel.
Garlic to increase the fragrance, onion for condensed sweetness...
... and low-juice tomatoes. Those are the key ingredients.”
― Yuto Tsukuda, 食戟のソーマ 25 [Shokugeki no Souma 25]

“It wasn't tuna ventresca that drew diners to this community over others, nor was it heritage beef. It was the final bottle of a 1985 Cannonau, salt-crusted from its time on the Sardinian coast. Each diner had barely a swallow. My employer bid us not to swallow, not yet, but hold the wine at the back of the throat till it stung and warmed to the temperature of blood and spit, till we wrung from it the terroir of fields cracked by quake and shadowed by smog; only then, swallowing, choking, grateful, did we appreciate the fullness of its flavor. His face was ferocious and sublime in this moment, cracked open; I saw it briefly behind the mask. He was a man who knew the gradations of pleasure because he knew, like me, the calculus of its loss.
To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry. Psychosomatic, I'm sure, but what flavor isn't? I raised my glass to the memory of my drunk in the British market. I imagined him sat across the table, calmed at last, sane among the sane. He would have tasted in that wine the starch of a laundered sheet, perhaps, or the clean smooth shot of his dignity. My employer decanted these deepest longings, mysterious to each diner until it flooded the palate: a lost child's yeasty scalp, the morning breath of a lover, huckleberries, onion soup, the spice of a redwood forest gone up in smoke. It is easy, all these years later, to dismiss that country's purpose as decadent, gluttonous. Selfish. It was those things. But it was, also, this connoisseurship of loss.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Not every change is so subtle. There are chefs in Rome taking the same types of risks other young cooks around the world are using to bend the boundaries of the dining world. At Metamorfosi, among the gilded streets of Parioli, the Columbian-born chef Roy Caceres and his crew turn ink-stained bodies into ravioli skins and sous-vide egg and cheese foam into new-age carbonara and apply the tools of the modernist kitchen to create a broad and abstract interpretation of Italian cuisine. Alba Esteve Ruiz trained at El Celler de Can Roca in Spain, one of the world's most inventive restaurants, before, in 2013, opening Marzapane Roma, where frisky diners line up for a taste of prawn tartare with smoked eggplant cream and linguine cooked in chamomile tea spotted with microdrops of lemon gelée.”
― Matt Goulding, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture

“The only point that everyone I spoke with in Rome agrees upon is that Armando al Pantheon is one of the city's last true trattorie.
Given the location, Claudio and his family could have gone the way of the rest of the neighborhood a long time ago and mailed it in with a handful of fresh mozzarella and prosciutto. But he's chosen the opposite path, an unwavering dedication to the details- the extra steps that make the oxtail more succulent, the pasta more perfectly toothsome, the artichokes and favas and squash blossoms more poetic in their expression of the Roman seasons.
"I experiment in my own small ways. I want to make something new, but I also want my guests to think of their mothers and grandmothers. I want them to taste their infancy, to taste their memories. Like that great scene in Ratatouille."
I didn't grow up on amatriciana and offal, but when I eat them here, they taste like a memory I never knew I had. I keep coming back. For the cacio e pepe, which sings that salty-spicy duet with unrivaled clarity, thanks to the depth charge of toasted Malaysian peppercorns Claudio employs. For his coda alla vaccinara, as Roman as the Colosseum, a masterpiece of quinto quarto cookery: the oxtail cooked to the point of collapse, bathed in a tomato sauce with a gentle green undertow of celery, one of Rome's unsung heroes. For the vegetables: one day a crostini of stewed favas and pork cheek, the next a tumble of bitter puntarelle greens bound in a bracing anchovy vinaigrette. And always the artichokes. If Roman artichokes are drugs, Claudio's are pure poppy, a vegetable so deeply addictive that I find myself thinking about it at the most inappropriate times. Whether fried into a crisp, juicy flower or braised into tender, melting submission, it makes you wonder what the rest of the world is doing with their thistles.”
― Matt Goulding, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture

“Everywhere you turn you see signs of its place at the top of the Italian food chain: fresh-pasta shops vending every possible iteration of egg and flour; buzzing bars pairing Spritz and Lambrusco with generous spreads of free meat, cheese, and vegetable snacks; and, above all, osteria after osteria, cozy wine-soaked eating establishments from whose ancient kitchens emanates a moist fragrance of simmered pork and local grapes.
Osteria al 15 is a beloved dinner den just inside the centro storico known for its crispy flatbreads puffed up in hot lard, and its classic beef-heavy ragù tossed with corkscrew pasta or spooned on top of béchamel and layered between sheets of lasagne. It's far from refined, but the bargain prices and the boisterous staff make it all go down easily.
Trattoria Gianni, down a hairpin alleyway a few blocks from Piazza Maggiore, was once my lunch haunt in Bologna, by virtue of its position next to my Italian-language school. I dream regularly of its bollito misto, a heroic mix of braised brisket, capon, and tongue served with salsa verde, but the dish I'm looking for this time, a thick beef-and-pork joint with plenty of jammy tomato, is a solid middle-of-the-road ragù.”
― Matt Goulding, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture

“Later in the meal, the full extent of Massimo's whimsy-driven modernist vision will be on display- in a handheld head of baby lettuce whose tender leaves hide the concentrated tastes of a Caesar salad, a glazed rectangle of eel made to look as if it were swimming up the Po River, a handful of classics with ridiculous names such as "Oops! I dropped the lemon tart"- but it's the ragù that moves me the most. The noodles have a brilliant, enduring chew, and the sauce, rich with gelatin from the tougher cuts of meat, clings to them as if its life were at stake.”
― Matt Goulding, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture

“All of this could fall flat, feel too much like a caricature of a Sicilian trattoria, if the food itself weren't so damn good: arancini, saffron-scented rice fried into crunchy, greaseless golf balls; polpette di pesce spada, swordfish meatballs with a taste so deep and savory they might as well be made of dry-aged beef; and a superlative version of caponata di melanzane, that ubiquitous Sicilian starter of eggplant, capers, and various other vegetation, stewed into a sweet and savory jam that you will want to smear on everything. Everything around you screams Italy, but those flavors on the end of the fork? The sweet-and-sour tandem, the stain of saffron, the grains of rice: pure Africa.
The pasta: even better. Chewy noodles tinted jet black with squid ink and tossed with sautéed rings and crispy legs of calamari- a sort of nose-to-tail homage to the island's cherished cephalopod. And Palermo's most famous dish, pasta con le sarde, a bulge of thick spaghetti strewn with wild fennel, capers, raisins, and, most critically, a half dozen plump sardines slow cooked until they melt into a briny ocean ragù. Sweet, salty, fatty, funky- Palermo in a single bite.”
― Matt Goulding, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture

“Despite the challenges, S'Apposentu slowly bloomed into one of Cagliari's most important restaurants. Roberto brought with him the hundreds of little lessons he had learned on the road and transposed them onto Sardinian tradition and terreno. He turned roasted onions into ice cream and peppered it with wild flowers and herbs. He reimagined porceddu, Sardinia's heroic roast pig, as a dense terrine punctuated with local fruits. He made himself into a master: of bread baking, cheese making, meat curing. In 2006, Michelin rewarded him with a star, one of the first ever awarded in Sardinia.”
― Matt Goulding, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture

“Domenico, my pen pal and the master of ceremonies, emerges from the kitchen in a cobalt suit bearing a plate of bite-sized snacks: ricotta caramel, smoked hake, baby artichoke with shaved bottarga.
The first course lands on the table with a wink from Domenico: raw shrimp, raw sheep, and a shower of wild herbs and flowers- an edible landscape of the island. I raise my fork tentatively, expecting the intensity of a mountain flock, but the sheep is amazingly delicate- somehow lighter than the tiny shrimp beside it.
The intensity arrives with the next dish, the calf's liver we bought at the market, transformed from a dense purple lobe into an orb of pâté, coated in crushed hazelnuts, surrounded by fruit from the market this morning. The boneless sea anemones come cloaked in crispy semolina and bobbing atop a sticky potato-parsley puree.
Bread is fundamental to the island, and S'Apposentu's frequent carb deliveries prove the point: a hulking basket overflowing with half a dozen housemade varieties from thin, crispy breadsticks to a dense sourdough loaf encased in a dark, gently bitter crust.
The last savory course, one of Roberto's signature dishes, is the most stunning of all: ravioli stuffed with suckling pig and bathed in a pecorino fondue. This is modernist cooking at its most magnificent: two fundamental flavors of the island (spit-roasted pig and sheep's-milk cheese) cooked down and refined into a few explosive bites. The kind of dish you build a career on.”
― Matt Goulding, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture

“Spaghetti alla puttanesca is typically made with tomatoes, olives, anchovies, capers, and garlic. It means, literally, "spaghetti in the style of a prostitute." It is a sloppy dish, the tomatoes and oil making the spaghetti lubricated and slippery. It is the sort of sauce that demands you slurp the noodles Goodfellas style, staining your cheeks with flecks of orange and red. It is very salty and very tangy and altogether very strong; after a small plate, you feel like you've had a visceral and significant experience.
There are varying accounts as to when and how the dish originated- but the most likely explanation is that it became popular in the mid-twentieth century. The first documented mention of it is in Raffaele La Capria's 1961 novel, Ferito a Morte. According to the Italian Pasta Makers Union, spaghetti alla puttanesca was a very popular dish throughout the sixties, but its exact genesis is not quite known. Sandro Petti, a famous Napoli chef and co-owner of Ischian restaurant Rangio Fellone, claims to be its creator. Near closing time one evening, a group of customers sat at one of his tables and demanded to be served a meal. Running low on ingredients, Petti told them he didn't have enough to make anything, but they insisted. They were tired, and they were hungry, and they wanted pasta. "Facci una puttanata qualsiasi!" they cried. "Make any kind of garbage!" The late-night eater is not usually the most discerning. Petti raided the kitchen, finding four tomatoes, two olives, and a jar of capers, the base of the now-famous spaghetti dish; he included it on his menu the next day under the name spaghetti alla puttanesca. Others have their own origin myths. But the most common theory is that it was a quick, satisfying dish that the working girls of Naples could knock up with just a few key ingredients found at the back of the fridge- after a long and unforgiving night.
As with all dishes containing tomatoes, there are lots of variations in technique. Some use a combination of tinned and fresh tomatoes, while others opt for a squirt of puree. Some require specifically cherry or plum tomatoes, while others go for a smooth, premade pasta. Many suggest that a teaspoon of sugar will "open up the flavor," though that has never really worked for me. I prefer fresh, chopped, and very ripe, cooked for a really long time. Tomatoes always take longer to cook than you think they will- I rarely go for anything less than an hour. This will make the sauce stronger, thicker, and less watery. Most recipes include onions, but I prefer to infuse the oil with onions, frying them until brown, then chucking them out. I like a little kick in most things, but especially in pasta, so I usually go for a generous dousing of chili flakes. I crush three or four cloves of garlic into the oil, then add any extras. The classic is olives, anchovies, and capers, though sometimes I add a handful of fresh spinach, which nicely soaks up any excess water- and the strange, metallic taste of cooked spinach adds an interesting extra dimension. The sauce is naturally quite salty, but I like to add a pinch of sea or Himalayan salt, too, which gives it a slightly more buttery taste, as opposed to the sharp, acrid salt of olives and anchovies. I once made this for a vegetarian friend, substituting braised tofu for anchovies. Usually a solid fish replacement, braised tofu is more like tuna than anchovy, so it was a mistake for puttanesca. It gave the dish an unpleasant solidity and heft. You want a fish that slips and melts into the pasta, not one that dominates it.
In terms of garnishing, I go for dried oregano or fresh basil (never fresh oregano or dried basil) and a modest sprinkle of cheese. Oh, and I always use spaghetti. Not fettuccine. Not penne. Not farfalle. Not rigatoni. Not even linguine. Always spaghetti.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“The rich, juicy savoriness of seafood explodes in the mouth like a breaking wave, so powerful it leaves me writhing! The keystones of this filling are the cheese, tomatoes...
squid liver and anchovies!"
"Correct! I finely diced each and then sautéed them in olive oil with red peppers and garlic until they were nicely fragrant. I added a splash of white wine, simmered it all until tender and mixed it into the filling."
"I see. However, the most critical factor contributing to the depth of the dish's flavor... is actually on the outside."
"Huh? The outside?!"
"Again correct! Once the squid liver and anchovies were simmered, I removed the solids. To the remaining sauce, I added heavy cream... and heated it until it became thick before I then seasoned it with a pinch of salt and pepper to make a squid liver and anchovy cream sauce!
I drizzled the sauce over the baked squid. Its creaminess makes for a stark contrast with the tangy, salty flavors of the filling... giving the tongue endlessly shifting flavors to enjoy!
Concentrating solely on making the filling delicious would not lead to the flavor I ultimately wanted for my dish. It had to be the casing and the filling together! Only when those two resonated in perfect harmony...
... would the flavor of the spear squid reach its peak deliciousness!
That is my Calamari Ripieni!”
― Yuto Tsukuda, 食戟のソーマ 29 [Shokugeki no Souma 29]

“I see prawns, mussels... a whole host of seafood!"
"Don't forget the perfectly ripe tomatoes and the bottle of olive oil.
Aah, I get it. It seems he is making Acqua Pazza."
ACQUA PAZZA
A local delicacy in Southern Italy...
... Acqua Pazza is a simple yet gourmet dish of poached white fish mixed with a variety of other ingredients.
Traditional ingredients include olive oil, tomatoes and shellfish.
"Compared to many other poached or simmered dishes, it uses relatively few seasonings. Because it's so uncomplicated, the quality of the ingredients themselves comes to the forefront. It's the perfect dish to show off his superhuman eye for selecting fish."
"Not that Acqua Pazza itself is a poor choice...
... but the centerpiece of the dish must still be the pike!
Yet the ingredients he's chosen have distinct flavors that demand attention. Won't simmering them all together drown out the flavor of the fish?"
"True! It would be a waste of an in-season pike to-
Wait..."
"Exactly.
Precisely because it is in season, the pike's flavor won't be drowned out.
Instead, it has the potential to become the base of the entire dish!
It's a recipe only someone with great confidence in their eye for fish could have chosen for this competition.”
― Yuto Tsukuda, 食戟のソーマ 12 [Shokugeki no Souma 12]

“The mainstay of Italian coffee lore, la tazzina del caffe, or an espresso, as served by one’s local bar and during the day consumed - generally - standing up, is another one of those things about which Italians have very strong feelings. The purists want is very dense, ristrettissimo, which is the way they serve it in Naples...”
― Sari Gilbert, My Home Sweet Rome: Living (and loving) in Italy's Eternal City

“As far as he was concerned, Testaccio, not the Via del Corso or the Piazza del Campidoglio, was the real heart of Rome. For centuries animals had been brought here to be butchered, with the good cuts going to the noblemen in their palazzos and the cardinals in the Vatican. The ordinary people had to make do with what little was left---the so-called quinto quarto, the "fifth quarter" of the animal: the organs, head, feet, and tail. Little osterie had sprung up that specialized in cooking these rejects, and such was the culinary inventiveness of the Romans that soon even cardinals and noblemen were clamoring for dishes like coda all vaccinara, oxtail braised in tomato sauce, or caratella d' abbachio, a newborn lamb's heart, lungs, and spleen skewered on a stick of rosemary and simmered with onions in white wine.
Every part of the body had its traditional method of preparation. Zampetti all' aggro were calf's feet, served with a green sauce made from anchovies, capers, sweet onions, pickled gherkins, and garlic, finely chopped, then bound with potato and thinned with oil and vinegar. Brains were cooked with butter and lemon---cervello al limone---or poached with vegetables, allowed to cool, then thinly sliced and fried in an egg batter. Liver was wrapped in a caul, the soft membrane that envelops a pig's intestines, which naturally bastes the meat as it melts slowly in the frying pan. There was one recipe for the thymus, another for the ear, another for the intestines, and another for the tongue---each dish refined over centuries and enjoyed by everyone, from the infant in his high chair to the nonnina, the little grandmother who would have been served exactly the same meal, prepared in the same way, when she herself was a child.”
― Anthony Capella, The Food of Love

“Renzo from Roddino leaves us on the doorstep of Osteria da Gemma, a Langhe culinary landmark in a village scarcely large enough to fill the restaurant. Before we can shake off the wet and the cold, before we can see a menu or catch our breath, the waiter comes by and drops a cutting board full of salumi between us. Prego. Then another plate comes out- carne cruda, a soft mound of hand-chopped veal dressed with nothing but olive oil and a bit of lemon, a classic warm-up to a Piedmont meal.
The plates continue, and it soon becomes very clear that we have no say in the matter. Insalata russa, a tricolore of toothsome green peas, orange carrots, and ivory potatoes, bound in a cloak of mayonnaise and crumbled egg yolk. Vitello tonnato, Piedmont's famous take on surf and turf: thin slices of roast beef with a thick emulsion of mayo and tuna. Each bite brings us slowly out of the mist of emotion and into the din of the dining room.”
― Matt Goulding, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture

“Bartolomeo watched her bring a forkful of pheasant to her lips. She closed her eyes and savored the flavors. He himself had studded the birds with cloves and stuffed them with fennel, then wrapped them in pork fat and roasted them until crisp. He had spooned the pomegranate sauce over their wings, the little seeds falling onto the plate like tiny jewels.”
― Crystal King, The Chef's Secret

“The evening Bartolomeo left her the radish rose, he also ignored the words of her gray-haired mother and gave Stella an extra serving of pappardelle, made fresh from ricotta, eggs, and goat milk, fried to perfection and dusted in sugar. They were called "gobble-ups" for a good reason, and the principessa was pleased to indulge, that is until her mother bade Bartolomeo to take the plate away. She glared at her mother and snatched one last fritter. Sugar coated the edge of her pretty lips and Bartolomeo thought he might swoon. He would give anything to kiss the sweetness away.
The rose was gone when he went to clear the plates. He could only hope she had secreted it away in the finely embroidered saccoccia hanging at her hip.”
― Crystal King, The Chef's Secret

“The arrival of the food snapped me out of my reverie. Like many chefs in Roma, the Farnese chef had taken much inspiration from Bartolomeo over the years. The first course included slices of Parmesan; olives from Tivoli; cherries in little gilded cups; a salad of sliced citron with sugar and rosewater; veal rolls dredged in coriander, spit-roasted, then topped with raisins soaked in wine; peas in the pod served with pepper and vinegar; salted buffalo tongue, cooked, then sliced and served cold with lemon; a delicate soup of cheese and egg yolks poured over roasted pigeon; blancmange white as snow and sprinkled with sugar; roasted artichokes and pine nut tourtes.”
― Crystal King, The Chef's Secret

“I began the day I was to dine at casa di Palone in the Vaticano kitchen, helping Antonio prepare the pope's meals. For noonday, we made barley soup, apples, and a little cheese and bread. For the evening meal, we prepared the same soup with bits of roasted capons, and I made a zabaglione egg dish with a little malmsey wine. I suspected the pope would not touch the custardy dessert, but I felt compelled to take a chance. The worst that might happen was that he would order me to go back to his regular menu. And at best, perhaps he would recognize the joy of food God gifted to us.
Once we had finished the general preparations, Antonio helped me bake a crostata to take to the Palone house that evening. He set to work making the pastry as I cleaned the visciola cherries- fresh from the market- and coated them with sugar, cinnamon, and Neapolitan mostaccioli crumbs. I nestled the biscotti among several layers of dough that Antonio had pressed into thin sheets to line the pan. Atop the cherries, I laid another sheet of pastry cut into a rose petal pattern. Antonio brushed it with egg whites and rosewater, sugared it, and set the pie into the oven to bake.
Francesco joined us just as I placed the finished crostata on the counter to cool. The cherries bubbled red through the cracks of the rose petals and the scalco gave a low whistle. "Madonna!"
Antonio and I stared at him, shocked at the use of the word as a curse. Francesco laughed. "That pie is so beautiful I think even our Lord might swear." He clapped me on the shoulder. "It is good to see you cooking something besides barley soup, Gio. It's been too long since this kitchen has seen such a beautiful dessert."
The fragrance was magnificent. I hoped the famiglia Palone would find the pie tasted as good as it looked.”
― Crystal King, The Chef's Secret

“Reading about these meals is making me hungry," Isabetta declared one afternoon. Her finger ran down the page. "There is so much food. Even on a Lenten day these cardinali knew how to eat! Listen to this menu: pieces of gilded marzipan; radish and fennel salad; braised lampreys from the Tevere; fried trout with vinegar, pepper, and wine; white tourtes; razor clams; grilled oysters; pizza Neapolitan with almonds, dates, and figs; octopus and fish in the shape of chickens; fried sea turtle; prune crostatas; stuffed pears with sugar; elderflower fritters; candied almonds... Oh, the list goes on and on!”
― Crystal King, The Chef's Secret

“Separate pots of simmering French and Italian soup stocks...
Bowls of various Chinese spice blends...
Trimmed and marinating lamb shanks, a common ingredient in Turkish cooking...
And the foundation of all Indian cuisine- toasting the starter spices!”
― Yuto Tsukuda, 食戟のソーマ 35 [Shokugeki no Souma 35]

“A chunk of parmigiano reggiano, eaten with a pear or some kind of fruit compote, is truly a dish fit for a king.”
― Sari Gilbert

“In fact, many Italians consider cappuccino or caffelatte to be breakfast; nowadays they’ll give their kids cornflakes or some kind of cereal but they, themselves, as their morning meal will have only caffelatte or cappuccino with a cornetto or some kind of cookies. (Be aware that the genetic word for cookies in Italian is biscotti, and that this has nothing to do with that in the US are now called “biscotti” and which, instead, are an oversized version of the tozzetti or cantuccini some Italians like to dip in vin santo and eat at the end of a meal.”
― Sari Gilbert

“By the way, although nowadays your average waiter will no longer flinch when an American or a German asks for a cappuccino after or even with dinner (he knows what side his bread is buttered on, be advised that he thinks it’s pretty disgusting). No Italian would ever drink cappuccino with, or immediately after, a meal and finds the idea repulsive as, at this juncture, I confess, do I.”
― Sari Gilbert, My Home Sweet Rome: Living (and loving) in Italy's Eternal City

“In Naples, where pizza was invented, Fairchild tasted his first cheesy flatbread, a punishing food for first-timers, whose mouths could be scorched with hot, lavalike cheese. He was enchanted by the various shapes of macaroni. And pastries were works of history. Naples' mixed heritage over several centuries from the French, Spanish, and Austrians resulted in flaky, sweet pastries, yeast cakes drowned in rum, and deep-fried doughballs known as zeppole, each one an ancestor of the modern doughnut.”
― Daniel Stone, The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

“We took our seats and spent the next few hours enjoying bruschetta, fried squid, heaping plates of penne puttanesca, and saltimbocca di pollo. Being full wasn't an option---the meal only ended once we'd proved consumption of a slice of olive oil cake.”
― Hillary Manton Lodge, Reservations for Two

“Once upon a time, my father told me, fine dining meant baked lobster and cocktails. Not all restaurants could be counted on to have wine lists. But at Peasant Stock, they made osso bucco and cassoulet, and for dessert things like macaroon soufflé with apricot-brandy sauce. They never served ice cream, but some far more fascinating item called granita, in potent infusions of espresso or huckleberry or blood orange.”
― Charlotte Silver, Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood