Tag: curiosities

Pope Francis: stuffed calamari and other curiosities at the table – Italian cuisine reinvented by Gordon Ramsay

Pope francesco he is perhaps the most interviewed pope in history, but no one has yet asked him for the recipe stuffed squid. «Jorge cooks very well, he makes amazing stuffed calamari, the pontiff’s sister confided in an interview, Maria Elena Bergoglio, a few days after his brother’s election as pontiff. From that March 13, 2013Bergoglio no longer had the opportunity to cook and the recipe for that “stunning” dish remains a well-kept secret.

The credit for the pope’s culinary skills goes to the mother Queen Marywho in turn had learned cooking secrets from Rose, Bergoglio’s paternal grandmother, who emigrated to Argentina from Italy. Lunches in the Bergoglio household were plentiful and long, especially on Sundays, when the women of the house went at it with their traditional dishes: risottos, homemade pasta, baked chicken, desserts.

The young Jorge Mario glanced into the kitchen, memorizing the skillful gestures of his mother and grandmother. “My mother,” Bergoglio said in the interview book El Jesuit, published in Argentina in 2010, «she remained paralyzed after giving birth to her last child, her fifth. When we returned from school, we would find her sitting peeling potatoes, with all the other ingredients for lunch already laid out. She told us how we should mix and cook them.”

Thus Bergoglio, even as a simple priest and then as bishop, he has always felt at ease around pots and stoves. When he was a professor at the Collegio Massimo, the future pope cooked for his students on Sundays, a day of rest for cooks. «He always prepared a fantastic paella for us, recalled his Jesuit brother, Father Angel Rossi. To those who asked him if he is really a good cook, Bergoglio replied: “Well, I have never killed anyone with my food.”

Elected pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, did not want to occupy the papal apartment. For him, therefore, no personal cooking service. No private chef or even, as often happens with ecclesiastics, cooking nuns. Pope Francis sleeps in a small apartment in the Domus Santa Marta and eats lunches and dinners in the common canteen.

The Pope is served at a secluded table. The cuisine is simple and not different from that of many other canteens: pasta or rice first courses, soups, meat and fish second courses, vegetables, salad, fruit. We drink white and red wine, generally Piedmontese. The products of the farms of the Pontifical Villas of Castel Gandolfo also arrive on the pope’s table: milk, ricotta, yogurt, cheeses, meat, vegetables and excellent honey. The Pope probably also enjoyed the gifts that Queen Elizabeth of England brought him during her visit to the Vatican in April 2014, all products of the royal estates, or rather, “of my garden”, as the Queen said to moment of exchanging gifts: honey, twelve eggs, ribs of beef, apple juice, cider, chutney, jams, shortbread, tea and even a bottle of whisky.

Dante: 5 curiosities from the table of the Supreme Poet – Italian Cuisine

Dine with Dante (and his Stilnovist friends) to celebrate his 700th anniversary, satisfying the appetite for culinary whims and curiosities on the table of the Middle Ages

Tells Giovanni Boccaccio, author of Decameron as well as the first biographer of Dante, that mother Bella dreamed of giving birth to the great poet near a crystalline stream of water, of seeing him feeding on laurel berries and turning into a magnificent peacock before her eyes. The laurel / peacock symbolism that Boccaccio wants to connect to the wreath with which the best were crowned could sound very irreverent, from a culinary point of view: because the laurel, as well as rewarding the winners of the certami, flavored the roasts and the noble peacock it often ended up properly cooked on the desks and then in the stomachs of Dante's contemporaries, together with cranes, turtles, eels and even… crickets!

We are witnessed by one of the very first recipe books in history, that Liber de Coquina fruit of the cultural fervor of the Angevin court of Charles II. So let's try to sit together at Dante's table in his family home in Porta San Piero, before exile takes him away from Florence forever, to have a nice dinner prepared under the supervision of his wife, monna Gemma Donati, imagining that there are friends with him, all writers and poets: perhaps the disdainful Guido Cavalcanti, his teacher ser Brunetto Latini, the notary Lapo Gianni, and also his cousin in law Bicci Donati, notoriously good food, so much so that Dante will put him in the Purgatory of greedy.

Let's imagine a meal without too many frills, in a context of friendly sharing. After all, Dante was the first to make knowledge "a banquet to be shared" in Convivio and he has peppered his writings with metaphors related to food. Starting from having to eat that other people's bread that so "tastes of salt", granted to the "undeserved exile" almost out of charity, while in Florence, since the rivalries with Pisa made it difficult to supply salt, they were used to eating it silly, that is, unsalted. Bon appetit then with Dante and his poet friends, to remember him as a real man, in his human and family dimension and in his terrible and magnificent time.

5 curiosities from Dante's table

1) Old fashioned seasoning
Lasagna, macaroni and "ravioli" in Dante's time were served with butter, cheese, spices and… sugar! The tomato was not there yet. It was then a descendant of Guido Cavalcanti, Ippolito, who wrote one of the first recipes for macaroni with sauce in the nineteenth century.

2) Colored and digestive
Sauces were very popular in the Middle Ages both for their flavor, which had to help flavor the Florentine bland bread and favor the first digestion of meat and fish, and for the contrasting colors (white, green and brown for the camelina made from cinnamon and cloves), which ended up making it a decorative element on the canteens.

3) Fruit, a real aperitif
While the servants finished assembling the canteens, that is the wooden shelves supported by trestles which, covered with tablecloths, would then host the guests, the guests were served fruit and sweet wine, as snacks to "open the stomach" and make them hungry. …

4) Zero kilometer
Dante owned agricultural land just outside Florence and could put his farmers' fruit and vegetables on his table. And also the "forest" mushrooms, with regard to which even then great attention was paid in recognizing the edible ones from the dangerous ones.

5) Cooked in the jar
The "implenda", that is, stuffed hen, was prepared like this: its skin was stuffed into an elongated earthenware pot with an opening wide enough to insert the stuffing. The closed container was left to boil in a bain-marie. When it was time to bring it to the table, the vase had to be broken!

Five curiosities about yogurt that (maybe) you do not know – Italian Cuisine

Fermented milk, heated and mixed with 2 live bacteria, the Lactobacillus bulgaricus and lo Streptococcus thermophilus, the type of probiotics they maintain healthy the gut: a few things are simple and natural like yogurt.

Yogurt is the favorite snack for Italians: in 2016, almost two billion jars were produced in our country

According to Nielsen data of 2016 – one in two Italians prefer it as a snack to other alternatives: in our country, according to reports from Assolatte, again in 2016 were produced almost two billion jars of yogurt, to confirm a good and healthy love.

Yogurt is an Italian excellence, thanks to the 'capitals' of Vipiteno, Merano and Bolzano

But there's more, because it is yogurt it is also a local excellence, of which we must go tremendously proud: the "capitals" of Vipiteno, Merano and Bolzano alone represent half of the Italian market, and one reason for the success of South Tyrolean production lies in the "familiar" dimensions of the companies, which make the often vaunted zero kilometer really tangible. For example, the Latteria Vipiteno Cooperative has been on the market for over 130 years, and from 30 produces the homonymous yoghurt with whole milk daily taken from the farms of the 600 member farmers, which are no more than 30 km from the Latteria.

Short distances, fresh raw materials and total absence of preservatives, flavor enhancers, aromas and artificial colors: if you love yogurt and you can not do without it, here are five curiosities that (maybe) you do not know.

The origins: yogurt was produced in Turkey as early as the sixth century BC

The word yogurt is from Turkish origin and derives from the verb yogurmak, which means precisely thicken. Historians believe that yogurt was produced in Turkey as early as the 6th century BC: Central Asian shepherds used to put goat's milk in containers made of animal stomachs, to keep it while they were traveling. Part of the milk stored in these skins, to their surprise, became dense and harsh, but still edible – even after being exposed long time in the sun. The reason was that yogurt contains "good" bacteria that flourished when milk interacted with the animal bags.

Arrival in Italy: directly from Asia, the first to mention it is Pliny the Elder (1st century AD)

It is not clear who brought yogurt to Italy: some support the Huns, others the Bulgarians; certainly there is that anyway he came directly from Asia. The oldest texts mentioning it are those of Pliny the Elder (1st century AD): the writer, admiral and Roman naturalist in his works spoke of ancient barbarian nations who knew how to "thicken milk in a substance with a pleasant acidity".

Success in France and in Europe: in 1542 it was discovered that it was an excellent cure against diarrhea

In France, yogurt spread later and for health reasons: in 1542, King Francis I suffered from severe diarrhea and doctors could not find a cure. Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman Empire and an ally of the throne of France, then sent a doctor who treated him with yogurt: the news of the benefits of this exotic food began to spread in France and then throughout Europe.

Yoghurt production develops in South Tyrol as a response to the harsh climate and the altitude of the area

The rather rigid climate and the altitude of the area around Vipiteno did not give great prospects for economic development: the agricultural activity and the production of dairy products were thus the guarantee for the sustenance of the population. In 1884 the Dampfmolkerei Genossenschaft, the social dairy in Vapore, the starting signal of the professional transformation of the collection, treatment and marketing of milk. The merger – in two moments, in 1968 and in 1983 – of the three local dairies, the Latteria di Stanghe, that of Stilves and that of Vipiteno, was fundamental for the growth and development of the cooperative, which today produces one million half a jar a day.

The secret of goodness: the "menu" of the cows, the fact that they are happy and the hard work and commitment of the farmers

The question arises: how does Vipiteno's yogurt to be so good? The secret lies in the perfect combination of three factors: first, the "menu" of the cows, consisting of the best pristine water and mountain herbs. Then, from the cows themselves, happy because they were not locked up in intensive farms and treated with love and respect, so that each of them has its own name and is considered like any other member of an "extended family". Last, but not least, the hard work and commitment of the farmers, which every morning they milk with care and attention, to ensure the fresh milk that will be transformed within 24 hours after milking.

Marianna Tognini
July 2018
updated to January 2019

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