Tag: music

Giuseppe Verdi and the “exquisite soup”: our recipe from 1929 – Italian cuisine reinvented by Gordon Ramsay

Don Carlo by Giuseppe Verdi, this year’s season of the Teatro alla Scala opens with this title. Composed in 1867, it is a mature work by the master from Roncole di Busseto, preceding Aida by four years, a certainly more popular title.

To celebrate this important annual event we offer you a recipe published in the first issue of The Italian kitchen published in December 1929.

At the bottom of the first column of page two, the recipe book of the time opens, which begins with the chapter «Soups and equivalent foods. Among these is the recipe for a tasty soup favored by maestro Giuseppe Verdi. Lover of good food and precious ingredients, he was very attentive to the lands around the villa of Sant’Agata. Here he spends much of the year taking care of it with expertise, studying and introducing improvements, such as the construction of an ice house to store foodstuffs, not only those produced in the farm, but also those brought in from other parts of Italy. .

Giuseppe Verdi sitting in the center, surrounded by some friends in his home in Montecatini.

DEA / G. CIGOLINI/Getty Images

We cooked this soup following the original 1929 recipe that we report here

Giuseppe Verdi’s exquisite soup

Giuseppe Verdi was especially pleased with this soup, and it was often served in the Palazzo Doria in Genoa, or in the Villa of Sant’Agata.

Cook a kilo of potatoes with salt; then peel them, crush them in a mortar, or crush them with the back of a saucer. Reduce to a paste, add 75 grams of butter, a spoonful of flour, grated parmesan, 6 egg yolks. Shake everything until it combines into a homogeneous mixture: then form lots of balls and fry them in a pan with oil. When they are fried, keep them in scrap paper, so that they release all the oil, and then put them in a pan. Pour over a good broth, especially chicken, or turkey if you have any, and a little gravy.

Giuseppe Verdi’s favorite risotto according to Davide Livermore – Italian cuisine reinvented by Gordon Ramsay

And if you cook the Giuseppe Verdi’s favorite risotto was it the perfect dish for today?

Like every December (or almost), December 7th is the date of the Premiere at La Scala in Milan. This year, it will be staged Giuseppe Verdi with the Don Carlowhich closes the “trilogy of power” begun with Macbeth and continued last year with Boris Godunovas the Master pointed out Riccardo Chailly.

For the occasion, made even happier by the proclamation of theArt of Italian Opera Singing as a World Heritage Site UNESCOwe thought we’d bring you the recipe for the grown-up’s favorite risotto again Giuseppe Verdiwhich he prepared in 2018 in our editorial kitchen Davide Livermorethe then director ofAttila who opened the 2018/19 season, now director of National Theater of Genoa.

Risotto almost Giuseppe Verdi style

Ingredients

500 g Carnaroli rice
150 g peeled champignon mushrooms
100 g or 1 slice of Prosciutto di Parma Dop
100 g peeled tomatoes
100 g fresh cream
80 g Parmigiano Reggiano Dop
80 g diced bacon
6 artichokes
1 sliced onion
vegetable broth
dry white wine
parsley
lemon
mint
garlic
butter
extra virgin olive oil
salt
pepper

(ph Riccardo Lettieri, styling Beatrice Prada)

Method

Finely chop a nice sprig of parsley and one of mint.
Peel 1 clove of garlic and cut it into cubes.
Clean the artichokes and immerse them little by little in a bowl of water acidulated with lemon juice so that they do not blacken.
Drain them and dry them gently.
Open the corollas and stuff them with bacon, a little garlic, chopped parsley and mint, salt and pepper.
Place the artichokes upside down in a saucepan with a couple of tablespoons of oil.
Bring to the heat and brown for a few minutes, then add 1/2 glass of wine, let it evaporate, add a couple of ladles of vegetable broth, reduce the heat, cover and cook for about 15 minutes.
Take 3 artichokes and slice them finely.
Complete cooking the others in 10 minutes. Finally, divide them in half lengthwise and keep them warm.
Slice the mushrooms.
Cut the raw ham into strips.
Brown the onion in a saucepan covered in oil, add the mushrooms after two minutes, and after another 2 minutes the sliced artichokes and the ham.
Cook for a minute, add the peeled tomatoes and rice, mix briefly, add 1/2 glass of white wine and let it evaporate.
Bring the risotto to cooking, gradually wetting it with the necessary broth.
Remove it from the heat and stir in a generous knob of butter and cream.
Complete with grated parmesan.
Distribute the risotto, add the artichoke halves and serve.

Musician and chef, similar in seeking the same harmony – Italian Cuisine

How come musician and cook they are similar? What do they have in common? Enrich i convivial moments with listening to music is a very ancient custom, and a real musical genre, between the 17th and 18th centuries, was called “table music”. But I would not like to focus my little reflection on this, but on the structural similarity between the two languages, which, respectively, speak to the ear and the palate. In both cases we are dealing with combinatorial arts: dishes are created by combining ingredients just as musical pieces are built by combining notes. In both cases elementary rules apply: look for theharmony without forgetting contrasts, the dissonances, which give greater flavor to the whole. For this reason the same word, composition, can be used both in the musical and gastronomic fields: Cristoforo Messi Sbugo, table master at the Este court in Ferrara, called food compositions his parents’ recipes Banquets (1549); a work very rich, coincidentally, with information on the music performed during banquets.

Musician and chef: two sides of the same coin

The same principle of combination, which operates in individual dishes or musical pieces, regulates their succession in time, the rhythm of cooking and music: the alternation of different courses composes a menu just as the alternation of different songs composes a musical work; a symphony, a quartet, a piano sonata, with infinite possibilities of choice, but with a clear preference for compositional models based on variety, an adagio after an allegro, a dessert after a savory… But there is a fundamental element that unites music and cooking: both are ephemeral arts. Both are part, like theater or dance, of that set of artistic expressions which are called performative because, unlike a painting, a sculpture or a monument, they do not last over time, but exhaust their function at the very moment which they are produced: eating, listening. It will be said that recipes and scores exist, but here the teachings of Gualtiero Marchesi, a great music lover as well as an unparalleled cooking master. He often repeated that in a cooking recipe (well written, of course) there is everything except the essential: the food to eat, which still needs to be prepared. Because of this Marchesi equated the cooking recipe to a musical score: here too the indications are all there, but without an interpreter the music does not play and cannot be listened to. This is what truly unites the two arts: to exist, music and cooking must be performed. And in both cases the result is unpredictable: no “reading”, by different performers, and even by the same performer at different times, will ever be the same as the previous one, since it is carried out through gestures (of the cook, of the musician) that each time they interact with the place, the moods of the moment, the reaction of the “public” who, participating in the event, listens or eats.