Julia Della Croce

Lentils and pork sausages, the first to represent coins, the second for abundance, served up together, has long been considered an auspicious dish with which to usher in the New Year in some parts of Italy. Take Modena’s lenticchie di …

If Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily, with 2,000 kilometers of spectacular coastline and some of the most pristine scenery in the world, you might ask, why don’t Americans know much about it? That question …

The first snow clings to the splashes of stricken marigolds outside my kitchen window. Only yesterday, their little mop-heads bobbed undaunted, taunting winter, as a cold wind whipped my little garden. Even in November of 2016, to see them in …

When I set out to sell a publisher on the idea of writing a book about Umbrian cooking some years ago, I was asked to sum up the cuisine in a short paragraph. Having just returned from one of my …

It’s no surprise that vegetables are the bedrock of the Italian diet. For one thing, the climate is temperate and the growing seasons are blessedly long. For another, there is a relationship between the Italians and their vegetables that can …

Many holiday foods, sweets in particular, are imbued with symbolic meaning, making anyone preparing them feel a connection to his or her tribe or traditions. Crisp and sweet ribbon-like pastries have a particular significance in the repertoire of Italian confections, …

It’s hard to beat a well-made pizza margherita whose colors are the very symbol of Italy, but in the cool of autumn, I find myself craving a more hefty—and healthy—pie topped with pork sausage and broccoletti di rapa, a variation …

Every now and then someone sends me a message that’s a real charmer. Here’s one I received about a recipe that appears in my first cookbook, Pasta Classica: The Art of Italian Pasta Cooking. Because the writer and so many other …

“I was still young when my life changed…. drastically. Shortly after midnight one Saturday… the smell of smoke awakened me. I ran to my mother’s bed…. The next thing I saw was a wall of fire shooting up the staircase. …

It is not easy to imagine that streets paved by the Romans that we still walk today could tremble savagely beneath our feet like they did in Amatrice on August 24, a town famous around the world for a dish …