La Buona Tavola

When I was little, helping my grandmother make pasta was my idea of a good time.  With her deft hands she transformed flour and eggs into silken pasta sheets so thin I could see through them.  I look back now …

Growing up, I remember sitting at the kitchen table on a weekend morning watching as my mother chopped mounds of onion, celery and carrots to begin her Sunday meat sauce. Soon the aroma of the onion gently sautéing in olive …

When I was growing up, I watched my mother poach, roast, bake, or grill the fish my father caught on his weekend expeditions to Long Island’s Montauk Point. Some of the tastiest fish were those that other fishermen tossed back …

It is a mistake to think that our immigrant forebears, however poor, went without meat. Country people have hunted for food since time immemorial and they still do. Pheasant and partridge, grouse and quail, duck and other wild water birds, …

I’m in Italy!—in the region of Marche, along the Adriatic sea—staying in the town where my grandfather grew up (he immigrated to America in 1911, at age 22). I’m staying with my cousins—also named Becci—the branch of my grandfather’s and …

Brioche con crema or cream puffs are my favorite desserts. Nothing like the tasteless ones you buy in the bakery. The cream is made from scratch. The smell of cinnamon or cannella together with a whole lemon rind is unforgetable.  …

Good gardeners always prepare for what the future will bring them. Now is the time to prepare for those succulent asparagus spears that will appear in the spring. Of course, you can grow asparagus from seed but that will take …

Somehow I can’t leave Sicily behind and I’m hooked on Averna Amaro Siciliano.  Call me pazza per gli amari.   I love this genre of liquor; with its complex interplay of flavors, Averna in particular has captured both my heart …

Even if the sweets associated with Italian Easter—colomba, Sicilian marzipan lambs, yeast breads with colorfully dyed eggs baked into them, to name the most familiar—are a memory soon after the holiday, one cake that is emblematic of the season persists …

Every year I plant fava beans in my garden and I ask myself, “why?!” The plants take a lot of room in the garden (though they shoot up really quickly, which is fun), the yield is small, and the effort …