Il Forno

Moving...

The long awaited time (at least by myself) has come. After about three years pondering about a new job and a few months spent looking for one, I have landed a gig in the land of the skirt kilt-clad, fried anything-eating men: Scotland. Not my first choice weather-wise, I have to confess, but it seems Italy and Southern Europe have little demand for my professional skills. Tough luck... for me and for them. I am very happy about the job though, and after having spent four years in what turned out to be professional hell, it is a big relief.

Even if Scotland seems to enjoy a slightly tarnished reputation food-wise (as the Mr Nice of British food journalism, AA Gill, so kindly reminds us), I am looking forward to making the most out of it. Maybe six years spent in the East of Germany – which has a few gems, but that is it– have somewhat diminished my gastronomic needs, or maybe I just can't take some London-centric food-journos too seriously when they shit on the rest of the restaurant scene of their own country. Time will tell. Therefore, any Scotland tips, especially concerning Glasgow and surroundings, will be most welcome.

It is goodbye to Germany. Nonetheless, there will be a couple of Jena-centered last-goodbye posts popping up in the next weeks. It might also be goodbye to this blog. I am not sure if I will continue posting on Il Forno after moving and probaby will only find out once we settle in. The plan is to continue blogging, but how, where and with what frequency remains unclear at the moment.

I have to say sorry to all of those who got in touch and whom I did not reply to in the past two months or so. The job hunt, and successive flat search left me with little free time and completely highjacked my thoughts away from blogging and the web. Quite a few have inquired about IMBB? and its future. I can only reply that at the moment I cannot give my attention to the event, but would be happy to give over the reins to anyone interested and committed to continue running this monthly event. If you are, get in touch and I'll be happy to pass on all the information you might need.

Till next time and Glasgow kisses to all ;-)!

Cookbook spotlight: Kitchen Sense (and Buttermilk biscuits with sausage gravy)

As all my fellow food bloggers, I have a passion for cookbooks: as hard as I try to promise myself that THIS book is the last one (... at least for a few months) I inevitably end up with a new addition to my collection sooner than I can say mise en place. You can imagine that when Cathy of A Blithe Palate asked me if I was interested in Getting a copy of Mitchell Davis' new cookbook, Kitchen Sense, to test I simply could not resist.

Now, I must admit that I am most definitely not a huge fan of plain cookbooks. I do use them, to great extent sometimes, but they're not exactly what I would read from cover to cover. Like wise, I must admit I had little idea of who Mitchell Davis is, of his role in the James Beard Foundation and of his previous books, The Mensch Chef and Cook Something.

And still, once the book arrived, I found myself reading through it (almost) from cover to cover captured by the clear and concise recipe descriptions, the short introductions to each  and the very welcome tips for variations and leftovers. I cannot even complain too much about the Italian recipes, one of my favourite hobbies. Apart one or two details and a semantic disagreement, these keep the original spirit if not always the original ingredients. Nonetheless, this makes the recipe more feasible for the US public the book is aimed at.

CAMPIONI DEL MONDO!

...excuse this short football-themed interruption... I'm off to celebrate!

Pizzeria Da Salvo

I'd not change any place in the world with Naples (and its immediate surroundings) when it comes to pizza. Pizza, as we know it today, was born there and Naples is, not surprisingly, most likely to be the city with the highest density of Pizzerias on Earth. Admittedly, not all the pizza made in Naples is great, but there are a pretty impressive number of pizzeria who produce a great pizza. Yet, when someone who is a real experts tells you he has found the best pizza in Naples, you simply strive to make it there and see what the fuss is all about, even if you live more than 1000 km away.

If you have been reading this blog from the start you might remember Marco, also known as Pizza Napoletana on a number of food discussion forums, and the pizza pics of his I published. A few month's ago he gave out his list of favourites in Naples and was clearly quite excited for the (re-)opening of one particular pizzeria, the best of all according to his opinion: Da Salvo in San Giorgio a Cremano (just outside Naples).

Telline (wedge shells) and spaghetti

Whenever I handle the ingredients I am planning to use for my next meal, I cannot help think that there is a part of us that is still back in the Stone Age. Fact is, as much as I love quality ingredients, there is nothing that compares to the joy of using ingredients that you have grown, caught or prepared from scratch yourself.

I definitely have quite a bit of that old hunter-gatherer ancestor in me. My balcony is hardly a place where you can sit out and enjoy the summer sun: too many herbs and potted plants (quite a few used for cooking) there screening you from those precious rays. Likewise, when I walk into a wood I try as hard as I can to just enjoy the landscape, yet inevitably I find myself looking for mushrooms, berries and wild herbs. At the seaside, I look for molluscs, which, on the shores of Lazio, means telline.

Telline (Donax trunculus), also called arselle in Italian and wedge shells in English, are small triangular clams that live in the sand banks close to the shore. Commercially, these are fished by boats carrying nets that drag through kilometres of the superficial layer of the sand banks, something that, to my eyes, is pretty damaging from the ecological point of view. Yet the real way to collect – and earn – a well deserved dish of telline is fishing them yourself.

Tiella Gaetana.

From time to time I get e-mails from Americans (and I mean Argentineans as well as US Americans) asking for some particular Italian recipe their grandmother used to make. I am happy to help whenever I can, I love those trips down memory lane, but occasionally I feel terribly sorry for not being able to lend my hand in their recipe search. Sometimes it is because, while I know the dish well, I have no idea of how the recipe looks like. Yet more often, I simply have no idea what dish they are talking about: the name might be familiar, but the description of the dish is not. The problem is that Italy simply does not have a national cuisine, but rather a collection of local ones that at times can change dramatically just going over the next hill. So, even for a born and raised Italian like me,m Italy remains an immense cooking school, with a promise of something new around the next road bend.

Shortly before leaving for my Italian break, I had one of these ah-ah!/I am learning something new moments. I was reading William Black's "Al Dente", a very well written and enjoyable book about Italian food and history, and stumbled upon his description of Tiella Gaetana, the stuffed "bread" typical of Gaeta . Now, I spent many of my childhood summer holidays in the area near Gaeta, so I had heard the name before, but I must admit I had no idea what the dish was. Black describes food in such a delicious way – something he definitely has a knack for – that I knew I had to get a bite of tiella as soon as I could. I also wanted to learn more about it.

Gaeta: il mercato (the market)

Back when Italy still was divided into a number of Kingdoms – i.e. till the second half of the XIXth century – Gaeta marked the border between the Kingdom of the two Sicilies (aka Kingdom of Naples) and the Papal state. For centuries Gaeta was an important military port as the remaining fortifications still show today. Today the city lives more of commerce and tourism than warfare, and the wealth and size of the city have benefited from that. Leaving behind the historical chatter, for those into food Gaeta has three intriguing items on offer: olive (olives) di Gaeta, tiella Gaetana (a savory stuffed flatbread) and the weekly market. Leaving the former two for upcoming posts, I'll show you around the market.

The city's market takes place every Wednesday not far from the railway station of Gaeta(there are a number of entry points, so it is best to just ask the locals). It is pretty much divided into a part dedicated to food and one to almost anything else with goods ranging from shoes and cheap clothes to kitsch home decorations and cheap plastic toys for kids. You can guess which part I was interested in.

Among the many "salumeria" stalls – selling, as customary in Italy, cured meats and cheeses, but also milk, bread and eggs – one particularly caught my eye. Beside the standard cheese selection, they had a selection of farmhouse goat and sheep cheeses. In any big city market these would have been presented in a specially attractive set-up, advertised with great clamour and sold at dear prices. As often in Italy, qualityis taken as obvious, so here the cheeses simply come in polystyrene boxes straight from the producer and are sold at dirt-cheap prices: the small goat cheese went for 1 Euro each, with the pecorini only slightly more expensive. I couldn't resist the temptation and a couple of goat cheeses and a small young pecorino.