Italian American

This dish is excellent served as a main course or as a dressing for pasta. (Toss the pasta with the sauce and top the plates with shrimp.) It is also delicious spooned over hot Soft Polenta (page 346).

When I bread and fry things like these slices of eggplant, I make a little assembly line that leads from the flour, to the eggs, on to the bread crumbs, and right into the pan of hot oil. Placing three rectangular cake pans side by side next to the stove works nicely—there is very little cleanup afterward—but any container wide enough to hold several slices of eggplant at a time will work just as well. This dish can be made with roasted eggplant slices instead of breaded and fried eggplant. Although it will be good, it will not be as tasty, nor will it have the texture of the fried eggplant. The roasted version is very simple: Drain and rinse the eggplant as described above, but instead of coating the eggplant slices, toss them with a few tablespoons of olive oil. Brush a baking sheet with olive oil, and set the eggplant slices side by side on the baking sheet. Bake them in a 450° F preheated oven for 20 minutes, till they are golden brown. Let them cool, and proceed to layer and bake the ingredients as below.

I’m offering you the basic recipe for filling these eggplant rolls. You can take it in any direction you like, adding spinach, raisins, pinenuts, prosciutto, or whatever else sounds good to you. Eggplant rollatini are versatile in another way, too. Because the individual rolls are easy to serve, they are wonderful as a first course for a big crowd—like a family gathering—or as part of an Italian-American buffet. For a smaller crowd, this makes a substantial main course that needs only a first-course salad to make it a meal. If you’d like to make these simple rolls even easier to fill, you can cut the sticks of mozzarella into little cubes and stir them right into the ricotta filling.

This is a more contemporary version of one of the standbys of Italian-American cooking. Instead of coating a thin, breaded, and fried chicken cutlet with tomato sauce, I like to top a chicken thigh with sliced fresh tomatoes and slices of fresh mozzarella or Fontina cheese.A light sauce made with fresh tomatoes and basil finishes the plate. Fontina is a mellow, lightly aged cow’s-milk cheese that melts beautifully. Take the time to search out Italian Fontina—you’ll appreciate the creamy difference. You can prepare this dish using veal or pork cutlets as well (see variations below).

Poussins—young chickens that weigh about 1 pound each—are great for this dish. Figure on one per person, and cut them into pieces at the joints; there’s no need to cut them into smaller pieces across the bone. As good as poussins are, I made this dish using supermarket-bought fryer chickens, because I want to be sure you try this delicious recipe. The secret to golden-brown chicken pieces is to leave them be as they cook. They will brown better if you’re not constantly turning them or checking on their progress.

The caccia in cacciatore means “hunt,” so I guess this is chicken hunter’s-style. Somewhere along the line—probably on its trip from Italy to America—the hunter’s pheasant or guinea hen in this dish was replaced by chicken. If you don’t want to cut up a whole chicken, you can buy pieces—get all legs and thighs, if that’s what you like; they are very good in this dish. It can be made using only chicken breasts, if that’s your preference, but to keep the chicken from drying out, you should cut the cooking time in half, and reduce the wine to 1/4 cup and the tomatoes to 3 cups. Best of all, though, is to make this dish with an older hen. In that case, increase the cooking time by 20 minutes, adding more water or stock as needed to keep the hen pieces covered as they cook. When you cut up chicken, or anything for that matter, your knife should glide along. If you’re struggling, stop for a second and take a look at what you’re cutting; you should be cutting between the bones at the joints, not actually cutting through the bones. If you’re off target, just wiggle the blade of the knife to get a feel for where the joint is, then make another cut. With practice, you’ll get a sense for where the joints lie.

If you intend to dry these sausages, make sure they are kept in a well-ventilated, cool (35- to 42-degree) place. They will be ready to eat about 2 months from the time you hang them. You can vary the spices in this recipe to make different-tasting sausages. For example, in the north of Italy cinnamon is added, while in the south and here in the States, fennel seeds, crushed red pepper or pieces of dried tomatoes, and sometimes cubes of caciocavallo (semi-fresh cheese) flavor the sausages. As with all fillings, it is a good idea to cook a little bit of the meat mixture before stuffing the casings. Taste the cooked sample piece of sausage and adjust the seasoning to your liking if necessary.

Cleaning, rolling, poaching, and slicing the sweetbreads can be done in advance, but wait until the last minute to cook them and make the sauce. Two whole sweetbreads will serve six people—perfect if you’re preparing this recipe for sweetbread lovers. If your circle of sweetbread fans is smaller, simply make this recipe with one sweetbread and cut the rest of the ingredients in half. Veal sweetbreads are the thymus gland of young calves, which, when cooked, have a delicate flavor and a somewhat firm texture. Look for large, plump pairs of sweetbreads and trim off most of the outer membrane before you cook them, keeping enough intact to hold the sweetbreads together as they poach. (You can always trim more off after they cook.) My method of shaping and poaching the sweetbreads first, then pan-searing them just before serving, helps the sweetbreads keep their shape and reduces the amount of last-minute cooking. Save any less-than-perfect slices and the trimmings from the end of the sweetbread “sausage” as a treat for the cook, or as a first course for another meal. (If you can’t get to enjoy them right away, wrap them tightly and freeze them until you can.) Brown the sweetbread nuggets in a mix of butter and oil until crispy, remove them from the pan and drain them. Sauté some sliced mushrooms in the same pan, then toss the sweetbreads and mushrooms with a green salad dressed with lemon and oil.

The sugar in the honey helps to caramelize the pork, onion, and pears as they oven-braise. It is a technique that works well with other roasted meats and birds as well. Just mix a little honey with the pan juices and baste or brush the roast with that during the last 10 minutes or so of roasting. For some dishes, you want the onions cut fine, so they almost disappear. Here, I cut the onions large—and the pears, too—so they keep their shape and don’t fall apart. Even when ripe, Bosc pears stay firmer than most, making them just right for this dish.

Texture is a very important part of the gustatory pleasures of tripe. Tripe should be soft and yet resilient; you do not want it mushy. In this recipe, as I do when making many long-simmered sauces, I keep a pot of hot water near the tripe as it simmers. From time to time, I check the tripe, ladling in water if the sauce has cooked down and some of the tripe isn’t covered. At the end of cooking, there should be enough sauce so the tripe is nice and juicy but not watery.

Peppers with a slight kick to them, like the cubanellas or banana peppers suggested at left, are wonderful for this dish. If you can’t find those, choose the long, thin-skinned peppers often sold as “Italian frying peppers” in supermarkets. You can serve the peppers alone or with a side of rigatoni, dressed with some of the sauce from the stuffed-pepper baking dish, grated Pecorino Romano cheese, and a drizzle of olive oil. This is a favorite dish at Becco, our restaurant in New York’s Theater District.

This sauce is traditionally simmered for hours, until a finger’s width of oil floats on top. Typically that oil was then reincorporated into the sauce. In true Italian family style, pass platters of the meat with some sauce spooned over them, and bowls of pasta dressed with the sauce around the table. Buon appetito.