Pine Nut

Sweeter than grilled kofte like the one on page 355—and too delicate for the grill—these may be broiled but are at their best when panfried. Serve with any Raita (page 175) and a cooked vegetable.

A flavorful vegetarian filling for stuffed vegetables (pages 445–447 and 492) that is simple, quick, and easy to make in advance. If you have a mild chile powder (like one made from Aleppo or New Mexican chiles), use 1/2 teaspoon or more of it in place of the cayenne. Some cooks add about 1/2 cup grated hard sheep’s cheese, of a type like pecorino Romano, to this mix.

You can definitely use leftover beans for this recipe, but especially White Beans with Garlic (page 441) or Aromatic White Beans with Chicken Stock and Tomatoes (page 442). If you must cook beans from scratch, it would be best to combine them with some garlic and other aromatic vegetables and a few sprigs of thyme while they cook.

I like this best with shallots, which are prettier and tastier than boiling onions. Some people add raisins (about 1/4 cup, from the beginning), which does not turn me on. Others garnish with toasted pine nuts, a nice but unnecessary touch. Other vegetables you can prepare this way: almost any member of the onion family, including leeks, scallions, and any kind of onion—if the onions are large, peel and quarter them, then insert a toothpick into each quarter to hold it together during the cooking.

Like the Uncooked Tomato-Mustard Sauce on page 606, this is often used to lend flavor to the ultrabland bollito misto, boiled mixed meats. But it’s a perfect sauce for roasted or poached fish and can even be thinned with more olive oil to make a salad dressing.

I have been making this winter fruit salad from the time I first started looking at cookbooks and well remember the original Claudia Roden recipe (in her wonderful classic A Book of Middle Eastern Food). My version, honed by experience and travel, is a little different. If you use water, you will probably need to add a bit of sugar; start with 1/2 cup and see how that tastes. This recipe produces a lovely syrup of its own, but you can serve it with yogurt or fresh or sour cream if you like. If you’re in a hurry, you may cook the mixture, gently, until the fruit softens. The texture will be mushier, the fruits less distinctive, but the taste will still be great.

Its flavor bears no resemblance to real caviar, its ingredients (except for the salt) have nothing to do with caviar, but its texture—supposedly—is akin to that of caviar. If there are enough seeds in your eggplant—not necessarily a good thing—I suppose you could argue that its graininess is like that of caviar. In any case, it’s a wonderful spread for Crostini (page 41), as a dip for fresh vegetables, or as a stuffing for roasted peppers or tomatoes (pages 492).

I found versions of this dish on menus across America, Italian and non-Italian. I guess everybody loves its appealing flavors. It is delicious made with frozen peas, but when I was a child, my grandma made it only with the sweetest first pods of peas. I also remember that it was my job to shell them, and I ate quite a few of those raw peas. Pancetta is pork belly cured with salt, pepper, and other seasonings, then made into a roll, but not smoked like bacon. You can substitute bacon or Canadian bacon for the pancetta, and substitute fresh peas for frozen.

Italians love the chicory family of vegetables, of which escarole is a member. Escarole was one of the abundant leafy green vegetables that they could readily find in the States. Today it has fallen out of favor, but when I opened Buonavia, my first restaurant, in 1971, we were cooking escarole by the bushel. We served it in soups, braised with garlic and oil as a side dish, in salads, and for an appetizer; or we would stuff it, as in the recipe below. In Italy, stuffed greens served with beans would often have been the whole meal, not just a side.

Italians love their artichokes in a thousand ways, and stuffed with seasoned bread crumbs is a favorite. This recipe is an Italian American rendition, much richer and with more stuffing and ingredients than the one found in Italy. It was often an appetizer on the menu of Italian American restaurants in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, and most likely the first way that many Americans tasted artichokes Italian-style. And I am sure the charm of it was the discovery of how to eat this curious thistle with not much pulp but lots of flavor.

This is one of the most classic Italian American cookies, and it is one of the easiest to make. In Italian American culture, these are simply known as pinoli cookies, the word “pinoli” referring to the pine nuts that top the cookies, a distinct Sicilian twist. The personal element in making this cookie is to ask yourself if you like it chewy or crumbly crisp—the difference is all in the baking time. With the timing given below, they will be a bit chewy, but of course it depends on how big you make them. Oh, so many variables in cooking!

The crostata, or tart, is as common in Italy as pie is in America. It is one of the best ways to showcase seasonal fruit as a dessert. Once the crust is made for the filling, add some marzipan and some plump, juicy seasonal blueberries. There is no need to add cornstarch to bind the juice of the berries—they will nestle into the marzipan.

Italian cheesecake is one of the easiest Italian desserts to make, and, yes, one can add raisins, orange, or pine nuts. But I recall my grandmother’s simple version, made from goat’s-milk ricotta with minimal sugar, and it was delicious. In America, the cream-cheese version, of much smoother consistency, is common, but an Italian will willingly partake of the crumbly consistency of ricotta cheesecake, any time.

If you have leftover poached chicken, the moist meat makes a wonderful warm salad, with raisins and pine nuts and a lively, sweet dressing (similar to the Cooked Carrot Salad with Pine Nuts and Golden Raisins, page 45). Three cups of dressed chicken would serve 3 or 4.

Pignoli (pine nuts) are an ingredient much loved and used in Italian cooking— from savory pasta dishes and pesto to meat dishes such as bracciole and rollatini, and an infinite number of desserts. Here it is the topping of the tart, and hence its name, pignolata, lots of pignoli. For me, pignoli are delicious nuts that I recall harvesting from a cone of the big pine tree at the end of my grandmother’s courtyard in Istria. It was a humungous pine tree—or maybe I was small. My brother Franco and the other boys would climb up the tree and shake or knock down the open cones. Burrowed in the open scales of the pine cone were the oval brown-shelled nuts, which the girls would crack open with stone on stone. First we would eat our fill, then we began collecting them for cooking. That fresh, sweet flavor of pine nuts is still vivid in my mind, and to me there is nothing worse than biting into a rancid old pine nut. So make sure that you get the freshest pine nuts, which should be sweet, nutty, and buttery at the same time. Buy them in small quantities, since they are expensive; use them quickly, and if you have some left over, seal them tightly in a plastic bag and freeze them for future use. To heighten their aroma, toast them just before using—although not in this recipe, since you will be baking them.

The flavors of oranges and black olives are quite harmonious and make an unusual and interesting sauce.

Carrots are an unappreciated standby. We tend to use them for everything but rarely highlight them. This dish brings out their sparkle.