The recipes featured come from my great-grandmother’s cookbook, which originally came from my family in Sicily.
After much difficulty deciphering the unspecific recipes, I think I have gathered a way to translate them to others.
Everything she cooked was based on taste. Many of the recipes read, “add garlic, taste, add onion, taste.” The key to the success of these southern Italian recipes is not following them line for line, but rather tasting as you go along, adding whatever makes your tongue happier.
As Sicilians are from southern Italy, typically seen as the poorer part of the country, most of these recipes are relatively inexpensive to make. My family used the vegetables and herbs, ingredients that would not break the bank, from their garden to create these concoctions.
On a last note before we venture into the recipes, the biscotti pictured above was featured in my food column from earlier in the week. A video can be found online on our website alongside the cookie recipe.
To start off, we will look at a traditional lasagne, a popular casserole-like dish in many Italian restaurants.
Lasagne, sometimes referred to as lasagna, received its name from its noodle, lasagne, the plural of lasagna, which refers to one of these noodles in Italian.
In America, the recipe has been recreated with cottage cheese to make it creamier. However, this is completely nontraditional.
Lasagne receives its amazing taste from ricotta cheese. While it may be a dryer cheese, that is the key to an authentic taste.
Here’s what you’ll need:
Whole milk ricotta (small or large size depending on layers)
One to two boxes of lasagne (1 box will yield three layers of noodles in a 9-by-13 baking dish)
1 egg
Salt or garlic salt
Oregano
Tomato sauce (with or without meat is optional)
Mozzarella
Parmesan
Here’s what you’ll do:
Blanch the lasagne by placing it in a vigorously boiling pot of water for one to two minutes. The noodles should be floppy but firm.
Lay the noodles out on the counter and sprinkle with salt or garlic salt.
Off to the side, take the ricotta and mix the egg in.
To layer the lasagna, begin by placing a little bit of tomato sauce on the bottom of the pan so the noodles will stick better.
Layer the noodles on the bottom of the pan with a slight overlap.
Dollop a spoonful of ricotta every 3 inches of the layer.
Sprinkle the layer with Parmesan, mozzarella and oregano. Use the amount that feels right to your taste.
Spread an even amount of sauce over the layer.
Layer lasagne over the cheese and sauce again and remember to overlap the noodles.
Follow steps 6 through 9 until there are three to five layers.
Place sauce on top of the final layer and sprinkle with mozzarella and Parmesan cheese.
Bake the lasagne at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to one hour or until the sauce on the top looks dry and the noodles curl around the edges.
Chicken cacciatore is a stew-like recipe served over pasta.
This recipe varies a lot in different regions of Italy. Every recipe is a little different and calls for different ingredients.
My great-grandmother’s recipe was simple but extremely bold in taste. Sometimes she included mushrooms; sometimes she did not, which speaks to the variation of this recipe.
She also never clarified if cooking involved a frying pan, sauce pan or pot, always using the word pan in place of the variations.
Chicken cacciatore is very much a “little bit of this, little bit of that” recipe. While it is stewing in a pot on the stove, make sure to taste it every 15 or 20 minutes to see if more oregano, salt or pepper needs to be added.
Cook it low and cook it slow and it is sure to turn out great.
Here’s what you’ll need:
2 pounds of chicken breast or one whole chicken
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 can tomato paste
Oregano
Salt
Pepper
Can of water
5 cloves of garlic
1 small onion
1 green pepper
olive oil
Here’s what you’ll do:
Dice the chicken and place into a frying pan with 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Sprinkle the chicken with salt and pepper.
Brown the chicken until it is completely cooked. Remove it from the pan but keep the grease in it, then set the pan aside.
Mince the garlic, chop the onion and slice the green pepper into strips.
Place the vegetables and garlic into the pan with remaining chicken grease. Saute the vegetables and garlic for about 4 to 5 minutes.
In a pot, place the chicken, vegetables, garlic, can of diced tomatoes, can of water and can of tomato paste and mix. Add about 1 tablespoon of oregano.
Simmer this mixture for 1 hour to 1 and half hours. Stir occasionally.
The chicken cacciatore is complete when there is no watery sauce and everything combines to create a thick, stewy combination.
Pasta fagioli, is a soup that takes the Italian wording for pasta and beans.
This is a meatless soup popular for my family during lent since Catholics do not eat meat on Friday during this time.
In the United States, it is often pronounced pasta fazool, but fagioli means beans, not fazool. This pronunciation may be far off, but my mother and I call this soup pasta fazool for the humorous effect to us.
Composed of inexpensive ingredients, one can understand how this would be a typical southern Italian “peasant” meal. A large pot of this soup costs only about $3.
The inexpensive yet hearty combination of the beans and pasta contribute to the “peasant” style of the dish.
But regardless of its origins, this soup is popular in restaurants today, so don’t pay very much for this soup when 10 servings or more equates to only $3.
My family’s version is completely vegetarian and does not use meat stock as a liquid base. The water from the beans serves as the base of this soup broth.
Here’s what you’ll need:
1 bag northern white beans
12 cups of water
2 cans of tomato paste
1 small onion
5 cloves of garlic
Salt
Pepper
Oregano
Macaroni
Here’s what you’ll do:
Do not soak and drain the beans like the bag of beans will instruct. Place 12 cups of water in a pot and bring it to boil.
When boiling, place the beans in and cook at a low heat for 1.5 to 2 hours. Stop cooking when the beans are tender.
Prepare the onion by dicing, and mince the garlic.
Saute the onion and garlic in a small pan with olive oil for about 5 minutes.
Cook half a box of macaroni.
When the beans are tender, add the onion, garlic, macaroni and tomato paste. Add one tablespoon of salt and one tablespoon of pepper. Add one tablespoon of oregano.
Allow the soup to cook for another half hour to 45 minutes. Taste the soup when it is warm to see if more salt, pepper or oregano should be added.
