No, Sir, I Did Not Love Brussels Sprouts: A Tale of Loathing

October 10, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

One fall day about a year ago, struck by the guilty feeling that hits after baking a particularly wicked and sinfully rich chocolate cake, I vowed for the sake of health and all that’s dear to me to cook more vegetables. But not just any vegetables. No, I wanted to cook those that rarely, if ever, filled my pots or waited in vain in my vegetable crisper until I discovered their rotten remains long past their expiration dates. The litany […]

Categories: Cooking, Italian Cooking, Photography • Tags: Brussels sprouts, Food dislikes, Food Habits, Prejudices, Vegetable

The Zen of Artichokes

October 3, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I love autumn. If it’s not the leaves and all the color, then I find poignancy in the drying and dying weeds littering the ground. They embody survival to me. One plant I particularly love is a thistle-like plant, filled with tiny seeds attached to billowy white parachutes. The least puff of wind forces the seeds out of their pods and they float in the wind, just like paratroopers, over the landscape, falling where they may, taking root at times […]

Categories: Agriculture, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy, Local foods, Photography • Tags: Artichokes, California, France, Italy, Meditations, Normandy, Photography, Thistles, Writing, Zen

Unquenchable: Natalie MacLean’s Terrific New Book on Wine

November 7, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

If, like me – overwhelmed by the hundreds of possible choices in front of you at the grocery store or local wine shop – you’ve ever stood in front of the endless shelves of stunning wine bottles and felt like just closing your eyes and grabbing a bottle, any bottle (preferably one on the lower shelves where the price stickers read below $10 a bottle), then, you’re going to just love Canadian wine writer Natalie Maclean’s new book, Unquenchable: A […]

Categories: Africa, Book Reviews, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Germany, Italian Cooking, Italy, Wine • Tags: Book Reviews, Château de Roquefort, M.F.K. Fisher Award, M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, Natalie MacLean, Peter Mayle, Provence, Rosé, Unquenchable, Wine

Lemons – Tiny Cathedrals of Gold

April 6, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Lemons, their pitted, nay, prehistoric, skins secreting golden oil, Shielding sourness, evoking memories of a grandmother’s kitchen, A grandfather’s garden. Born in the East, fruitful India, A kiss of cold, albeit fleeting, spawns the yellow Immortalized  in stone, paint, and clay. A fruit reverenced, Blossoming from mountain and lake, Urging cooks to slice, pierce, and squeeze, Inspiring miracles among the pots and pans. Lemon curd … Lemon pie … Lemon chicken … Preserved lemons … Limoncello … Such richness! Pasta […]

Categories: Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy, Lemons, Lent, Lit & Food, Photography, Poetry, Uncategorized • Tags: Food Photography, Italian Cooking, Lemons, Meditations, Mint, Pasta, Poetry

Seduced by Spaghetti

June 17, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Continued from Still Mi Amore — Wild Abandonment Among the Tomatoes and Zucchini: Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? ~~ Henry David Thoreau ~~ Only when I studied the culinary heritage of Catholicism did I pay deeper attention to Italian food. The saints’ days celebrations intrigued me, although today few people celebrate those days with as much reverence or fanfare as in the past. But the Italians seemed to […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Cookbooks, Evan Kleiman, Gorgonzola, Honey, Italian Cooking, Paola Pettini, Viana La Place

Still Mi Amore — Wild Abandonment Among the Tomatoes and Zucchini

June 14, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A market is three women and a goose. ~~ Italian proverb ~~ I know that for many Italian women my nostalgic idea of Italian cooking would seem foreign, as alien as if I zoomed in from another planet. Louise DeSalvo makes that clear in her book Crazy in the Kitchen: Foods, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family as she debunks the myths of the happy Italian family. And the quiet testimony of an Italian-American friend of mine seconds […]

Categories: Beef, Cookbooks, Cooking, Italian Cooking • Tags: Beef, Cookbooks, Italian Cooking, Louise DeSalvo, Marlena de Blasi, Sacra di San Michele, Tuscan Beef Stew

In a Kitchen Far, Far Away …

May 7, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Once upon a time, in a kitchen far, far away … A neophyte Italian cook opened up Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cook Book: The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating and two handsome princes swore eternal love over an ethereal pasta roll stuffed with spinach and ricotta.* That’s how the story would begin, and end, in a fairy tale. [More about fairy tales and their real significance HERE].** But this is real life and what […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Honduras, Italian Cooking, Italy, Pasta • Tags: Classic Italian Cook Book, Cookbooks, El Zamorano, Honduras, Italian Cooking, Marcella Hazan, United Fruit Company

The Pull of Italy: An Explanation of, or at Least a Discourse on, an Obsession

April 26, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Just what is it about Italy? The sheer, sheer beauty? Or … The turbulent history The grottoed mushroom-rank earth The Latin-infused language The ancientness The glimmering light The icy green water of northern lakes The needle-like cypress trees The deep phosphorescent colors of art The blue of the sea The dark wood floors and terra cotta tiles The flowers and the grape vines and the olive trees The spirituality mingling with ancient beliefs And food and cooking reflect all of […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Bill Buford, Cookbooks, Enchanted April, Heat, Italian Cooking, Italy, Virginia Woolf

Idylls of Cuisine, #60

April 25, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]

Categories: Beef, Cooking, Italian Cooking, Pasta, Photography • Tags: Beef, Food Photography, Italian Cooking, Italy, Meatballs

Thomas Jefferson and His Magic “Maccaroni” Machine

January 11, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Thomas Jefferson, rightly or wrongly credited with first bringing pasta to the tables of Americans, drew a picture of  a pasta-making machine. This drawing, now in the Library of Congress, resulted from a trip to Italy taken by Jefferson in 1787. Don’t forget that “macaroni” served as a generic name for pasta and doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re talking about elbow macaroni … Here’s recipe for Macaroni Pudding from Thomas Jefferson’s Cook Book (the recipe actually comes from Mrs. Horace […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Italian Cooking, Pasta, United States, Virginia • Tags: Macaroni, Pasta, Pasta Making, Southern cooking, Thomas Jefferson, Virginia

Pandolce: From Liguria with Love, Thanks to Laura Schenone

December 22, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Laura Schenone, author of the soulful The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken and the scholarly (and prize-winning) A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, traveled back to Liguria for Christmas in 2007. From that trip came her perpetual Christmas gift to all of us, Pandolce. In an article in the December 2008 issue of SAVEUR Magazine, she teaches us how to make our own Pandolce in the old way, just in time for Christmas and the holiday season. Although the […]

Categories: Baking, Bread, Christmas, Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy, Techniques • Tags: Christmas, Italian Cooking, Italy, Laura Schenone, Pan Dolce

The Feat of Feasting

November 16, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

One cannot both feast and become rich. Ashanti Proverb “Feasting,” for all practical purposes, appears to be the antonym of “hunger.” And yet, feasting is rife (ripe?) with teeming contradictions and ritualistic conventions. For some, feasting implies hunger. Ambrose Bierce defined feasting in a rather limiting manner in his irreverent Devil’s Dictionary: FEAST, n. A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness. In the Roman Catholic Church […]

Categories: American Cooking, Italian Cooking, Local foods, Locavores, Menus, Thanksgiving • Tags: Feasting, Feasts, Local foods, Locavores, Medicis, Menus, Thanksgiving, Weddings

Hunger is the Best Sauce

November 11, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A hungry people listens not to reason, nor cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers. [Lat., Nec rationem patitur, nec aequitate mitigatur nec ulla prece flectitur, populus esuriens.] De Brevitate Vitoe (XVIII), Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) Chronic hunger is something that most of us in the United States will never really know.* Yet we, like most humans, fear it. Just as people have feared it for centuries. That fear permeated ancient myths and led to such collective cultural […]

Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Bibliographies, Bread, Cooking, Ethiopia, Europe, Evolution, Italian Cooking, Local foods, Methods, United States • Tags: Africa, Discorso sopra la carestia e fame, Famine, Giovan Battista Segni, Hunger, United States

No Thanks to Marco Polo: An Encyclopedia of Italy’s Pasta Shapes

November 6, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Marco Polo returned to Italy from his Chinese travels in 1296. The myth, legend, what have you, credits him with introducing pasta into Italy’s culinary repertoire. But Marco Polo did NOT bring pasta to Italy. And 73-year-old Italian author Oretta Zanini de Vita wants you to know that, immediately, upfront and center. Zanini de Vita says, Dried pasta, the kind made with durum wheat, is found in Italy from about A.D. 800. It was in fact the Muslim occupiers of […]

Categories: Archaeology, Book Reviews, China, Italian Cooking, Italy, Local foods, Pasta, Reference • Tags: Archaeology, China, Encyclopedia of Pasta, Italian Cooking, Italy, Marco Polo, Oretta Zanini de Vita, Pasta

Saints, Souls, and Haints: Honey Cakes

October 27, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Some interesting comments from 1845 about All Souls’ Day, by Charles Knight in Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (!), Volume 14, p. 441: To do a Tarentella as it ought to be done requires room, and although the palaces of the nobility and gentry be large (in ninety cases out of a hundred far too large for their shrunken fortunes), the lodgings of the poor and humble, especially in Naples [Italy] and in the […]

Categories: Halloween, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: All Souls' Day, Day of the Dead, Halloween, Italy

Coming Up: New Food Memoirs & Other Treats

August 29, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Food memoirs form just one of many research items on the list of materials used by culinary historians. In rounding out the larger picture of just what was going on in a specific time in history and related to the life of a specific individual, food memoirs cannot be beat. The following memoirs and other food-history tomes will be out and on shelves soon: Elena Kostioukovitch’s book is more narrative history than personal story, but who cares? It still sounds […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Italian Cooking • Tags: Confections of a Closet Master Baker, Cookbook Trends, Cooks, Elena Kostioukovitch, Gesine Bullock-Prado, Jason Epstein, La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy, Methods, Why Italians Love To Talk About Food

Idylls of Cuisine #26

August 16, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

[A picture, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]

Categories: Italian Cooking, Italy, Pasta, Photography • Tags: Food Photography, Italian Cuisine, Italy, Pasta Carbonara

Wrestling with Risotto

August 15, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Learn to Make Risotto with Biba Caggiano:

Categories: Italian Cooking, Photography, Rice, Video • Tags: Biba Caggiano, How-to Risotto, Risotto, Video

The Man Who Drew Too Much

August 14, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

As a writer for Gourmet magazine in its early years, illustrator and engraver Samuel Chamberlain introduced Americans to European food, mostly French. According to Nathalie Jordi,* his columns about his French cook Clémentine** — who cooked in the Chamberlain kitchen in Marblehead, Massachusetts — subtly reinforced Gourmet’s original image as a magazine intent upon luring Americans into a sense of the upper-class lifestyle. Writing his Clémentine columns under the pseudonym Phineas Beck (after the French term for a food expert, […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Europe, France, French Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Bouquet de France, Clementine in the Kitchen, Cooks, Italian Bouquet, Samuel Chamberlain

Elizabeth Romer’s Chronicle of Tuscan Agriculture

August 13, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Contemplating the impact of Food Network’s publishing juggernaut on the current food scene in America, I find myself turning backwards, to some of the “earlier” writers on food in Italy. Many of these people, like Elizabeth Romer in The Tuscan Year: Life and Food in an Italian Valley (1985), wrote of day-to-day practices, of times not generally recorded by local people. Romer, wife of archaeologist John Romer and a prolific co-writer with him on Egyptian and other ancient cultures, wrote […]

Categories: Agriculture, Cookbooks, Italian Cooking, Italy, Local foods • Tags: Agriculture, Cooks, Elizabeth Romer, Italian Cooking, Italy, Tacuina sanitatis, Tuscany

The Hermetic Lady in the Palazzo: Marlena de Blasi

August 12, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Cookbook author and memoirist Marlena de Blasi does not seek the limelight, preferring instead to write her books in the shadows. The shadows, that is, of the great stone monuments of Italy, first San Marco in Venice and now a sixteenth-century palazzo in Orvieto in Umbria. De Blasi’s body of work includes A Taste of Southern Italy: Delicious Recipes and a Dash of Culture (2006, originally published as Regional Foods of Southern Italy, 1999), Regional Foods of Northern Italy: Recipes […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Cooks, Italian Cooking, Italy, Marlena de Blasi

Old News: Le Ricette per Cucina Raccolte dal Principe Don Paolo Borghese

June 27, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Le Ricette per Cucina Raccolte dal Principe Don Paolo Borghese (Recipes  from the Collection of Prince Don Paolo Borghese), a new cookbook published by the Ferragamo family of Italian shoe fame, sounds scrumptious. The eighteenth-century recipes come from family archives. According to the Vogue UK Website, the book will be available worldwide in September 2009 for £30.

Categories: Cookbooks, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Cookbooks, Cooks, Ferragamo, Italian Cooking, Principe Paolo Borghese

Idylls of Cuisine #16

June 7, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

[A picture, and nothing else, for silent contemplation.]

Categories: Archaeology, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Archaeology, Cooking, Italy, Pompeii

At the Tables of the Monks: In the Beginning (Part II)

May 19, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

You’d never know a hermit started it all. St. Benedict of Norcia (ca. 480-547 A.D.), called the Father of Western Monasticism and the Patron of Europe, never intended to form a religious order. He just wanted to get away from it all, “all” in this case being Rome, where his noble Umbrian family sent him for literary studies, and what he perceived to be the decadence of his upper-class noble friends and their families. So, like many young people, Benedict […]

Categories: Italian Cooking, Italy, Middle Ages • Tags: Ancient Roman Cuisine, Apicius, Medieval Monasteries, Menus, Middle Ages, Monte Cassino, Rule of St. Benedict, St. Benedict

At the Tables of the Monks: Part I

May 18, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The hood does not make a monk. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure Contemplating a National Geographic article from February 2009 on the mummies of priests and other religious persons in Sicily, it’s easy to start wondering just how and what monks ate. Citing research on the skeletal material indicated that unlike most of the population of Europe in the early modern era, the article suggested that monks and other clerics tended to weigh in on the portly side. Furthermore, close […]

Categories: France, French Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Benedictines, Hieronymous Bosch, Monks, St. Benedict, The Concert in the Egg

Fish: Garum and Beyond

May 4, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

O le bi oju eja ti ehin ko le iwe. (Yoruba) : It is as hard as the eye of a (smoked) fish, which the teeth cannot break. [N.B. -- Applicable to any difficult matter.] (from Wit and Wisdom from West Africa, Richard Francis Burton) Most people who live to eat (definition: the food-obsessed) might recall talk of garum, a noisome fishy sauce used by the Romans to season their food. Likely the Romans “borrowed” the idea from the Greeks. […]

Categories: Africa, Fish, Italian Cooking, Italy, Recipes • Tags: Africa, Fish, garum, Roman Cooking

The Pope and the Porcupine

April 22, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

When it’s soft, eat the stone and throw the porcupine out. Old saying about tough meat. Chef Bartolomeo Scappi (1500-1577) cooked for two popes (Pius V, for one), as well as for several cardinals. Fortunately for posterity, he also wrote a fat, hands-on tome about  cooking and serving food in Renaissance Italy. Terence Scully’s invaluable translation of Scappi’s Opera (The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi 1570) is the first such rendering in English, making Scappi’s work accessible to many Latin-impaired researchers. […]

Categories: Italian Cooking, Italy, Recipes • Tags: Cooking, Food, Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi, Porcupines, Recipes, Terence Scully

Idylls of Cuisine #7

March 29, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

[A photograph and nothing else, for silent contemplation.]

Categories: Italian Cooking, Photography • Tags: Food Photography, Italian Cooking, Italy

Life, Love, and Lost Raviolis

March 24, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The food memoir seemingly pops out everywhere these days. It’s the hot new genre in writing.  Some authors coin a phrase and tell a story better than others. Most bog down the reader right away, with dramatic and overwritten accounts of trauma suffered in the kitchen or in love,  unwrapping personal anecdotes best kept tightly coffined in foil like a rotten fish ready for the garbage. So M. F. K. Fisher they’re usually not. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me set the […]

Categories: American Cooking, Food writing, Italian Cooking • Tags: Cooking, Cooks, Food, Food Memoirs, Hoboken, Italian Cooking, Laura Schenone, Ravioli

Cooking in Italy

March 21, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Instead of forking out thousands of lire for a cooking class in Italy, take a look at these videos. Buon appetito! Cooking  Sicilian  with Mamma Agata Amalfi Coast with Mamma Agata (Looks like somebody got into the wine a bit early on) Lezione di cucina dl ristorante La Finestra a Padova (Italian Cooking Class at La Finestra)

Categories: Italian Cooking, Italy, Photography, Restaurants, Video • Tags: Food, Italian Cuisine, Italy, La Finestra, Video

St. Joseph’s Day

March 19, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

St. Joseph’s Day (March 19) always enthralls me because of the elaborate “tables” that Italian women created in honor of Saint Joseph. In many ways, these “tables” remind me of Mexican Day of the Dead altars. Here’s a link that takes you to a site with first-person accounts of the feast-day celebration and customs.

Categories: Festivals, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Cooking, Food, Recipes, St. Joseph's Day

Idylls of Cuisine #5

March 15, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

[A photograph and nothing else, for silent contemplation.]

Categories: Italian Cooking, Photography • Tags: Food Photography, Italian Cooking, Italy

Italy in Provence

February 26, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Memories of Provençal food continuously whisper to me. And reflection forces me to draw the logical conclusion that the food of Piemonte, Liguria, and Provence share the same grandparents. Or even the same parents. Countless, interminable wars guaranteed both the emigration and immigration of people (and food) over the centuries. Walking cookbooks, I call those people. Like lovers’ lips touching lightly, Provence borders Liguria and Piemonte and drew (and still draws) denizens of light and lavender and life. Van Gogh, […]

Categories: France, French Cooking, Italian Cooking • Tags: Boeuf Daube à la Provençale, Cooking, Food, France, Italy, Provence

Carnevale Goeth: A Dip into Austerity and Cucina di Magro

February 24, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“Thin” kitchen, that’s what the “magro” part means here. No, not a galley kitchen. Not a New York loft kitchen. Not even a Paris apartment kitchen. Skinny food. That’s cucina di magro. Vegetables. Legumes. Fish. Fruit. Shellfish. The bones of the Mediterranean diet. No meat, at least none that walks around on four legs. Or even two. Many years ago, out of sheer curiosity and a strange desire to experience gastronomically and historically what people encountered during the forty-day Lenten […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Eggplant, Festivals, Italian Cooking, Pasta, Recipes • Tags: Cooking, Cucina di Magro, Eggplant, Food, Lent, Meatless Meals, Pasta, Recipes

Carnevale Cometh: Ricotta and Fritters, Oh My!

February 13, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Fritters and Carnevale, lumped together like ham and eggs, mashed potatoes and gravy, risi e bisi, rice and beans. Ricotta fritters, to be exact. True, most people associate ricotta fritters more with St. Joseph’s Day, March 19 in Italy. But those fritters lean toward the filled variety, sweetened, creamy ricotta delivering a tantalizing surprise with every bite. No, these particular fritters include ricotta in the batter and puff up like popcorn, spitting and swirling in the oil like little balloons […]

Categories: Cheese, Desserts, Italian Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Carnevale, Carnival, Cooking, Food, Fritters, Mardi Gras, Recipe, Ricotta

Carnevale Cometh: Calzone

February 10, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

What of calzone? And its cousin panzerotti? As cousins will often do, both look alike, except for size. And both end up seated at the communal table for celebrations like Carnevale. Calzone comes from a Latin word, calceus, meaning shoe, and may have been in used in everyday speech beginning around 1170. Today, the accepted translation is “pant leg” or “trousers.” One can just imagine farmers and laborers walking to the fields with a nice, warm calzone wrapped in a […]

Categories: Italian Cooking, Pizza, Recipes • Tags: Calzone, Cooking, Fppd, Italian Cooking, Mardi Gras, Pizzerias

Carnevale Cometh: Cenci By Any Other Name Would Taste as Sweet …

February 9, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Hereupon, a whole host of absurd figures surrounded him, pretending to sympathize in his mishap. Clowns and party-colored harlequins; orang-outangs; bear-headed, bull-headed, and dog-headed individuals; faces that would have been human, but for their enormous noses; one terrific creature, with a visage right in the centre of his breast; and all other imaginable kinds of monstrosity and exaggeration. These apparitions appeared to be investigating the case, after the fashion of a coroner’s jury, poking their pasteboard countenances close to the […]

Categories: Carnevale, Desserts, Italian Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Carnevale, Carnival, cenci, Cooking, Food, Italian Cooking, Mardi Gras

Carnivale Cometh: Lasagne di Carnevale

February 6, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

And now for the food of Carnival, as interpreted by cooks in what is now Italy. (See previous post on Carnival for more history.) Greasy, fatty, protein-rich, oozing with cheese or sugar, the dishes created for Martedi Grasso (Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday) served a higher purpose than merely feeding hungry stomachs: the severe Lenten proscriptions of the Roman Catholic Church meant that the ingredients — meat, cheese, butter, sugar, fat, eggs — couldn’t be touched until the Gloria rang out […]

Categories: Cheese, Italian Cooking • Tags: Carnevale, Carnival, Cooking, Food, Italian Cooking, Lasagna, Mardi Gras, Recipes

Carnevale Cometh

January 29, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Soon the streets of Venice will overflow with a flood — not of water, as usual — but of tourists and food. For soon the rituals of Carnevale, or Mardi Gras (also called Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday ) will once more surge into popular culture. The official date of Mardi Gras in 2009 falls on February 24. Mardi Gras, officially only one day on the liturgical calendar, is the term used by most people for a two-week period (or […]

Categories: Italian Cooking • Tags: Carnevale, Carnival, Cooking, Food, Italian Cooking, Nardi Gras, Recipes