Pistachio Cranberry Biscotti

This Christmas day was filled by a lovely meal at a dear friend's home. Our contribution: these biscotti. They are perfect to finish a meal with coffee or sweet wine and just the right dose of crunch.

Hope you all had a joyful, convivial, stress-free day, filled with good food, good drinks and people you love.

Pistachio Cranberry Cantucci

2 medium free-range eggs + 1 for brushing

200 gr  caster sugar

250 gr all-purpose flour

150 gr whole wheat flour

2 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

150 gr raw shelled pistachios

50 gr dried unsweetened cranberries

milk as needed, for the dough

Preheat the oven to 180C/375F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment and set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk the eggs with the sugar until smooth, fluffy and pale yellow. In another bowl, combine the two flours with baking powder and salt. Add the flours to the egg mixture and fold through until combined. Add pistachios and cranberries and start needing the dough with your hands, trying to incorporate all the nuts and fruit into the dough. Add a drop of milk if the dough is too dry.

Using your hands, shape four logs of dough, about 3cm wide and 1cm thick. Ease them onto the prepared sheet, making sure to space them a bit, and brush the surface with the remaining egg, lightly beaten. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a couple minutes, until cool enough to handle.

Transfer the logs on a cutting board and slice them in 1-cm thick strips using a sharp knife. Scatter the cookies on the same baking sheet. Finish baking them by toasting them for five minutes on each side. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on a rack. Enjoy dipped into sweet wine, coffee or tea.

Festive Cranberry Sauce

Speaking of home-made presents for yourself or your beloved…

I heard it is not Christmas without cranberry sauce, at least not here in the UK. I love embracing new traditions, especially those I wanted to embrace a long time ago but wasn't able to for lack of access to ingredients. Fresh cranberries are extremely rare in Italy and well, not so much here –for my major joy and merriness.

This cranberry sauce was made in its most basic form. However, some other liquid such as wine or port can be used instead of the juice to make it even more festive. I don't even get started with its versatility: from turkey to oatmeal, it'll be your best companion over the holidays, and it is so easy to make that you will be tempted to make it for all your friends, too.

Coconut Loaf Cake | Cake al Cocco

There is a deep need for rest in these days. Rest from work, duties, manners, social constraints, voices, noises, people, crowds, rush hours, public transports, high streets. There is a deep need for empty, hilly streets at dusk, bird noises, a little apartment that smells of cinnamon and baking bread, a couch, some lit candles in every room and nothing else. A deep need for neutrality: no sound, no color. A deep need for inner peace and inner brightness when everything gets too dark too early.

I find myself longing for solitude, and pure emptiness. For much that I got to know and yes, to love this city, sometimes I ache, I feel overwhelmed, I find myself panting, reaching for fresh air and hidden corners. I try to close my eyes and blank my mind and I can see the task getting harder and harder. Am I alone in this? Am I the strange one, the outsider?

I find relief in my empty kitchen, in an empty afternoon when nobody is home and I can free myself completely. The simple gestures of gathering bowls and measuring cups, ingredients and notes, aligning them on the table, turning on the oven solace my bewildered mind. I think, not free from guilt, that I could do something else instead, perhaps something more suitable to my age or my current location. But I chase these thoughts as I focus on measuring the ingredients, on following cooking instructions. My mind blanks as I pursue my goal of simply baking something, anything, as long as it fills my mind with silence and keeps my hands busy.

A coconut loaf has been in my plans for months and I simply felt its moment had come. Its purity, its triune coconut-y essence, its perfect synthesis of flavors, its light colored nature donated comfort and warmth to a lonely, happily lonely, or w happily-in-two-maximum afternoon, a time when everybody writes, or naps, or reads and no small talk breaks this peace.

Bìgoi in Salsa and notes on fresh pasta

The 8th of December gives officially way to the Holiday Season in Italy. Home from work and school, most people spend the day decorating their houses and Christmas trees, or gift shopping. The first panettone is cut and shared alongside a glass of bubbly sweet wine. Two weeks and it'll be Christmas: people start to get on their marks with menus, courses, and dishes for the biggest meal of the year. 

To be in line with this festive spirit, we created a bit of a Christmas-y Italian Table Talk Edition, in an attempt to chat about and share some Italian holiday traditions and recipes from various regions in Italy. As for many other aspects of the Italian culture, Christmas traditions vary from region to region, and recipes and traditional dishes vary alongside them. Most of these traditions are in fact religiously influenced and linked to the cult of specific saints or the respect of religious rules. From the northern region of Trentino Alto Adige, which is very much influenced by German culture, and where people await St. Nicholas on December 6th rather than Santa Claus (which btw is the same person) on Christmas Night; or Lombardy, where Saint Lucy (again, instead of Santa) brings candy and gifts on December 13th; to the Southern regions, where Christmas Eve dinner is the biggest meal and Epiphany (January 6th) is the crucial moment for gifts and sweet treats; Italy shows once again its complexity, its kaleidoscope of mismatched cultures that somehow manage to coexist. 

I had no hesitation about the recipe I was going to share this month: very few things feel more festive and Christmas-y to me than bìgoi in salsa. As strange as it might sound, this poor, anchovy- and onion-based pasta dish is hands down my favorite Christmas' Eve first course. A big classic of the cuisine of Veneto, bìgoi in salsa was once eaten mainly on "giorni di magro" (fasting days) such as Ash Wednesday, Good Friday and Christmas Eve. Nowadays, it is consumed all year round in traditional osterie and local restaurants in Venice, as well as in other provinces.

Bìgoi (bìgoli, in Italian, though I tend to use the Venetian word more) are thick, fresh spaghetti and are probably the most famous pasta shape from Veneto, a region where pasta per sé (just like bread) wasn't really a staple, to the same degree polenta and rice were. The invention of bìgoi seems to date back to the 1600s, when the whole of Veneto was dominated by the Serenissima (the Venetian Republic). A pasta maker from Padova invented and patented a machinery to make different types of pasta, including thick bìgoi and thin spaghetti etc., but the preference of people was all for the former, endorsing the success of bìgoi over all the other shapes, and spreading their cult all over the territory of the Venetian domain. 

The original recipe called simply for wheat flour and water. The dough was kneaded and then allowed to rest. It was then pressed through a particular machinery called "bigolaro", which was maneuvered by hand. The signature bronze die produced thick, rough, rustic strings of fresh dough, about 2-3mm thick and 25cm long. The fresh pasta was then hanged on a wire and let dry overnight. A variation of this recipe calls for whole wheat flour and/or buckwheat flour, which resulted in darker bìgoi called "mori" (dark). Only in recent times were eggs starting to become part of the fresh pasta mix, their higher protein content making the dough both softer and more resistant. Before then, eggs were used as a form of currency to buy goods that poor people couldn't produce themselves – things like salt and sugar – so their use in the kitchen was rare. 

In even more recent times, a few pastifici (pasta factories, artisan and industrial alike) in the region, particularly in the town of Bassano del Grappa, started to produce the dry version of bìgoi, white or wholemeal, made with durum wheat instead of plain wheat flour. What remains as a common feature is the rough surface, better able to hold onto any kind of sauce. Traditional sauces for bìgoi are duck ragù, typical of Vicenza; and salted sardines or anchovies. For the former, the fresh version of bìgoi is used, whereas, for the latter, the choice goes generally towards dry bìgoi.

My family has always just bought the dry (white) version of bìgoi (loose at first, then packaged) at the local grocery store. They didn't have a bigolaro, therefore they weren't able to make them at home. The sauce was always the same: salt-packed sardines (or, more recently, anchovies) purchased from the ambulant fishmonger; white onions from the garden, and sunflower oil. Olive oil used to be too expensive and too rare to be found in a normal Venetian household. Only modern versions of this recipe call for extra-virgin olive oil, producing an even more strongly flavoured dish. Either way, it'd be difficult to establish an original recipe for bìgoi in salsa: every family has its own. Below is my family recipe as it has been enjoyed for generations. 

Bìgoi in Salsa

Here comes the confession: I haven't been able to put my hands on either fresh or dry bìgoi here in London. So, I opted for the least bad-case scenario: thick dry spaghetti alla chitarra (squared). The result? Good, very good. So here is my suggestion: if you find bìgoi, great! If you want to make them yourself, even better (you'll just need a meat grinder attachment to your food processor). But if none of these cases apply and you still want to give this recipe a try, go for the thickest spaghetti you can find (not linguine or tagliatelle: they have to be round or maximum squared, not flat), better if made with a bronze die, which give them a rougher surface, and even better if made with whole-gain flours. It still works fantastically well. A last reminder: if using fresh pasta, adjust cooking time accordingly. 

serves 4

350 gr dry bìgoli (or other thick spaghetti)*

350 gr of white onions, thinly sliced

6 T olive oil (or other vegetable oil of choice)

8 salt-preserved anchovies, washed

salt

Bring a big pot of water to a boil. Add a handful of coarse sea salt. In the meantime, heat the oil in a skillet, add the onions and cook until very very soft, stirring every now and then, about 15 minutes. Add 1/4 cup of water and let evaporate. Add the anchovies and dissolve them in the onion sauce using a wooden spoon. Cook a few more minutes, until the sauce is well combined. Cook the bìgoi in the boiling salty water, drain al dente and add it to the skillet with the sauce. Toss a few times until evenly coated. Taste for salt and add more if needed. Serve immediately.

*To make them fresh you'll need about 200 gr of flour (durum wheat or whole wheat or a mixture) for 150 ml of water and a teaspoon salt, all well-kneaded and shaped into thick spaghetti using a meat grinder. Let it dry for a few hours before cooking.

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Also in this month on Italian Table Talk: a lovely, seasonal cardoon flan from Giulia; and some sweet treats like mandelbrodt from Jasmine, and Tuscan cavallucci from Emiko.