Cookbook Survivor: Michael White, Fiamma: The Essence of Contemporary Italian Cooking
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
First off, an important note: the resolution of this Cookbook Survivor column won’t be until Sunday night, because I’m going out to dinner tonight with my family and will be cooking tomorrow instead. Such suspense!
This is another book that I bought after eating in the restaurant that originated the cookbook—in this case, I bought it on the way out, because it had been a great meal and I was aware I had almost no Italian cookbooks.
Italian cuisine is something that doesn’t inspire strong feelings in me in any direction, whether we’re talking food that’s directly inspired by what actual Italians in some region of that nation put on their tables or serve in their restaurants or various Italian-American dishes. I’m perfectly happy to go to a good Italian restaurant of either kind and perfectly happy to cook Italian or Italian-American food, but I also don’t feel it’s one of the cuisines that I will preferentially seek out above most others. I like it, at times I’m in the mood for it, but I don’t have a strong emotional relationship to it.
Almost all of what I do cook that’s inspired by Italian or Italian-American cuisine is seat-of-the-pants stuff. I make my own pasta now and again. I’ll make a big Sunday ragu every few months, usually with lamb or sometimes a pork shoulder braised all day in the sauce. There’s a lasagna recipe that I especially love that uses that ragu and the cooked meat from the sauce for meatballs along with some sausage and a bechamel layering. I generally only make that in the winter because it eats heavy but feels great if it’s cold out. There are lots of quick things I’ll do that use an Italian-inspired pantry or produce or techniques common to Italian, especially northern Italian, food. It feels odd to me to turn to a cookbook for pasta dishes in the sense that I feel you make pasta with whatever’s good from the market and whatever you have in your kitchen, you don’t plan to go out and buy specific ingredients for a fixed-recipe pasta dish. With some exceptions—say, cacio e pepe, which I love (but which really doesn’t call for anything besides eggs, cheese and black pepper; the genius is really all in the technique).
All of this goes to explain why maybe I haven’t used Fiamma very much since buying it in 2007 or so. Though I also have had a couple of so-so experiences with recipes from the book not working out very well. For this testing, I’m going to make the following:
Grilled Octopus Salad
Agnolotti Filled With Ricotta and Spinach (a small pasta middle course)
Chicken Marinated in Balsamic Vinegar
We all love octopus here and it’s especially great when it’s grilled. The agnolotti seem fairly doable, though I might switch to a simpler shape if I’m getting worn out. And the chicken recipe seems as if it might be a regular staple if it’s as good as it looks—it’s simple but conceptually distinctive.
I was also tempted by some rabbit recipes but rabbit’s a pain to get a hold of. There’s also a roast pork with glazed peaches that I like the look of, but it’s a bone-in pork rib roast and that is a cut I pretty much never see in supermarkets—I’d have to order it from a butcher or go down to the Italian Market in Philly. If I end up keeping the book around for another week’s testing, maybe that’s what I’ll do.
THE RULES FOR COOKBOOK SURVIVOR
There are no rules. I’ll substitute ingredients if I want or if I have to, I’ll pick recipes capriciously, I’ll keep a book in contention for weeks or toss it after a single week. Authors are free to write me and tell me I’m incompetent or a jerk.
Also HERE’s THE DEAL: You get Cookbook Survivor in TWO INSTALLMENTS. One on Saturday morning telling you what I’m gonna do, and one on Saturday evening telling you how it went.