Main

Here is another delicious example of the enduring influence in Friuli of the spice trade that flourished during the Serenissima, the centuries-long epoch of the Venetian Republic. As you will find in this chapter, cinnamon dresses potato gnocchi, page 80, and lends depth to roasted lamb shoulder and its sauce, page 87. And in this recipe, ground cloves and cinnamon are the crowning seasonings for thin cutlets of beef, rolled and sautéed, so the spicy fragrance perfumes your whole kitchen. As a spring or summer dinner, I love these quick and delightful braciole with a tossed cotta e cruda salad, page 297. And they are good anytime with the Crispy Swiss Chard Cakes, page 78. On a cold day, though, serve them with a warming bowl of polenta for a delicious and typically Friulian meal.

In Friuli and neighboring regions, cooking pork and cabbage together in the same pot has been the habit for centuries. Sometimes the cabbage is in the form of sauerkraut (for example, Istrian cappucci guarniti, page 27), and sometimes it is fresh Savoy cabbage. This recipe is a quick and delicious rendition of this one-pot tradition in which the meat and its juices are used to flavor and cook the cabbage. Here the chops are browned in the skillet, leaving caramelization and pan juices that permeate the cabbage as it cooks alone, until the ingredients are united for a few minutes at the end. Together, they make a harmonious and satisfying meal—but if you have a hungry bunch, serve some grilled polenta alongside.

Risotto with spinach is delightful, but it is only one of the many risottos made in springtime in Friuli. At the end of winter, the cuisine in Friuli is driven by the wild herbs that people pick or buy from the foragers who come to the markets. These flavorful, healthful greens are cooked in risottos, soups, pasta fillings, and frittatas. This recipe shows the basic technique that is used in Friuli to make risotto with common, delicious plants such as nettles (ortiche), wild asparagus (asparagina), and the popular herb sclopit (Silene vulgaris—maiden’s tears). So, if you happen to come by some of these greens, cook them in place of spinach.

Gnocchi in Friuli are made with the same potato-and-flour dough as the round, ridged gnocchi made elsewhere in Italy, the kind we are most familiar with. But Friuli-style gnocchi have a couple of tempting distinctions. First, you’ll find that their shape is different—they are smooth, slender cylinders that are actually faster and easier to form than round gnocchi. This shape gives you an option in finishing the gnocchi: you can boil, drain, and dress them just as they come out of the cooking pot, or, after they’re boiled and drained, you can gently fry them in butter until golden and crisp on the outside—and then dress them—having gained another layer of flavor and texture. Second—and unique to gnocchi and other pastas in Friuli—is the dressing of melted butter, sugar, cinnamon, and smoked dried ricotta. This melding of sweet, salty, spicy, and smoky may seem exotic at first but will quickly captivate you. Milk products like ricotta are frequently preserved by smoking in Friuli, and smoked ricotta (drier than fresh) is a common household product. It is available here now, but if you can’t find it, use ricotta salata as a good alternative (see Sources, page 340). And if you have a smoker, you can coldsmoke the ricotta salata, for a flavor closer to what is enjoyed in Friuli. You can dress gnocchi friulani with other sauces—basil pesto, tomato—or serve with another regional dish like Beef Goulash, page 58.

This quick rendition of breaded cutlets with a lively relish will be a favorite at your house, I am sure. For a special brunch, top a cutlet with a fried or poached egg.

Paprika is found nowhere in Italian cuisine except in the cooking of Trieste and its surroundings. Though the years of domination by the Austro-Hungarian monarchs were resented by the Italian-speaking Triestines, their descendants have not given up the city’s traditional adaptations of Hungarian dishes like this goulash. Serve Middle European style with potatoes (boiled or mashed); Italian style with polenta or fettuccine; or with steamed rice.

Gnocchi made with gries (farina) were a favorite of mine as a child—perhaps because they were often cooked for holiday dinners. And I have especially fond memories of the gnocchi di gries made by my great-aunt Nina while we lived with her in Trieste, before we left for the United States. And though Zia Nina is gone, here is the way my mother, Erminia Matticchio, prepares them for our family today. The little gnocchetti are delicious and simple to make. Because they cook in broth, and take on the flavor, homemade broth is always best, and together they make a festive and satisfying soup course. The gnocchi are a favorite soup garnish for children, and a good dish for infants starting to eat solid food. To make a larger amount of gnocchetti, simply multiply the recipe. They keep well, so you can make a big batch, drain them after cooking, and pack in ziplock freezer bags; refrigerate or freeze. Reheat in boiling broth (if frozen, defrost them first).

Sweet gnocchi are among my favorite childhood food memories. These were never dessert but a main course for the children: if the adults were to have gnocchi with venison guazzetto or other game sauce, some of the dough would be specially prepared just for us kids, stuffed with prunes or marmalade (or both) in winter, or with fresh ripe plums in late summer. I loved them all and remember that if we had three or four we were full until the next meal. I make these prune and plum-jam gnocchi for my grandchildren today, but now the adults want them too. And though I still consider them a main dish, on occasion I do serve them for dessert. They also make a wonderful accompaniment to roast duck or goose—and a lovely breakfast! To make sure these have a sweet, crunchy crumb coating, drop the cooked gnocchi into the bread-crumb mixture while they are still wet from the cooking pot. If you let them dry, the crumb topping will have difficulty adhering.

Offelle are just like ravioli, but what encloses the filling is potato dough rather than pasta dough, which lends a special soft texture. Here’s how I coordinate the elements of this recipe so everything comes together perfectly. First I cook and rice the potatoes for the dough (as in the preceding recipe). While they’re cooling, I make the sausage-spinach filling and let it cool. Then I mix the dough, roll it out, and stuff it to form plump offelle.

Use this versatile dough to make small gnocchi with the familiar ridged shape, or in the following recipes for stuffed offelle and prune gnocchi. This same dough can also be formed into long gnocchi, page 80, cooked and dressed Friuli style with brown butter, smoked ricotta, cinnamon, and sugar. With all dishes using potato dough, keep several time factors in mind to get the best results. First, allow the cooked potatoes to air-dry thoroughly before you mix the dough—2 hours or even longer if possible. The drier the potatoes, the lighter the dough will be when cooked. Second, because potato dough is best when freshly mixed and cannot sit around, plan to shape the dough into gnocchi and cook them right away (or freeze them). If you are making stuffed gnocchi or offelle, have your filling ingredients ready when you mix the dough.

Fried fish steeped in saor, a tangy marinade of onions and vinegar, is enjoyed in all the regions around the northern Adriatic, in the Veneto, Friuli, and Istria. Many fish are suitable for this preparation, including mackerel, monkfish, young trout, even fillet of sole, but I especially love fresh sardines. When I was young and we had fried sardines for dinner, the leftover fried fish went into a crock of saor. It would keep for days and become even more delicious. With this recipe, you can assemble the dish and serve the sardines a few hours later. But if you let them marinate (in the refrigerator) for 1, 2, or even 3 days, the results will be worth the wait.

This is one of those recipes that I am sure you will cook again and again. It takes just minutes, and when you set the mussels on the table, steaming and aromatic, they beckon the whole brood. Give everyone a warm soup bowl, put a ladle in the pan to scoop out the shellfish and luscious sauce, and set a basket of grilled country bread in the middle. Nothing could be better.

In Trieste, every home and every trattoria has a pot of this hearty soup perking on the stove, especially during the winter months, when the bora, a cold north-easterly wind, blows down from the Carso mountains above the city. Bean soups with pasta (pasta e fagioli) or rice are popular here too, as in other parts of Italy, but the combination of beans and sauerkraut is the favorite by far—a perfect example of the Slavic influence on the culinary culture of Trieste.

Roast goose is a festive dish throughout all of northern Italy, but the Istrian tradition of serving goose with mlinzi reflects the culinary customs of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. And though roast goose by itself is utterly delicious, to have a forkful of mlinzi at the same time, drenched with sauce, is absolute bliss. Mlinzi are a simple form of homemade pasta, with an unusual distinction. After the fresh dough is rolled into thin sheets, it is baked in a low oven until crisp and toasted gold. The stiff sheets are later cracked into jagged shards and cooked like ordinary pasta. As a result, mlinzi are more porous and seem to drink up their dressing—in this dish, the richly flavored sauce made from the goose’s roasting juices. The baking also imparts a lovely nutty flavor to the pasta, which complements the dark meat deliciously. That’s why roast goose and mlinzi are a match made in heaven. This is a large, festive meal and does require considerable time and attention. It is best done in stages, the mlinzi prepared and baked a couple of days in advance (see page 20) so you can focus on roasting the goose and making the sauce.

At every major holiday or event in Istria—no matter what else—there must be a pot of sauerkraut with big cuts of cured and fresh pork buried inside. This dish belongs in the category of treasured one-pot meals, filled with flavor, that can feed a crowd yet require little attention from the cook. It is enjoyed for days—even better reheated—and if there are any leftovers, they are turned into jota, page 42. It is essential that cured meats be of the best quality, so visit a real Eastern European–style butcher if you can. Good sauerkraut is also essential. If you can’t find genuine fresh sauerkraut, sold in bulk, I recommend buying bagged sauerkraut, in the refrigerator cases of most supermarkets, rather than canned.

Brodetto means cooked in a soupy medium, and so it is in this recipe: different fish cooked together with aromatics to form a unified, delicious dish. The more varieties of fish in the brodetto, the more complex the flavor will be. Traditionally in Istria, brodetto was made with the pick of the catch. But in many a fisherman’s household, such fish was sold, and his family ate what he didn’t sell, a mix of the smaller fish, which were all harmonized by the brodetto cooking method. I remember many brodetti of my childhood in which there were only small fish. I wasn’t even ten years old, but already my mouth was well attuned, and I would screen with efficiency all the small fish bones—a skill that is still with me. This dish can be made several hours in advance and reheated, very gently. Set the meaty fish on a platter and keep warm, and use the sauce and remaining bits of fish to dress the pasta (or polenta). I like to let everyone help themselves to fish from the platter. And since the crab should be eaten with the hands, provide an empty bowl for the shells and bones—and plenty of towels!

Shrimp alla buzara is common all around the northern Adriatic coast. When I make this quick and delicious dish at our house, I give everyone an empty bowl for the shells. I bring the pan to the table; we roll up our sleeves and dig in, savoring the sweet meat, then sucking and licking every drop of sauce from the shells. All that’s needed is some grilled bread. If you wish, use smaller, inexpensive shrimp (shelled and cleaned) in the recipe to make a terrific dressing for spaghetti or linguine. And leftovers make a great risotto.

This is typical of Istrian preparations for the abundance of fresh seafood that blesses the region—fast, simple, and full of flavor. The longest step is cutting the pasta dough into diamond-shaped pasutice, which can be done hours ahead or frozen way in advance. (And though pasutice is the optimal and traditional pasta, linguine would be a fine substitute.) For the sauce itself, the cooking takes just minutes. Use your widest skillet, so the shellfish sauté and caramelize quickly in the dry pan, then cook them only briefly in the liquid, or they will become rubbery.