Techno-Gastronomy in the Big Apple

Imagine lots of food for thought by inspired thinkers who inspire others to probe both the virtual and the tangible corners of the edible realm. This is the food + technology conference taking place in New York City on April 3 through April 5th, and I can't wait to go. More auspiciously called The 2014 Roger Smith Conference on Food/ From Flint Knives to Cloned Meat, the line-up includes more than 100 presenters, 31 panels, workshops and receptions but, most importantly, the event promises an extensive three-day flirtation with culinary luminaries and like-minded scholars - more than 250 of them. From Modernist Cuisine to The Brave New World of 3-D Printing, there is something here to satisfy anyone's taste for knowledge and thirst for the unknown.

Last year, the conference, held at the Roger Smith Hotel, was devoted to the erudition of cookbooks and featured a tantalizing array of speakers - from Mollie Katzen to Amanda Hesser. This year, Andrew Smith, the conference founder and driving force (along with organizers Roger Horowitz, Cathy Kaufman, and Anne Mendelson), imbues today's food vortex with "ambiguity." The sympathetic tag to the event's flinty name is, after all, "Our ambiguous love, hate, and fear of food technologies." I'm there.

The conference's leaders describe food technology as "any imaginable means of using and manipulating food, from cracking nuts with a rock to molecular gastronomy. The very act of deciding what is or isn't food is intrinsically bound with up technology." Wylie Dufresne, a leader of the movement to integrate science with food preparation and presentation will be there. So, too, will be experts in milling, flour and bread baking techniques, sensory profiling, wine and terroir, and biotechnology. Other compelling subjects include "The Eight Minute Egg" and "The Technology of Cake." A lecture on coffee would go nicely right here.

And there are workshops in social media for food writers, on the history of chocolate, and the truth about olive oil, led by Nancy Harmon Jenkins, the author of The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook.

Andrew Smith, a prolific writer and assistant professor of food studies at The New School, is particularly excited this year to have panelists coming from all over the United States and from six countries to participate. His latest book is New York City: A Food Encyclopedia (AltaMira, 2014); and his 3-volume Food and Drink in American History: A "Full Course" Encyclopedia was released by ABC-CLIO in November 2013. This is a man who can clearly handle a lot of information and knows a heck of a lot about New York City. If you already live in New York, this conference is a must. If you live out of town, it is an excellent reason to visit. For more information, to register, or book a room at the Roger Smith Hotel, go to foodconferences@gmail.com or http://thefoodconference.com/workshops.php.

And why does this conference matter? We are a nation obsessed with food and technology. The flow of one has always influenced the outcome of the other. Now we need to find out how they go together on one plate.

Read All About It: Israel's Emerging Food Scene

Now that Jerusalem has become one of the best selling cookbooks in recent years, it may be time to look at it in context. The recipes are wonderful, the photographs are mouthwatering, the narrative is compelling and democratic. Beyond food, the book has touched something deeper in all of us. Jerusalem, home to more than 60 religious and ethnic communities, is a lodestar for spirituality, sharing and healing, along with a full measure of continuing strife. So beyond the book's virtues of history combined with recipes, unusual ingredients and flavors, it allows us to hold in our hands a gastronomic overlay to the region's millennial conflicts, through a universal experience that connotes peace and above all, pleasure. I had the rare opportunity last year to interview authors Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, the former is Israeli, the latter Palestinian, when they came to New York on a book tour. We three sat on the bima in a huge Park Slope synagogue, and gazed upon hundreds of fans who came to listen to their stories and then hungered for more. It was clear to all of us assembled there that their Jerusalem penetrated into a realm far deeper than cooking. The cuisine that the authors express speaks to ancient realities and present truths: The kitchen table knows no boundaries; and no wall, however high and long, can ever be so impermeable to prevent the vapors of the collective culinary consciousness waft through.

Just this weekend, I had pleasure of a parallel experience. This time, the talented and ebullient chef, Einat Admony, owner of New York City restaurants Balaboosta, Taim and Bar Bolonat, expressed the food of another diaspora. Vivid dishes -- cooked and served in her Brooklyn loft to a handful of journalists and friends - blended the recipes of her native Iran with Arabic verve, and Israeli cunning. Pomegranate mimosas, spicy Yemenite s'chug, brown-boiled eggs, delectable fried eggplant, osovo (an overnight peasant dish with myriad variations - ours included rice and marrow bones), kubaneh (a slow-cooked Yemenite bread), and malabi (a traditional milk custard) with red fruit conserve for dessert made an emphatically evocative case for "new Israeli cuisine." Best of all, the recipes are easily found in Ms. Admony's beautiful new book Balaboosta published this week by Artisan.

If asked who I'd have come to a last dinner, Yotam, Sami and Einat would certainly be among my guests. But so too would be the five journalists who graced the stage of the Museum of Jewish Heritage on October 6th for an event entitled "Frothed Milk and Truffled Honey." It was a nod to the ebullient creativity that's fermenting in the kitchens of Israel's best chefs. Janna Gur, food writer and publisher of Israel's most prestigious culinary magazine Al Hashulchan, said that the best word to describe the new Israeli cuisine is "fresh." Fresh referring to the abundance of Israel's technicolor produce, fresh referring to the culture's rampant innovation, and fresh also referring to the sassy ingenuity with which chefs there have absorbed culinary influences from the entire region and integrated them into a new, electrifying cuisine.

In 1996, I was one of four "Women Chefs for Peace" on a mission to Israel. Upon my return I wrote an article for the New York Times called "A Region's Taste Commingles in Israel." I predicted then that it was the trend to watch. And now, it's here.

Mixed-up Menu Trends

Every month or so I look forward to receiving the "events publication" from the James Beard House in New York City. Part booklet, part magazine, not only is it a gastronomic "look-see" into the minds of chefs and what they're thinking, but also a good indication of what may be cropping up on menus in your own zip code. Keeping in mind that cooking at the Beard House requires a certain amount of performance art and culinary high-wire acts, the offerings are complex and sometimes over-the-top. Yet, I'm fascinated by the ingredients I've never heard of (yes, I just admitted that), grateful for a new technique or idea, and sometimes baffled by some of the crazy-mixed up combinations.

Nonetheless, a read of the menus to be cooked by myriad chefs from all over the country provides an "instagram" sweep of America's culinary landscape. There's almost a dinner every day at the Beard House, with chefs telling their stories through the narrative of the menu, somewhere in the USA.

First, the ingredients: You'll be seeing mutton, geoduck, banana leaves, lamb tongues, mantequilla enojada (I must look this up), beef heart, gizzards, lotus leaf, finger limes, lotus root, barberries, nettles, cara cara oranges, red verjus, headcheese, shimeji mushrooms, green strawberries, buttermilk, sugar cane, scrapple, lamb neck.

A few new ideas: There's "lambcetta" (I imagine that's a riff on pancetta but who knows), white barbecue sauce, cold fried chicken torchon, cider aspic, black sesame panna cotta with yuzu, sweet chestnut-filled ravioli with warm English custard, brisket bourguignon (with lamb belly confit and quinoa).

Some nice menu language: Foraged mushrooms of the moment, fresh-churned butter, Chocolate Study=Soft, Crunchy, and Nutty.

Most curious? Coffee malt crème and soda bread parfait with frozen parsnips.

I am struck by the lack of cheese in the dishes or their presence on the menus. Instead most menus were chock-full of mystery words and only a handful showed a kind of elegant restraint. It was refreshing to see the word "fumet."

What does it all mean? Some of the wanton (not wonton!) creativity that began in the 1970s was expressed on menus in language that read like shopping lists, where every ingredient in a dish was revealed. The trend continues today. And while it is a way for chefs to differentiate themselves from others, the menus have a sense of gastronomic sameness -- with little sense of place, identity or ethnicity. This is merely an observation and not a judgment for it is what we have come to expect of our chefs and their menus. "Wow me," we say. And for the most part, this is what the chefs are doing. Frozen parsnips, anyone?

If you're lucky enough to be in New York in March or April, or anytime really, you should try one of the Beard House dinners. You'll be dropping into a wondrous food community and share a bit of the past... and the future.

Food for Thought: Two Lovely Books for Summer

Here are two wonderful summer reads about food and family from exotic climes: One is a memoir, the other, a cookbook. Pomegranates and Grapes by Nuray Aykin, is the autobiography of a young Turkish woman, turned PhD, who finds love in America while holding onto her heritage -- especially her cuisine. Her personal journey, punctuated, or defined by obstacles, perseverance and an enduring love of food, is told through taste memories that make you hunger for more. Sally Butcher's cookbook, is a lovely companion to Ms. Aykin's evocative food tales. The New Middle Eastern Vegetarian: Modern Recipes from Veggiestan, is a treasure trove of authentic recipes, bursting with flavor and sense of place. Pomegranates and Grapes: Landscapes from My Childhood By Nuray Aykin (iUniverse 2012)

Nuray Aykin, author of the charmingly titled Pomegranates and Grapes, emerges as a masterful wordsmith, connecting readers to her story even though we don't know her, or her name. We learn about a remote upbringing in towns scattered across the landscape of Turkey and are moved by a solo journey to Buffalo, New York, to secure a doctoral degree amidst years of illness and "foreign-ness." We commiserate after the breakup of her marriage, and enjoy the success that comes after hardship and strife. The food of her country anchors her adventures and evokes a Mediterranean way of life that buoys her spirit throughout.

Yet strikingly, the story is not really meant for us at all. It is, instead, a retrospective diary of sorts to her 18-year old son who is leaving for college. Lest the past go unremembered, Ms. Aykin uses the word avlu, a greeting or entrance area, to welcome her son into her life's story, in order for him to better understand his own.

The cuisine of her childhood plays a starring role: She writes,

"We would sit under the shade of a walnut tree and eat our lamb chops in cool weather. At the houses we visited, they would serve sikma, made by filling bazlama (bread dough) with feta cheese, onions and parsley. After you wrap the hot bazlama around the filling you need to squeeze it with your hands, almost leaving imprints of your fingers on it to warm up the fillings. We would drink ayran (a salty yogurt drink.) The foam of ayran would fill half of our glasses, just like beer, and leave a white mustache every time you took a sip. We had an abundance of fruits and nuts -- apples, pears, plums grapes, black and white mulberries, almonds, walnuts and pistachios."

The images are delectable.

With a PhD in industrial engineering, Ms. Aykin has a rare gift of combining laser intelligence with motherly passion. Her story is a cultural and emotional "dig" into the archeology of nuclear and extended family relations, stereotypes of grandparents and women, and the exquisite simplicity that binds us through food and love -- whether we are in Istanbul or Buffalo; whether we are child or parent, leaving or left behind.

But where Ms. Aykin teaches us about her native cuisine in prose, I craved the immediacy of first-hand experience. Enter: Ms. Butcher's cookbook.

The New Middle Eastern Vegetarian: Modern Recipes from Veggiestan By Sally Butcher (Interlink Books, 2012)

It's rare for me to read a cookbook cover to cover, but a trip to Veggiestan (a fictional region including Turkey, the Levant, and Middle East) while sitting in bed with a cup of mint tea, was irresistible. I longed to "taste" the food of places I had not yet been -- Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Greece and Lebanon, to name a few -- and so this evocative romp would have to suffice for now. Immediately I turned to the recipes from Turkey as Ms. Aykin had whetted my lips for aryan (recipe below), and more. In Ms. Butcher's engaging book she boasts about the Turks' impressive array of bread. "Unsurprising," she says, "if you study a map of the country. It extends in all directions: south to the Mediterranean, north to the Black Sea, permeating ever easterly. Its cuisine reveals a huge number of influences," and she has included recipes for the two most intriguing and versatile breads: yufka and pide. The former is soft and chewy and made with yogurt; the latter, is a "wrap" of sorts and thin as a wafer.

Knowledgeable as all get out, Ms. Butcher is a London-based food writer who, with her husband, runs the renowned Persepolis -- a Middle Eastern food store where, according to fans, her enthusiasm and tenacity is in no short supply. This comes bursting through the pages of her new book -- transforming scholarly authenticity into joy. And while you will find many vegetarian recipes from Turkey -- including the populist red pepper paste, olive oil-drenched egpplants, everyday beans, and lahmacun (a kind of Turkish pizza), the array of recipes from elsewhere in Veggiestan is dazzling in their scope and in their use of exotic (but findable) ingredients: orange flower water, turmeric, saffron, rose petals, barberries and pistachios. Swooning, yet? Ms. Butcher has a gift for recipe titles: Melons with Wings; The Soup of Ezo the Bride; Palestinian Upside-Down Rice, Burghlers (you can guess what these are), Persian Magazine Spinach Balls, and Black-eyed Pea and Lemon Hotpot. A recipe for Sweet Hummus, made with date syrup, cinnamon and cardamom, intrigues.

As promised, here's her recipe for aryan: A perfect drink for these sweltering days of summer. Enjoy.

"The Strange Phenomenon of Salted Drinking Yogurt" Makes 4-1/2 cups

2 generous cups plain yogurt 2 generous cups cold water 2 teaspoons salt 2 teaspoons dried mint

Whisk (and I do mean whisk) the yogurt and water together. Add the salt and the mint, and chill well. Serve over ice.

Sophia Loren & NYC's Best Pizza

A Vittorio De Sica movie from the 1960s, called L'Oro di Napoli, features a young, voluptuous Sophia Loren sensually flattening discs of pizza dough while her cuckold of a husband drops them into a primitive vat of very hot oil. They promptly inflate and are sold without embellishment to be eaten as a snack, or as what today we call "street food." The set for that movie was a real-life restaurant called Starita, where they've been baking or frying extraordinary pizza since 1910. But about 10 years ago, Antonio Starita, the shop's third-generation pizzaiolo, hit upon an ingenious third-step -- first frying the dough, then decorating it and popping the pie into an oven to warm the toppings and melt the cheeses.

Last summer in Naples, we forked over a fistful of Euros to a clueless cab driver while searching for this legendary pizzeria in the twisty-curvy district of Materdei. Like many pizzerias in Italy, it was closed for lunch. But a version of it recently opened on Manhattan's easy-to-locate West 50th Street -- and there he was, Don Antonio Starita himself, overseeing a grand parade of classically Neapolitan pizzas coming out of his wood burning oven and, oh, yes, out of his deep fat fryer, at the new Don Antonio by Starita.

His specialty is called montanara in New York and simply pizza fritta in Naples. The fried dough puffs into an amazingly soufflé-light disc and topped with an intense tomato sauce and imported smoked mozzarella di bufala known as provola, and then popped briefly into a volcanically hot oven. It is like eating an exceedingly flavorful pillow.

The secret? Palm oil. The palm oil is important because it can withstand the rigors of high temperatures without breaking down, adding a delicate crispness to the dough's exterior. The dough downright floats with a bearable lightness of being.

We were a party of six celebrating culinary maven Arthur Schwartz's birthday, (he is the author of the award-winning cookbook Naples at Table), and I can tell you that every dish was its own celebration. We began with a huge platter of angioletti, which are fried puffy thumb-sized strips of dough topped with marinated cherry tomatoes, garlic, excellent oregano, and arugula, which was, for me, one of the most original and delicious dishes I've had anywhere recently! Then onto pizzas chosen by Antonio, not all of them on the menu.

We went nuts over a two-layer affair stuffed with mix of sautéed escarole, pine nuts, raisins and ricotta, then topped with wafer-thin dough and fresh mozzarella. A splendid pie with grape tomatoes in tomato sauce with mozzarella and basil stopped all table conversation for a short moment. And for dessert there was a pizza slathered with ricotta, honey and almonds, punctuated with a lit birthday candle.

Fat be damned, you're looking at a trend here, mark my words. I've run across a sushi bar selling slices of pizza dipped in tempura batter and deep-fried. Fish-and-chips shops have been doing downmarket versions for years in (of all places) Scotland, but they've kept it a rather well deserved secret. Out in Denver, Marco's Coal-Fired Pizzeria has a montanara and a ricotta-honey dessert pie, but they'll also fry any of their numerous pies in the same manner as Starita, right down to using palm oil.

Of course if you pile some mozzarella, salami, ricotta and tomato sauce onto a round of pizza dough, and fold it into a turnover, then you have a makings of a deep-fried calzone -- which is what you get at Locanda Positano in San Francisco and numerous other pizza joints around the country -- but these miss the point of crisping all the dough's surfaces, making for an amazing depth of flavor.

In Naples where they've been frying dough for centuries, you get it Starita's way or occasionally you run across a decorated thin-crust pizza that's topped with a second layer of dough, the edges being pressed together and the entire affair gently submerged in hot oil. This is not an obscure product in Naples, but it sure has taken its time crossing the Atlantic.

Now a restaurant named after the dish itself, La Montanara, has just opened on New York's Lower East Side. There, Giulio Adriani, who owns a restaurant in Rome and two places called Forcella in New York, is serving only fried pies, but he's using sunflower oil.

Locating Starita in New York may be easier than searching the curvaceous streets of Naples hoping to find either Sophia Loren or great pizza, but getting in isn't easy since they take no reservations and crowds form early, often waiting on the sidewalk for one of the restaurant's 70 seats. Bring a bunch of friends so you can try several of the 70 varieties available. Or, you might consider that long-awaited trip to Napoli.

Tell them Don Antonio sent you.

Waiting for Godello: The New Wines of Spain

There's a "new kid" on the wine trail. After hawking other importers' wines for 30 years, Gerry Dawes is now selling his own discoveries. And discoveries they are!

Gerry Dawes, a wine expert's expert, is particularly smart about Spain's food and wine scene, and takes America's top chefs to Spain for their own edification. He's been prowling Iberia for ages, discovering gems of restaurants and small wine makers who have utterly no interest in selling to you, me -- or even to Gerry at first, until he proves himself professionally savvy enough to merit at least a conversation. A conversation with Gerry usually is a conversion.

This week I attended a tasting of 20 wines he's just brought in from Spain. They're being touted by chef gurus like Jeremiah Tower and Dan Barber, and gobbled up so quickly by restaurants such as Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Picholine, Petrossian, Paul Grieco's Terroir Tribeca and by topflight wine shops, such as NYC's Chambers Street Wines and Nancy's, that about half are already sold out.

The tasting was held at Despaña Soho, a Spanish café, gourmet shop and wine store (Despaña Vinos y Mas) in New York's Soho district, along with a parade of splendid tapas from Despaña's kitchen. The tasting of wines began, unexpectedly, with the reds, followed by a few rosados, a half-dozen whites, and a last sip of a late harvest moscatel (Aliaga Moscatel Vendimia Tardia 2010).

Gerry is garrulous and endlessly funny, but when it comes to wine he's a fanatical traditionalist: wine should taste like where it came from, and wines shouldn't be manipulated into big alcoholic bruisers crammed with "jammy" fruit. He's not a fan of what has been called the world-wide "Parkerization" method of vinification. Put differently, he's a fan of old-fashioned wines made the old-fashioned way. "Great wine is made in the vineyard," he says, "not in the winery."

For proof, we tasted five different reds from the Ribeira Sacra region of Galicia, each in its own way a star, but each notably different from the other. A tasting companion seated next to me was so stunned by a Toalde Tinto ("tinto" means red) with a big barnyard nose and well-tamed fruit, that he fumbled two idioms in this malapropism: "It knocked me onto my socks." Well, I suppose for twenty-five bucks, a wine probably should do just that -- except these days you'd have to shell out twice that amount for something French or Italian that approached this gem.

To prove this was no fluke, we then tried four different Albariños made by four growers who are part of a small group making singular artisan wines. They were so radically different from each other -- each displaying its own form of greatness -- that you'd never guess they came from the same small patch of geography. "These people aren't making wine to fit a pre-conceived mold," Gerry says; "they're letting their own localized wild yeasts work their individual alchemy."

What "The Spanish Artisan Wine Group -- Gerry Dawes Selections" stands for is rather simple: Relatively low alcohol, little or no oak, generally hand-harvested grapes, real corks, avoidance of over-ripe grapes and over-extraction in the winery. If you've grown up drinking California "fruit bombs," these Spanish artisan wines may be a revelation. The truth is that many California growers today also are working to crank back the excess fruit and alcohol that many gastronomes complain are antagonistic to food and sobriety.

Speaking of sobriety, we were kept sitting upright by stunningly great platters of jamón Ibérico, crunchy salt cod croquettes, Spanish tortillas filled with sweet peppers and garlic and dabbed with smoked paprika aioli, and a cheese that was new to almost all of us: Torta de Queso Canarejal, a soft unpasteurized, ewe's milk cheese, produced by the Santos family in the province of Castilla-Leon. Made with milk thistle rennet, the cheese which comes in a four-inch round, about two inches thick with an edible rind; it resembles an extremely zaftig camembert. You slice off the top and inside there's a creamy, spoon-able voluptuous cheese that you scoop up with breadsticks. All these, and vastly more, are specialty products sold by Despaña and also served in its friendly café with communal tables.

Senor Dawes also has a passion for rosado (rosé to us) -- not the "blush" wines and white zinfandels that give rosés their bad name, but light, elegant Spanish versions that you just keep on drinking. As he says, "No one's ever seen a group of people drinking roses where everyone wasn't smiling." We had two, both retailing at $13.99: Aliaga Lagrima de Garnacha from Navarra, made only from unpressed grapes, and Hermanos Merino Catajarros Cigales Rosado, a mix of two red grapes (tempranillo and garnacha) and two white grapes (verdejo and alvillo). The latter had a slight spritz, and lots of body without being weighty; it is an unmitigated bargain and will become our house pour for the summer. If I can lay my hands on some.

For me, the most exciting flavors came from the Adegas D. Berna Godello 2012 Valdeorras with 13% alcohol, retailing at $24.99. Despite a stuffy nose, I was able to detect notes of white peach, dry lychees, sake, guanabana, and unripe pear! Gerry was delighted. Godello is a white variety of wine grape grown in Galicia, a region of northwest Spain. It's the wine world's new vacation spot.

You won't find these small-batch wines at your local Costco, but the good news is that in addition to New York, Dawes is working on distribution in New Orleans, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and both Northern and Southern California. In the not too distant future then, my prediction is that grape varieties with names like mencía, garnacha, and godello, will join the more familiar tempranillo and albariño on restaurants lists and in our wine glasses at home. After all, this is what we what to drink alongside our favorite tapas.

I should note that between wine shipments, Gerry Dawes runs amazing gastro-tours to Spain, sometimes with great chefs, and often with just-plain-folk who want to really dig into the food, wine and culture of the country. These tours are as unique as his wines; to learn more, you might click here.

Lidia's Italy in America

Lidia Bastianich is one of my personal heroes and, in a moment's notice, I would lead the campaign to make her our next Ambassador to Italy. (Mr. Obama, are you listening?) Nothing, of course, against our current Ambassador, but I can think of no one who is so recognizably respected. Lidia has all the makings: savvy business acumen, formidable intelligence, and the perfect demeanor fitting such a position. And I love the notion that political prowess may actually begin in the kitchen. Lidia has introduced us, through her seven cookbooks, television shows, and as doyenne of a handful of Italian restaurants in America, to the complexities of Italy's culture and to the simplicity of Italy's authentic cuisine. For decades we have accompanied her on journeys across the culinary landscape of Italy and now, in her newest cookbook, Lidia takes us on a culinary exploration of Italian cooking in America.

And while you'd think there's nothing left to say about Italian-American food given the thousands of magazine articles and dozens of cookbooks that have scrubbed this particular gastronomical cupboard clean, nugget after nugget of good food and delectable ideas pop out of the recipes and stories lovingly told by Lidia and her daughter, Tanya Bastianich Manuali, in Lidia's Italy in America (Alfred A. Knopf).

Lidia Bastianich, who by most reckoning must be Our Lady of Italian Cooking, traveled the country, revisiting places where Italian immigrants originally settled and where, even today, there's great resonance. From Arthur Avenue in the Bronx to San Francisco and California wine country, with stopovers in robust Italian enclaves like New Orleans (think muffuletta sandwich), Philadelphia, Federal Hill in Providence, Chicago (think chicken Vesuvio), Baltimore and Boston, she adds places and faces to what certainly is America's favorite "foreign" cuisine.

I put the word "foreign" in quotes because, by and large, we eat domesticated versions of true Italian food here and in many cases we eat Italian dishes that never existed in the old country. Many of the dishes -- spaghetti and meatballs and veal parmigiano --were invented here by immigrants who made good and creative use of products then available to them.

Most of the time-worn dishes in this book no longer appear on menus of trendy, upscale Italian restaurants. After all, when was the last time you went out for lasagna or veal marsala or chicken tetrazzini? -- dishes that have been co-opted by the likes of Olive Garden. So you won't find sea urchins or burrata or guanciale or lardo here. You will find perfectly clear recipes of all your old favorites along with some interesting twists.

She notes that, contrary to most recipes in Italian-American cookbooks, the steak in bistecca pizzaiola should be cooked separately from the sauce so that both retain their distinct identities; most recipes have the meat simmered in the sauce. She has the same advice for those old standbys, sausage and peppers and veal marsala: cook the meats separately from the vegetables, then toss together at the very last moment.

Lidia theorizes that pasta alla puttanesca soared to popularity here in the 1970s because authentic Italian ingredients such as cured olives and cured capers were just becoming available, so the dish delivered what she calls a "wallop of flavor" that keeps people making it right up to today. She explains that even though Thomas Jefferson had a macaroni-making machine and served his baked pasta doused with cheese, maccheroni al formaggio also has an Italian rendition, hers with sage, grated fontina, cheddar and parmesan cheese.

Although they're authoritative, many of these recipes are nostalgic because they require an ingredient many of us no longer have: time -- time to make and fill ravioli with sausage and ricotta, or to assemble the various components of a first-rate lasagna, or to pound thin, stuff, roll and braise braciole. Where are our grandmothers now that we need them again?

There's one very up-to-date recipe for brined turkey breast, from the New York restaurant Torrisi Italian Specialties, in which the bird is cooked very slowly in a quasi-sous vide plastic pouch, then smeared with a fabulous paste of garlic, oil, honey and vinegar and broiled until the skin crisps.

I asked Lidia which recipes best represent the Italian-American kitchen. She chose Fried Marinated Artichokes, Clams Casino, Penne Rigate in Vodka Sauce, Spaghetti with Meatballs, Chicken Cacciatore, Sausage and Peppers, and Almond Pine Nut Cookies as the "stellar expressions."

I'm up for any of these dishes -- or for her voluptuous eggplant parmigiana -- next time Lidia plans to spend an afternoon at the stove.

The soulful pictures of Italian-American chefs, cooks, fishermen and butchers are almost worth the price of this lovely book. Ambassador Bastianich has a nice ring.

Tastes of the Week

Dec. 5 through Dec. 11th, 2011 Without a doubt, the taste of the week was the hand-sliced "5J Jabugo de Bellota" ham from Spain, meticulously carved by a master ham-slicer, also known as a cortador, at a private tasting last week. There is great romance around the entire production of the beloved 100% pure bred Iberico pig of Spain. Unique in myriad ways, it's worthy of a taste of your own. Read more about it.

I made a cake from Arthur Schwartz's wonderful and encyclopedic book Naples at Table, while I listened to the soundtrack from John Turturro's voluptuous film Passione. Talk about having a good time (by yourself!) The cake is the famous Torta Caprese from the Amalfi region of southern Italy, which we enjoyed this summer during our trip to Ravello, Atrani, and Amalfi. The cake is flourless and based on an abundance of ground almonds. I had a hankering to make it for company this weekend. I added some espresso powder (not an authentic but a still-in-the-vernacular touch) and served it with my own homemade chocolate sorbet. Recipe below. But you might have to browse Arthur's book, or website, for his marvelous torta.

To celebrate the completion of several years of research and a voluminous manuscript about a beloved food personality, we toasted our colleague, the author, with a bottle of 2000 Moet and Chandon champagne. The champagne was a beautiful golden color with yeasty complexity, honeyed tones and bright acidity. If only all champagne tasted this way! A perfect match with still-warm slices of smoked ham meticulously cut by another master ham-slicer (my husband), and my homemade tapenade whose salinity was softened by sweet butter and a touch of brandy. To finish? Deeply flavored espresso and amazing chocolate-covered pecans from Blue Apron gourmet food store in Park Slope -- a gift from our guest.

Another house gift, this time from my brother and his wife, was a box of the best Italian cookies from Giorgio's Bakery in Hoboken. They are famous for their cannoli and pignoli cookies, but I now love their chocolate-enrobed spice cookies (I don't know their official name but they taste like Christmas) and almond-studded quaresimali (biscotti).

There might be nothing more refreshing to drink than freshly-squeezed pink-hued grapefruit juice! At a breakfast I hosted at my home this week for students in my class (Foundations in Buddhist Contemplative Care), someone brought a jug of the said juice from Lambeth Groves. OMG! The brand is available at the famous Park Slope Co-op and, I imagine, many other places, too. Located in Vero Beach, Florida you can find out more about it by calling 1-800-JUICE-4-U. It's been a long time since I've even thought about grapefruit juice. So glad to get re-acquainted.

And since it's "the season," I enjoyed two wonderful dinners in town last week.  A superlative holiday hosted by Les Dames d'Escoffier at the glamorous Barbetta restaurant in the theatre district. The cannelloni alone were "da morire" (to die for) as was the risotto, braised beef in Barolo and many other specialities from the Piedmont region of Italy.

And there was the Indian feast for four at Tulsi, the Michelin-starred midtown restaurant owned by the great tandoori master and lovable chef, Hemant Mathur. I believe we consumed the entire menu (well, almost!) and savored the tandoori lamb chops, dum biryani -- a "time honored Mughal rice dish, slowly baked in a Handi pot sealed with naan dough" -- made with goat, ginger, cardamom, mace & saffron, lamb nargisi kofta (with cashew nut sauce and cumin-greep pea quinoa), black pepper and coconut shrimp, and masala ceviche (with citrus, green chile, cilantro and gun powder (!)...for starters.

Tomorrow I'll eat yogurt.

My Homemade Chocolate Sorbet You don't need a fancy ice cream maker. I make this in a $30 Donvier (just make sure the canister, and the chocolate mixture, are very cold) before starting to churn. If not eating right away, let the sorbet soften a little before serving.

3/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup dark corn syrup 1/2 cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder 4 ounces semisweet chocolate 1/2 teaspoon espresso powder pinch of salt

Combine the sugar, corn syrup, cocoa powder, and 1-1/2 cups water in a large saucepan. Whisk until smooth and bring to a boil. Boil 1 minute, whisking.  Remove from the heat and stir in the chocolate, the espresso powder, a pinch of salt and 1/4 cup water. Stir until the chocolate melts. Pour the mixture into a blender and process 1 minute, until smooth. Refrigerate the mixture until very cold. Stir briskly and freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's directions. Serves 6