A Ligurian Kitchen
Recipes and Tales from the Italian Riviera
by Laura Giannatempo
Hippocrene Books, 2007
$29.00, cloth
234 pages
Hippocrene cookbooks deserve to be more widely known. Their collection is both wide and deep, ranging across the world from Afghanistan to Vietnam, with Uzbekistan, Bolivia, Quebec, the Pyrenees, and more in between. Each book delves into local foodways and cuisines, providing authentic recipes. Hipprocrene finds authors who know the food, live with it, and can share it.
Likewise the cuisine of Liguria deserves to be more widely known. This stretch of coastline along the Gulf of Genoa just meets France to the west and is famous for the beautiful Cinque Terre, five cliffside towns that have inspired poets and tourists. But the region is less known for its food. Its somewhat austere dishes, based in home cooking, are often overshadowed by the rich dishes of Bologna or the baroque constructions of Sicily.
Giannatempo is an able translator of these culinary traditions, having spent many summers in her family's home in the slightly off-the-beaten-track village of Bonassola. The local flavors of focaccia, fresh fish, and mountain greens are in her bones. It is a place she calls her punto fermo, her anchor.
My own grandmother comes from this area, and my husband often laments that he has married into an Italian family that comes from a region where polpettone, meatballs everywhere else in Italy, are made with vegetables, and indeed, Giannatempo includes a recipe for Polpettone di Fagiolini, layered with green beans, mushrooms, fragrant with marjoram and basil, and thyme, all bound with bread crumbs and grated parmesan.
She also includes a recipe for Farinata, a street food specialty of the area, a chickpea flour pancake sliced into wedges with crispy edges, each melting bite velvety with olive oil. This is Ligurian luxury, no sausage or bold spices, just the simplest ingredients served at the moment. Giannatempo offers two versions, a basic recipe and one embellished with onions and thyme.
It is notoriously difficult to recreate street food at home, and Giannatempo's version seemed a bit thin. But on a hot well-oiled pan, it spreads, gets caught by the rim, quickly sets, and begins to brown and fill the house with a nutty and appetizing aroma. With crispy edges, a tender center, and savory with oil and salt, it's amazing that something so lean can feel so indulgent.
She points out that Ligurian cooking is cucina povera, the cuisine of the poor, that ingeniously makes do with what is hand and in the process, develops dishes that taste of where they come from. As the title makes clear, Giannatempo's collection is a personal one that includes some regionally traditional dishes and others that she developed through seasons of cooking family meals.
The recipes are lush with seafood, grilled meats, and hearty soups. Some recipes are barely that, like a tomato salad with oil and fresh basil or a quick pasta with capers and anchovies. They hold the truth, Giannatempo notes, that Italian cooking is about shopping. Getting the freshest, best seasonal ingredients. Other dishes, like Angiolina's roasted stuffed summer vegetables, are local legends or the very particular Ligurian pastas, corzetti or trofie with the local pesto of Genovese basil.
The desserts have a local feel as well, and many rely on fruits and nuts for sweetness. A few, like a gelato parfait or almond cake with figs, have a refined character. Others, like Sweet Focaccia With Grapes are definitely home cooking. Savory focaccias are familiar, but when the dough is sweetened with wine, topped with sliced grapes, and sprinkled with sugar, it becomes breakfast in heaven. Giannatempo's version uses more yeast than I would, probably to guarantee and quick rise, but it's really the concept you're after.
Part of what gives the book its particular flavor are Giannatempo's revealing asides, about the Italian obsession with drafts and the digestive system that needs constant monitoring, or the preparations for a special meal served on the midsummer holiday of the Festa degli Incappucciati, a strange Halloween-like day of costumes, gossip, and processions, or the vivid description of her aunt and uncle's house, pastel pink and a terrace view of the sea framed with bougainvillea. They are recollections that sustain her during the year in her Brooklyn apartment, and that will intrigue you into learning more about this elegant sliver of Italian coastline.
© 2007 Claudia Kousoulas
