The collection
Recipes
Every recipe is a whole meal in a single dish, built for one (or two) and ready in the time it takes to decide what to watch. No props, no theatre, no waste.
Pasta e patate with smoked mozzarella
Pasta e patate is a dish that looks like a mistake on paper and tastes like a hug in person. Pasta. Potatoes. Together. It sounds like the kind of thing a...
Caprese panino with prosciutto crudo
The panino alla caprese is the Italian sandwich that somehow manages to taste like a two-week summer holiday on the island of Capri even when you are eating it...
Gnocchi alla sorrentina
Gnocchi alla sorrentina is the dish your Italian mother makes the day you come home from a long trip. The day your girlfriend broke up with you. The day you...
Pasta al tonno with olives and capers
There is a specific moment in every young man's life when he realises that pasta al tonno is a legitimate dinner option and not a sad capitulation to...
Tuna, cannellini, and red onion salad with rustic bread
If there is one dish in the Italian repertoire that proves you don't need to cook to eat like a king, it is tonno e fagioli. A can of tuna, a can of cannellini...
Insalata di farro with tuna, tomatoes, and rocket
Farro is the grain that Roman legionaries ate on their way to conquer most of Europe, and having tried this salad, we understand why those campaigns went as...
Minestrone with rice
Minestrone is the soup that wasn't invented so much as negotiated into existence over the course of a hundred generations of Italian households trying to use...
Pasta e fagioli
Every Italian family has a pasta e fagioli and every Italian family thinks theirs is the real one. In Tuscany they'll insist on cannellini. In the Veneto...
Lentil soup with garlic crostoni
Italian tradition says that eating lentils on New Year's Eve brings money in the new year, because the little discs look like coins. We can personally confirm...
Pasta alla Norma
Legend says a Sicilian writer once watched his friend eat this pasta and shouted chista è 'na vera Norma!, a true Norma, in honor of the Bellini opera. Whether...
Pumpkin and sausage risotto
Risotto is the dish that taught us cooking is also a conversation with the pot. The first time we tried, we walked away to check our phone for thirty seconds,...
Insalata di riso
The unwritten Italian summer rule: from August 10 onwards, no one turns on the hob for more than twenty minutes. The insalata di riso is the national response....
Eggs in purgatory
This dish exists because someone, somewhere in southern Italy, came home at 3am on a Saturday after too many glasses of red, opened the fridge, and found...
Orecchiette with broccoli and sausage
Our cousin from Bari has exactly one culinary opinion, which is that pasta with broccoli is superior to every other pasta on earth. The classic Apulian version...
Pasta e ceci
In our student house there was a dish called venerdì sera. The fridge had surrendered, the wallet had surrendered, and the only survivors were a can of...
Zucchini and potato frittata
The frittata is the Swiss Army knife of the Italian kitchen. Leftover vegetables? Frittata. Unexpected friend on the doorstep? Frittata. Sunday picnic?...
Tuna panzanella
In Tuscany in August, our nonna refused to turn on the oven. Not for bread, not for pasta, not for the love of God. She would slice yesterday's bread, drench...
Trofie al pesto with green beans and potatoes
There is a specific corner of Italy where they got the memo about carbs before anyone else, and that corner is Liguria. The Ligurian ancestors, faced with the...
Fagioli all'uccelletto with sausage and rustic bread
Fagioli all'uccelletto translates litreally as beans in the style of the little bird, which is a poetic and slightly confusing name for a dish that contains no...
Radicchio and gorgonzola risotto with walnuts
If you want to understand the north of Italy in one plate of food, make this risotto. Radicchio is the bitter red-purple chicory that grows around Venice and...
Pasta alla puttanesca with tuna
Nobody agrees on why puttanesca is called puttanesca, and the disagreement is considerably more entertaining than the truth probably is. The story everyone...
Pollo con i peperoni
There is one dish Romans traditionally eat on Ferragosto, the 15th of August, which is reliably the hottest day of the Italian calendar, a day when the city...
Risotto with sausage and savoy cabbage
There is a line across Italy, somewhere around Florence, north of which people stop asking what pasta you want and start asking what rice you want. Italy is...
Ribollita with cavolo nero and cannellini
The same Tuscan grandmother who refused to switch on an oven in August made ribollita in January, and it took her three days, and she considered that a...
Frittata di maccheroni with peas and provola
I did not invent frittata di maccheroni. I discovered it the way almost everybody discovers it, which is by being too tired to think of anything else. There...
Tramezzino with tuna, egg, and rocket
The tramezzino was invented in Turin in 1925, and its name was coined by a poet who was trying to purge Italian of English words. The Caffè Mulassano, in...
Shredded chicken, cannellini, and rocket salad
Every office has a Davide. Davide owns the third shelf of the shared fridge. Not officially, there was never a vote, but everybody knows. His containers are...
Pasta al forno with aubergine and scamorza
In the south of Italy, pasta al forno is the Sunday dish. It is also the funeral dish, the christening dish, and the dish that appears when relatives arrive...
Aubergine, chickpea, and tomato bake with bulgur
The Italian word for aubergine is melanzana, and the folk etymology, which is far too good to check carefully, has it coming from mela insana: the unhealthy...
Polenta with mushroom and borlotti ragù
Every October, in every village in the north of Italy, a certain kind of man disappears into the woods before dawn. He tells nobody where he is going. He...
Minestra di pollo e pastina with carrots
The single best value item in a European supermarket is a whole chicken leg. Not a breast, not a fillet, not anything sold in a plastic tray with a photograph...
Frittata with spinach, ricotta, and peas
A French omelette is a technique. An Italian frittata is a solution. The distinction matters more than it sounds. An omelette is judged on execution: no colour...
Piadina with prosciutto crudo, squacquerone, and rocket
Squacquerone is a cheese named more or less after the noise it makes, and it is the best word in Italian food. It comes from the Romagnolo dialect verb...
Farro salad with roasted pumpkin, borlotti, and sage
There is a thing that happens at Italian markets in October which does not happen anywhere else, and it is that pumpkin is sold in wedges. Not whole. Not in a...
Orecchiette with cime di rapa, chickpeas, and chilli breadcrumbs
Puglia spent several hundred years being accidentally vegan and had the decency not to make a personality out of it. The reason was not ethics. It was that...
Polpette di pollo with courgette and rice
Somewhere in Europe tonight there is a nineteen-year-old called Matteo, three weeks into his first year away from home, standing in a shared kitchen with his...
Couscous with chickpeas, courgette, and roasted peppers
There is a town on the western tip of Sicily where the local speciality is couscous, and it confuses people who think they already know what Italian food is....
Lentil and potato stew with rosemary
There was a month, somewhere in my mid-twenties, when I had ninety euros to get to the end of it and eighteen days in which to do that. I am not going to dress...
Spanish tortilla with chorizo and onion
The origin story of the Spanish tortilla involves a general, a siege, and almost certainly a lie. The version usually told is that Tomás de Zumalacárregui, a...
Focaccia with mortadella, stracchino, and tomato
Mortadella is the reason Americans say baloney, and the journey between those two words is a small tragedy. The name probably comes from mortarium, the mortar...
Pasta with sausage, fennel seeds, and cherry tomatoes
The Italian verb infinocchiare means to trick somebody, to pull the wool over their eyes, and it comes directly from finocchio, fennel. The story behind it is...
Chilli sin carne with rice
The first time I properly batch cooked, I made six portions of chilli on a Sunday afternoon and felt like a man who had solved his own life. By Wednesday I was...
Orzotto with leeks, peas, and pancetta
Roman gladiators were nicknamed hordearii, which means barley men, because barley was what they were fed. This was not a compliment. Barley was the grain of...
Minestra di pasta e broccoli with pecorino
Italians distinguish between a minestra, a zuppa and a vellutata, and will explain the difference to you at length whether or not the subject came up. A zuppa...
Frittata with peppers, potato, and salami
There is a particular Italian object you will only ever encounter on a long-distance train at around 12:30, and it is a foil parcel being opened with...
Piadina with hummus, roasted carrots, and rocket
The piadina is the flatbread of Romagna, it is considerably older than pizza, and it is sold from small painted kiosks at the side of the road in a way that...
Pasta with courgette, basil, and white bean cream
Signora Elena lives on the third floor and conducts a running audit of everyone else's shopping. She does it on the stairs, at the precise moment your hands...
Pollo alle olive with potatoes and lemon
The taggiasca olive takes its name from Taggia, a small town in western Liguria, and the story the locals tell is that Benedictine monks planted the first...
Riso al forno with peas, mozzarella, and cooked ham
My mother's riso al forno appeared on the table roughly once a fortnight and was, structurally, an audit of the fridge. The rice was the only fixed element....
Minestra di riso e verza with borlotti
My grandfather held that a savoy cabbage is not properly ready until it has been frosted at least once. He grew them in a strip of garden behind the house and...
Panino with courgette frittata and roasted peppers
Before there were sandwich shops there was the panino con la frittata, and it belonged to men who worked outdoors. If you spent the 1950s or 1960s on a...
Gnocchi with peas, speck, and ricotta
Speck comes from the far north of Italy, from a province where the road signs are in two languages and about two thirds of the population speak German at home....
Courgettes stuffed with rice and lentils
There is a moment every August when the Italian courgette supply exceeds Italian demand, and the surplus has to go somewhere, and where it goes is you. If you...
Polenta pasticciata with sausage and tomato
Pasticciata comes from pasticcio, which in Italian means both a pie and a mess, and which English eventually borrowed as pastiche after running it through...
Zuppa di farro with borlotti and pancetta
Farro nearly died out, and what saved it was paperwork. For most of the twentieth century farro was a peasant grain that nobody with a choice ate. It is harder...
Pasta with cauliflower, anchovies, and toasted breadcrumbs
Sicilian cooking is Arab cooking wearing an Italian jacket, and no dish gives the game away faster than this one. Pasta with cauliflower, in Palermo, is called...
Chicken, chickpea, and spinach curry with rice
Chiara moved to Berlin for a job in 2019 and has been cooking Italian at people ever since, partly out of homesickness and mostly out of spite. She keeps a bag...
Caponata with chickpeas and couscous
My great-aunt in Catania made caponata in a quantity that can only be described as industrial. Not a pan. A pot roughly the size of a bucket, once a fortnight...
Pumpkin soup with chickpeas and rosemary croutons
Italians do not carve pumpkins. They eat them, in quantity, and find the alternative faintly wasteful. The centre of Italian pumpkin cooking is Mantova, in...
Baked pasta with tuna, peas, and béchamel
It is Sunday at 18:00 and you are looking at the week ahead the way you might look at a hill. There is a specific low-grade dread that arrives on a Sunday...
Melanzane alla parmigiana with rustic bread
There is one question that can divide an Italian family in under ninety seconds, and it is whether the aubergines for a parmigiana should be fried or grilled....
Risi e bisi with pancetta
On the 25th of April, the feast of Saint Mark, the Doge of Venice was served a plate of rice and peas, and this went on for several hundred years. Risi e bisi...
Pasta with lentil ragù and carrot
Ragù is a French word that Italy took and then refused to give back. It comes from ragoûter, to revive the appetite, and it arrived with the French cooks...
Spezzatino di pollo with peas and polenta
Italy runs on regional insults, and two of the best ones are about food. Northerners call southerners terroni, roughly earth-people. Southerners call...
Pizzoccheri with cabbage, potato, and fontina
I ate pizzoccheri for the first time at 1,800 metres, in a rifugio in the Valtellina, having walked up in trainers because I had misread the difficulty of the...
Red lentil dal with rice and spinach
Dal is probably the most-eaten dish on the planet, and Italy has no equivalent, which is odd, because the logic behind it is exactly the logic that produced...
Pasta with courgette, egg, and pecorino
There is no faster way to start a fight on the Italian internet than to cook a carbonara slightly wrong. The rules, enforced by a large and tireless volunteer...
Sausage, potato, and pepper tray bake
The night I understood the single tray was the night I did not do the washing up. I had made a proper dinner, by which I mean the kind that uses three pans,...
Tofu, broccoli, and noodle stir-fry with ginger
I was wrong about tofu for roughly fifteen years, loudly, and in company. My position, which I would deliver unprompted at dinner parties, was that tofu tastes...
Petto di pollo alla pizzaiola with potatoes
Alla pizzaiola means in the style of the pizza maker, and it describes not a technique but a shortlist: tomato, garlic, oregano, olive oil. In other words,...
Peppers stuffed with rice, mince, and herbs
Italian food is unimaginable without the pepper, the tomato, the potato and the courgette, and Italy had none of them until about five hundred years ago. All...
Chickpea and spinach stew with cumin
In Seville during Holy Week, when the processions block the streets and the bars are three deep, the thing to order is a small dish of chickpeas and spinach....
Chicken, potato, and rosemary tray bake
I want to tell you about the day I learned that chicken skin does not travel. I had made this tray bake on a Sunday and it came out of the oven exactly right:...
Gattò di patate with ham and mozzarella
For most of my childhood I was fairly sure my grandmother was serving us a cat. Gattò is what Neapolitans call this dish, and to a small child the difference...
Polpette al sugo with rice
Spaghetti and meatballs is not an Italian dish, and Italians will tell you so at considerable length, but the story of why is a great deal more interesting...
Chicken and broccoli stir-fry with noodles
It is 19:50. You got home at 19:35, which was later than you meant to, the walk from the station was colder than you had dressed for, and somewhere between the...
Pollo alla cacciatora with potatoes
Alla cacciatora means hunter's style, and like most dishes named after hunters, it contains no hunted animal at all. The usual theory is that this is what a...
Pasta alla campidanese with sausage, saffron, and peas
Sardinia is my motherland, and this is the dish the island puts on the table when it wants to show off. Malloreddus alla campidanese comes from the Campidano,...
Pane frattau with tomato, poached egg, and pecorino
Pane carasau is the flatbread of the Sardinian interior, the one they call carta da musica because the sheets are thin enough to read through. It is baked...
Potato, mint, and pecorino gnocchi with tomato sauce
In Ogliastra, on the east coast of Sardinia where the mountains come down almost to the sea, they make culurgiones. These are parcels of pasta filled with...
Gallurese bread and cheese bake with greens
Gallura is the north-east corner of Sardinia, granite and cork oaks and wind, and its most famous dish is a lie in two directions. Zuppa gallurese is not a...
Spaghetti alla bottarga with courgette and lemon breadcrumbs
Bottarga is grey mullet roe, lifted out whole in its sac, salted, pressed flat and left to dry until it turns the colour of dark amber and goes firm enough to...