When my cousin Silvana married a boy from up near Cavalese, I thought I was losing her to the mountains forever. But every September she would come back down to us with a sack of pearl barley tied with string,…
When I was a young bride living near the fish market at Rialto, my mother-in-law took me by the wrist one morning and said, ‘Today you learn to cook like a Venetian, not like a girl from the hills.’ She…
When the last frost lifted off the vegetable gardens along the lagoon, my grandmother would set a basket of pea pods on the kitchen table and call it the first real meal of spring. We children would sit for an…
In our house, the colour yellow always meant something good was coming. My mother kept a little tin of saffron threads locked away like they were gold coins, because in a way, they were — she used to say one…
In Piemonte we have a saying about Barolo: ‘il vino dei re, il re dei vini’ — the wine of kings, the king of wines. My grandfather kept only two bottles a year for himself, and one of them always…
Up in the Aosta Valley, where the mountains rise so steep that the cows seem to graze sideways on the slopes, there is one cheese that matters more than any other: Fontina. Nonna Fiore married into a family with cousins…
In Nonna Fiore’s kitchen, prosciutto di San Daniele is never really cooked — it is honoured. She tells us that in the flatlands of Friuli, where cold air rolling down from the Carnic Alps meets the warm, salt-laden breeze off…
Up in the high valleys of South Tyrol, where the mountains speak both Italian and German, Nonna Fiore learned to cook a plate that tells the whole story of the border in a single bite. Speck con crauti was never…
Down by the old port of Genoa, long before anyone spoke of street food as a trend, the fritto stalls were already selling little golden squares of panissa wrapped in paper, eaten standing up with your fingers, salt in the…