THAT OLD CHESTNUT

If ‘that old chestnut’ is used often enough, doesn’t the idiom itself become an old chestnut?

Let’s make the collective noun a VENEER of chestnuts

Never mind, I’m marking autumn and the cooler weather by eating record numbers of chestnuts. I can’t resist the sweet, nutty flavour and smooth floury texture. They’re low in calories and high in Vitamin C, and the bonus is the shell’s beautiful faux wood veneer pattern.

My own ‘old chestnut’ is 24 years old and lives happily in a winter coat pocket in my wardrobe. I bought the purple coat for my father’s funeral in Italy in December 1989 and after buying hot roasted chestnuts the same day from a street vendor, I saved the last chestnut in the paper cone and put it in my pocket. It’s been there ever since. I haven’t worn the coat for many years but occasionally put my hand in the pocket just to touch the smooth chestnut.

Various Italian community groups in Australia celebrate what was once known as “poor man’s food” with harvest events, and I was pleased to see Sydney restaurateur Stefano Manfredi recently host a chestnut and wine sampling outside his Balla restaurant. He tells me he’s the Ambassador for Chestnuts Australia and conducts masterclasses at Myrtleford, NE Victoria where they’re mostly grown.

I roast them under the griller (after scoring the shell with a cross to prevent explosions) and eat them neat, but also like them in cakes and desserts especially the traditional Tuscan cake made with chestnut flour, nuts and rosemary – Castagnaccio. DO NOT under any circumstances confuse them with ‘horse chestnuts’ which are bitter, mildly poisonous and sound like something that Colonel Potter from the TV series MASH would splutter loudly.

Chestnut in all its natural glory. Was it also a Muppet character?

Let’s embrace chestnuts in Australia. Why not organise a sing-a-long next Christmas of Nat King Cole’s famous Christmas Song that begins ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire …’

Help spread the word. And don’t forget to SHARE, lest the First Witch in Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 1) takes revenge again and casts an evil spell on you.

Nigella Lawson does a great chocolate chestnut refrigerator cake   

And for chestnuts with a kick, try this: Chilli Spiced Roasted Chestnuts via Not Quite Nigella 

PS. I’ve  just discovered a delicious Mario Batali recipe for Chestnut Crepes

Pasta Shapes my Memories

Apparently, there are more than 250 pasta shapes available but I have no idea why.

I’m sure there’s someone out there who has set themselves the task of sampling every single one and probably blogged about it. Me? I’m happy to stick to the five or six I enjoy regularly, perhaps because of my strong associations with them.

One of my favourites is maccheroni (with a good meat ragu) as they remind me of the time my mother was hired to demonstrate this dish in a Sydney CBD department store in the late ‘50s. I was maybe four when I helped her hand out the paper dishes laden with pasta (direct from boiling pots of water and sauce) to a largely pasta-ignorant crowd of shoppers. Ah, those wacky days before OH&S took over.

I like mafaldine too. There they are, the long curly strands flying through the air from the kitchen to the backyard of the boarding house next door in ‘60s inner-west Balmain. Unwanted by the young Italian male lodgers – bored by yet another pasta dinner I guess – their loss was the pet dog’s gain.

Occasionally I’ll cook creste di gallo (roosters’ combs) just to hear my grandfather’s voice denouncing them as shaped “like old folks’ dentures”.

But more often than not, I reach for spaghetti, despite my first school kid trauma of discovering a tuckshop spaghetti sandwich was not what mamma made: it was some kind of sickly sweet orange coloured pap.

Spaghetti, or sometimes linguine, is the pasta of choice in many film scenes. You just can’t convey some messages with any other shape. The Italian journalist who coined the phrase ‘Spaghetti Western’ in the mid ‘60s knew his onions.  

Think about the steamy kitchen sink scene in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment when Jack Lemmon prepares dinner for Shirley Maclaine and strains the pasta over a tennis racquet. “You’re pretty good with that racquet” she says, to which Lemmon replies “Wait till you see me serve the meatballs!”  

Or the spaghetti-eating scene with the two besotted dogs in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp. 

But the last word goes to Walter Matthau (Oscar) in Neil Simon’s 1967 bachelor fest The Odd Couple during a nasty fight when he throws Felix’s freshly cooked plate of spaghetti, er, linguine* and sauce against a kitchen wall, where it slowly drops off. That image just wouldn’t be the same with bow-tie or shell-shaped pasta.

* Watch the ‘Odd Couple’ clip for the spaghetti v linguine tussle    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDXSXkYoM5Y

 Lose yourself in the definitive Guide to Pasta Shapes 

The Eggs and I: Comfort Food My Way

I’ve been thinking about comfort foods this past week after a family medical emergency. I guess most people think about casseroles or hearty winter soups as a source of nourishment in stressful times, but for me it’s eggs.

Eggs seem to lurk in strange places in my family’s north-eastern Italian cuisine: in Russian salads, alongside boiled meats and with radicchio (see earlier post on The Secret Radicchio Society). Sometimes I think the famous stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ film A Night at the Opera looked at this cuisine for inspiration when Groucho orders a meal from the steward – “two fried eggs; two poached eggs; two scrambled eggs; two medium boiled eggs. And “TWO HARD BOILED EGGS”.  Cracks me up every time.

I’m in between hospital visits, and what do I scoff down in 30 seconds flat on the run? A coddled egg squashed between a slice of bread. Not sophisticated but filling.

It’s Easter Sunday today but I haven’t quite been able to make the hand coloured hard-boiled eggs I often produce for festive picnics. So it’s caramel-filled chocolate eggs for afternoon tea instead.

And in among the surrealism of the past week are memories of another film that always makes me smile: The Egg and I (1947) with Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray as city slickers who buy a rundown old country farm. It’s a nice ‘fish out of water’ story (probably mackeral with egg mayonnaise in our case) and also a grammatical sticking point for those who like to argue that it should be ‘The Egg and Me’.

Psst- for those who like their trivia hokey, The Egg and I  paved the way for the nine successful Ma and Pa Kettle films in the 1940s-50s.

Here’s the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera stateroom scene egg warmup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC8PAQQIoCM

Russian Salad (Insalata Russa) recipe courtesy of Italian Language Blog

Food on Film: A Missed Opportunity

The Weekend Australian’s film critic Evan Williams wrote an entertaining piece last year about memorable food films citing Babette’s Feast, Julie and Julia, Tampopo and La Grande Bouffe, among others, in his story ‘Reel Delicious‘ .

Culling my mother’s old LPs a few weeks ago, I stumbled on an album by brilliant Italian actor/comedian Walter Chiari. He played the lead role in the popular Australian film They’re a Weird Mob (1966, Michael Powell) as Nino Culotta, a sports journalist who travels to Sydney by ship following the promise of a magazine job. Cut to the comedy of errors that follows and he finds himself digging holes as a brickie’s labourer working alongside three likely lads – all good-natured Aussie blokes who soon teach him the local customs.  

What surprised me about the film was the lack of food scenes or Italian culinary references. If They’re a Weird Mob were made in today’s food-obsessed world, its plot of an educated Italian immigrant finding himself in an Anglo-Australian mid 1960s setting could have been milked by the filmmakers for all its worth. The only exception is a restaurant scene where Nino politely advises a couple of sheilas “you can’t eat spaghetti with a spoon”.

In another scene he’s at home with his workmates after a hunting expedition. All they’ve produced from the trip is a miserly rabbit, which is rejected by one of the wives and a dinner of baked beans on toast with extra tomato sauce is eaten instead. Nino looks on in amusement. But jump to 2013 and what a wonderful opportunity to have him jump up and offer to debone the rabbit and stuff it with garlic, breadcrumbs and capers. Perhaps with some grilled radicchio on the side.

Nino is such a likeable character that he happily accepts two mugfulls of milky tea (or is it instant coffee?) from a workmate after long hours sweating in the hot sun on a worksite. Today, he would have offered his workmates an espresso made from the stovetop Moka pot he’s set up in the shade of the truck.  

And wine? No way. Our ‘New Australian’ tries to blend into his new lifestyle by drinking far too many beers with his mates at the local pub. Where’s the Prosecco? The Pinot Grigio? Or a Vermentino from Sardegna?

These missed opportunities are more than compensated for however with some great Australian idioms used throughout the film.

Meeting a new drinking buddy, Nino is asked “Whaddya do for a crust?”

He’s also told in no uncertain terms that he’s “not right in the scone”.

More praise for the film: http://blogafi.org/2012/11/22/why-i-adore-theyre-a-weird-mob/

Italian-Australian chef Stefano de Pieri’s stuffed rabbit recipe that Nino could have made:  http://www.lifestylefood.com.au/recipes/17413/stuffed-rabbit

Images courtesy Roadshow Entertainment

Mother Tongue turns to Thoughts of Food

The language we learn to speak as children is part of our identity and shapes our first thoughts and how we relate to the world around us.

In my case, it was Italian – or more precisely a north-eastern regional dialect from Friuli-Venezia Giulia. I spoke only a few words of English before starting school in Sydney’s inner-west and remember my mother farewelling me on my first day and crying – in Italian.  Our home was TV-free until then, so – as an only child – I had limited opportunities to learn English.

One of my strongest Italian language memories was successfully landing the job of Kitchen Hand for my mother. Child labour laws didn’t apply to four-year-olds who made semolina dumplings and cut home-made pasta into long fettuccine strips. So I learnt to cook using Italian – not English – instructions.

and now for the taste test

Later, when I learnt more of the general Italian, I naturally picked up on various food idioms, some so florid they could be the basis of a four-course meal:

Pre-dinner drink

Non si puo avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca  – You can’t have the wine cask full and your wife drunk
(You can’t have your cake and eat it too)

Appetiser

È buono come un pezzo di pane - He’s as good as a piece of bread
(He’s a good person)

Entree

Beccare con le mani in pasta - To catch with hands in the pasta
(To catch red-handed)

Main Course  (choice of two)

Chi dorme non piglia pesci - He who sleeps does not catch fish
(The early bird gets the worm),  OR

Ridi che la mamma ha fatto gli gnocchi – Ironic expression which means keep on laughing (even if you think there’s nothing funny to laugh at)

Last Thursday was INTERNATIONAL MOTHER LANGUAGE DAY, a UNESCO initiative observed annually on 21^st February promoting linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. Linguistic analysts predict up to 50 per cent of the world’s 7,000 languages may be in danger of disappearing by the end of this century. Australian Indigenous languages top the threatened list with only 20 of the original 250 still widely spoken. Once lost, they will be gone forever.

I sometimes wonder whether the regional dialect I speak with my mother and her friends will survive. When I cook Italian dishes I occasionally hear my mother’s voice in my head, speaking in dialect, saying something like “these potatoes are so watery they might ruin the gnocchi”.

These exchanges about food resonate so strongly with me and if I hadn’t learnt Italian, I’d be so disappointed that I’d be … hitting the sauce. In English.

See also Aidan Wilson’s International Mother Language piece in Crikey (Fully sic)

It’s all about The Cup of Cino

It’s never too early to plan for your dotage.

With this in mind, I’ve gathered my disparate collection of ceramic coffee cups in anticipation of the day I breathe a sigh of relief at not having to compete with younger, louder café patrons and just entertain my friends and their Zimmer frames at home.

This frenzied stocktake was brought on by a guest blog post I contributed last week to the Italian Language Blog where I reminisced about my family’s in-house afternoon coffee catchups.

I also tut-tuted at the increasing use of the disposable cup – sometimes seen in the popular ‘bucket size’, rushing down the street with a human sucking from its plastic lid. That can’t be pleasant, surely, and not only diminishes the coffee drinking experience but also contributes to ever-increasing landfill. (In Australia alone, 500 million disposable cups are thrown away every year – each one taking up to 50 years to biodegrade.)

If I save only ONE person from ever drinking good coffee from a paper cup again my job here is done. Would you really drink a good wine from a plastic tumbler? No. You’d take Danny Kaye’s advice and admit that “the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true” (The Court Jester, 1955).

Read full ‘Language of Coffee’ post: http://blogs.transparent.com/italian/the-language-of-coffee-2/

Related posts about coffee: 

http://ambradambra.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/lurking-in-the-cupboard-manual-coffee-grinder/

http://ambradambra.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/hold-the-traffic-i-have-another-coffee-story-to-write/

Lurking in the Cupboard #4: Metal Food Tins

I like attractive food packaging almost as much as I like good food and I’m a sucker for a well-designed metal canister. There’s something about the coloured, patterned enamel I find irresistible. It all started many years ago with my parents buying 3-litre Italian olive oil cans – the KING of tins – and my collection keeps growing. 

One of my favourite metal tins holds my favourite sweet treats: Amaretti di Saronno almond-flavoured macaroons wrapped in coloured paper. Sadly, the Lazzaroni brand is now hard to find in Australia outside of Easter or Christmas. Delicious with coffee, liqueur or as a cheesecake crust, they have a nice folksy legend around their creation – involving a Milanese bishop, a young couple and crushed apricot kernels.http://blogs.transparent.com/italian/gli-amaretti-di-saronno/

     

This elegant orange embossed canister appeals to me more than the Frangelico bottle inside. The dark bottle, shaped like a monk’s habit, has a few too many elements I think. My fashion advice to the designers would have been “Before you head out the door, take one thing off.” (Coco Chanel). I like the hazelnut flavoured liqueur On the Rocks or in this flourless chocolate Frangelico cake http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Flourless-Chocolate-Hazelnut-Cake-241088

If you don’t like hairy fish, turn away now. I like to eat anchovies the way my father did: on a slice of crusty Italian bread spread with a layer of rock-hard unsalted butter (has to be thick, no namby-pamby scrapings) then with anchovies laid on top. Heaven. The Rizzoli brand is my favourite as they’re packed in good virgin olive oil.

I can’t find the Mackeral brand I used to buy in the bright yellow tins anymore, so have settled for something less colourful. My serving suggestion for a quick snack: tip mackeral fillets onto a plate with some roasted garlic pieces, chopped continental parsley and cracked pepper. Eat with toast. Don’t breathe.

How do you counter mackeral breath? Try these Bianconeri ‘Confetti alla Liquirizia’ (sugar-coated, mint-flavoured liquorice lollies). The packaging is gorgeous, with the white pebble-shaped sweets under a layer of delicate paper in the hinged tin. Don’t let the cute frolicking children on the lid fool you – these are seriously strong sweets.

And the best part is they make great storage containers for kitchen utensils, spare coins, dry food, nuts ‘n bolts. Upcycling at its best. Metal canisters – TAKE A BOW!