Adimando - Piatti: plates and platters for sharing, inspired by italy

For my family,
past, present, and
future.

Text copyright 2019 by Stacy Adimando.
Photographs copyright 2019 by Linda Pugliese.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 9781452169668 (epub, mobi)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Adimando, Stacy, author.
Title: Piatti / by Stacy Adimando.
Description: San Francisco : Chronicle Books, [2019] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018030263 | ISBN 9781452169576 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Cooking, Italian. | Seasonal cooking. | LCGFT: Cookbooks.
Classification: LCC TX723 .A35 2019 | DDC 641.5945dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030263

Design by Vanessa Dina
Prop styling by Paige Hicks
Food styling by Stacy Adimando

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Years ago, when my Italian grandparents were still alive, I told them I wanted to find and meet some of our distant family in Italy. My relatives are in Reggio Calabria, one of my grandfathers used to say, referring to the city on the outermost point of Italys so-called boot. But because he never said anything more, I had always assumed it would be difficult to locate them. I braced for what I guessed would be a committed search involving digging through government records and old family trees. Twenty-four hours later, I had all of their phone numbers and addresses in Italy.

The easy thing about visiting this part of my family was they all lived in the same house in Reggio: four branches of family in one four-family building, the eldest grandmother living on the bottom floor and the youngest son living on the top floor, a very traditional Italian setup. There was a big garden with chickens beside the house, tiled floors and crucifixes everywhere, and every branch of the family had another son named Matteo.

The first night, they took me out to a local restaurant for dinner. I remember writing my mother back in the States over email, telling her I was surprised they had taken me out and not cooked dinner at home. I get the feeling they dont make a big fuss about cooking? I wrote with confusion, and admittedly a little disappointment.

The next day, my great-aunts said they wanted to cook me a little lunch, which I also wrote about to my mother. They brought out a spread of salami and cheeses, olives, some oil-preserved eggplant, marinated mushrooms, a dish of spicy beans, and a mountain of fried pork and veal meatballs with bread, I wrote. Because I was navigating the experience with only my mediocre Italian, I thought that was the end of the meal, so I ate a lot. Silly me. After that, there were thick pork sausages and soft-cooked peppers in a pool of olive oil, an entire eggplant Parmigiana with layers of boiled eggs and prosciutto hidden between the eggplant slices, breaded veal cutlets each as wide as a frying pan, a giant bowl of fettuccini with swordfish, capers, and tomatoes, and a dessertthe most gargantuan almond cake Ive ever seen.

This kind of over-the-top feast was my Italian-relative dream come true. But they had had mebefore the pasta came out, before the cream-filled cakeat the antipasti.

In my travels around Italy, my fondness for this style of foodabundant platters, often served a few at a time, some warm and others at room temperaturehas remained a constant. At a restaurant called Zia Pinas in Palermo, Sicily, an antipasti buffet as long as a bowling alley is the first thing that greeted me at the door. There were heaps of golden bread crumbs stuffed inside soft-cooked vegetables, green olive salad with cubed ham and coarsely shredded carrots, potatoes falling apart in a pool of oil, tender red peppers, and a spatula dangling from a baking dish filled with oily eggplant. We spent so much time picking out our antipasti, then lapping up the sauces and crumbs with a crusty loaf of bread, we nearly forgot to order mains. In the osterias of Rome, nothing can stand between me and a platter of salty fried artichokes alla romana, creamy fagiolini con le cotiche (beans in a puddle of olive oil with morsels of crispy pork), or fiore di zucca, fried zucchini flowers usually filled with anchovies and cheese. So often, my most romantic memories of a new region would include these first bites we ate, when the table was just beginning to buzz with conversation, and no one yet knew where the night would take us.

Back home, I wondered why this type of grazing couldnt last all night. Fast-forward to a recent day in my Brooklyn neighborhood, one of the last fall days my husband and I knew would be warm enough to host friends and neighbors in our backyard, when we decided to throw a party. Come over, we told friends, bring whomever you want, there will be snacks. We put bottles of sparkling wine on ice in a big tin bucket we use in the garden. As friends arrived, we shucked clams and oysters in the kitchen and brought them out back on a haphazardly crushed plate of ice. We draped fruit with some of the peppery cured lardo we had in our meat drawer, and cracked open homemade jars of marinated artichoke hearts and mushrooms. And we simmeredin the oven in the background, while glasses clinked and guests had already begun nibblingpork I made a special trip to the butcher for, in its own fat and juices with loads of bay leaves and a hint of citrus peel.

Most of our friends could hardly believe I had characterized this as snacks. But it felt natural to my husband and me, as thisa spoil-your-dinner spread of too much food, laid out casually on big, pretty plattersis how we like to eat and entertain.

There is plenty that inspires the way I cook, from a formal culinary training and years working as a food writer and editor, to a certain natural-born disposition that will lead me always to prefer a vegetable to meat (my husband feels the opposite). But if I must pick one primary source of inspiration, clich or not, its Italy: my upbringing as an Italian American, my incessant journeys to the country, and the way a meal there ends up being a little of everything, served slowly over time, in a quantity you didnt think you could eat.

I believe this way of eatinggrazing casually over a series of plates big and smallis a wonderful way to eat and entertain at home, not just something we should experience as a first course when traveling in a foreign country. Those moments, when the initial platters of warm food hit the table, and the flush of alcohol is just beginning to hit our cheeks, might arguably be the best moments of any meal. Today, I like to focus on these moments, stretching them to last the whole evening, when I serve and entertain.