Haughey Monica - The Secret of Great Italian Cooking: Recipes and Reflections of a Love Shared Through Food 2015

The secret of
Great Italian
Cooking

Recipes and Reflections of a Love Shared through Food

Monica Haughey
Maria Grazia Furnari

www.goodfoodinitiative.ie

2015 MONICA HAUGHEY & MARIA GRAZIA FURNARI

Creative Assistance Clare Mathews

Pages iv and v, vix , xvi Francesco Ancona

Page vi Michelle OSullivan

Page xxii, 40 Hugh Mc Elveen

Pages xxvi, 3, 11 , 22, 33 , 37, 42 Lido Vannucchi

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systemswithout the prior written permission of the author.

ISBNS

PARENT : 978-1-78237-976-8

EPUB: 978-1-78237-977-5

MOBI: 978-1-78237-978-2

PDF: 978-1-78237-979-9

A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the National Library.

Published by ORIGINAL WRITING LTD., Dublin, 2015.

Printed by ESSENTRA, Glasnevin, Dublin 11

This book is dedicated to the Eagar and Furnari families in Ireland and Italy

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Laura Lastrucci, Silvio Venturi, Naima Fornaci, Lina Leanza and Lucia Leanza for assistance with photographs.

Thanks also to Fabio Pracchia for inspiring conversations on Italian Food and Siobhan Bourke for editing and support.

Thanks to Mamma Ro in Lucca.

Monica Haughey

Introduction

Monica Haughey

For many years my late sister-in-law, Paula Eagar, came back and forth from her new found home in Sicily laden with mouth watering gifts for her family in Ireland. She came with large chunks of Parmesan cheese, delicious local wine and large bottles of Olive oil, known to her family as good Olive oil.

She had had fallen in love with and married Aldo Furnari, a Sicilian, in 1968 whom she met while studying in Milan. She had fallen in love not only with Aldo, but also with Sicily and especially with Italian food and culture. Similarly, Paulas Irish family enjoyed traveling to Sicily and experiencing first hand a very different and romantic culture that they thrived on during their summer holidays.

Paula Eagar

When Paula came home to Ireland on holidays in the summer, her gifts of Italian food were highly prized and somewhat novel. The fresh Parmesan and large bottles of Olive oil werent used in Ireland at that stage. Paula was introducing her Irish family to the pleasures and sensual delights of the Italian food culture in which she had become immersed. Her son Carmelo shocked Paulas parents but delighted their neighbours by knocking on doors in Dartmouth Square in Dublin asking to harvest their snails, as he wanted to make a pasta sauce.

For my wedding in Dublin, Paula managed to travel from Sicily with six beautiful pasta bowls and a very large and fragile serving bowl, once again, to somehow maintain the links between Italy, her home country of Ireland and the people she loved.

The strong connection between our Irish and Sicilian families have continued since Paula passed away in 2009. Since marrying into the Eagar family, I have enjoyed many trips to Sicily and visited Paulas daughters, Maria Grazia Furnari and Sara Furnari in Lucca and Milan. Holidays with the Furnari family involves much discussion about food and dining with large and ever-changing numbers of Italians. I have enjoyed eating lots of different pasta dishes, beautiful fresh fish and foraged wild mushrooms, asparagus and anything else in season.

In the summer of 2014, under the banner of The Good Food Initiative, Paulas daughter, Maria Grazia Furnari, led two cookery classes in my home in Dublin. Maria Grazias classes were wonderful and inspirational even though all who attended were already well able to cook! This prompted me to think further about the links through food between our Irish family and Paulas Italian family.

I began to wonder what the big deal was about Italian cooking. Why did we all love so much the experience of watching and tasting the food she made? Why are we Irish so allured by Italian cooking and what was it that Maria Grazias parents really brought home to Ireland with the Olive oil and cheese and other wholesome food?

Since Paula first traveled back from Sicily, Irish food culture has become richer and more diverse and we now enjoy a wider choice of ingredients. We have artisan producers making fantastic mozzarella, we have a multitude of other world class local cheeses and fresh produce in our farmers markets. An increasing number of supermarkets supply fresh organic produce from home and abroad. When preparing for the cookery classes it came as a surprise to Maria Grazia that all of her ingredients were now available in Ireland and that she did not need, like her mother before her, to covertly stash them in a suitcase!

Yet it does seem that the Italians have something special to offer us around food. In this short book, Maria Grazia and I have taken some time to explore the connection between our two countries, through food and family. Maria Grazia has given us recipes that she herself loves and prepares every day and that she has inherited from her own family whilst growing up in Sicily. Others recipes she has learnt from her friends in the different regions of Emilia Romagna and Tuscany where she has lived. Her repertoire has also been enriched by those recipes she has created from her own intuitive sense and love of cooking.

Alongside the recipes, we explore what is behind our love of Italian cooking, what we can learn from it and how we can incorporate it into our own culture. Maria Grazia describes her appreciation of food and its centrality in our lives, not only in its role to nourish and satisfy but also in its wider meaning.

We can make daily choices that have
an impact on our health and on the
people we care about and on the health
of the environment

Maria Grazia Furnari

My Italian Family Background

Maria Grazia Furnari

I was born in Sicily with Irish and Sicilian parents . My mum came from what was in many ways a traditional Irish family, but where education and travelling were priorities even at times when money was not plentiful.

My father came from Adrano, a big Sicilian farming town, made famous by a farmers revolt in the 1950s to claim ownership of the land in what was at that time a quasi-feudal system. His father was a farmer who went into the countryside every day on his donkey to bring home fresh fruit and vegetables. His sister, (Graziella) the woman I took my first name from, had a salumeria (grocery) on the main square where, even in post war times, you would always be welcomed by the aroma of fresh bread and an abundance of the best olive oil, cheese, olives and anchovies.