THE COOKBOOK TEST #0087: CUCINA & FAMIGLIA
INSTALLMENT #0087 (FREE) BIG NIGHT / TIMPANO / CHICKEN ALA BRICK
Dear Readers,
It's impossible to overstate the excellence of the film BIG NIGHT. I'm guessing that most of you, as literate and food-motivated people, have seen it already. If you haven't: please stop reading this and fire it up immediately. Don't let me spoil the plot or tell you anything about it except that it's a first-rate movie that will reward your time.
OK. So now you've watched the movie and I can get into the details a little bit. Big Night stars two of my favorite actors - also possibly two of my favorite people, based on their other projects and public personae - Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci. [1] Shalhoub plays Primo, a driven, perfectionist chef, and Tucci plays his brother Secondo, a restaurant manager struggling to make the business side of the enterprise work.
The two brothers are immigrants from Calabria, and their restaurant revolves around flavors and dishes that are true to their upbringing and their homeland. As such: They're flailing, losing business to the likes of Pascal's, a rival spot that serves mediocre but thoroughly Americanized Italian fare that locals wolf down by the plateful.
I love this film on every level. Sure, I love the food. But I also love the family politics and the challenges of running a restaurant on a day-to-day, human level. And I love its gimlet-eyed depiction of a war between a really good restaurant and a really mediocre one where the mediocre one triumphs.
That's often the way it goes in the real world - as a critic, I can recall dozens (maybe hundreds, at this point?) of wonderful restaurants with strong personalities and great food that couldn't hack it for any one of dozens of pedestrian reasons - the rent, the neighborhood, the labor shortage, the competition, the lack of parking, the lack of pedestrian access, the fraying of the friendship or marriage that the place was founded upon.
The relevance of all this? This week we're looking at CUCINA & FAMIGLIA, a book by Joan Tropiano Tucci (the actor's mom), plus chef Gianni Scappin and writer Mimi Shanley Taft. Its subtitle is "Two Italian Families Share Their Stories, Recipes, and Traditions," and the book is right on the mark: it's a lot of deep-cut memories, recipes that are worn in from years of loving use, family legends, and remarkable insight into the food and the people that populate the book's pages.
You might think that the book's Hollywood connection and fairly simple "here are my family recipes" conceit would render it lightweight or unimpressive, but Cucina & Famiglia has about 200 recipes, all of which are rendered with thoughtful depth and engaging context. In short: as much as Big Night was a serious movie about real food, this is a serious book about real food, too. It came into my life by chance, but it's going to maintain a cozy place on my bookshelf for the long haul.
at your service,
James
CUCINA & FAMIGLIA
BY JOAN TROPIANO TUCCI AND GIANNI SCAPPIN WITH MIMI SHANLEY TAFT
WILLIAM MORROW AND CO. | 1999 | $25
So: let's take a little trip back in time.
The year is 2014. Donald Trump is just a semi-amusing television personality. "AI" is almost entirely lodged within the genre of science fiction. Guardians of the Galaxy is the top-grossing film. And I am dad to a charming one-year-old.
Inspired by Big Night, we decided to produce the film's hallmark dish, the timpano.
What is a timpano?
It's a massive package of fresh pasta wrapped around homemade marinara sauce, hard-boiled eggs, salami, provolone cheese, mozzarella, and garganelli pasta. Once it's turned out of the bowl it's baked in, it presents like a giant savory cake, and you can cut entire wedges out of it to serve your friends and family.
It took three families and three hours to make it, plus a couple more hours to bake it and serve it.
We drank a lot of wine in the process. Our kids played together. We simmered sauce, we rolled out pasta, we sliced up meat and grated cheese, and we prayed to the food gods that when we flipped over the big bowl that the timpano had baked in that it would come out intact.
It did.
At any rate: Big Night inspired us to make this monster, and Cucina & Famiglia has a serious-looking recipe for it in case you want to make it yourself. If you do: bring some families together, and drink a lot of wine.
It's a perfect way to spend a Sunday. You can read about our effort here - it was one of the most ambitious things I've ever done with food, and a treasured memory not least because it was the first time Joe ever tried ice cream and he went crazy like a little piranha after tasting it when he realized it was the most perfect food he had ever experienced.
BRICK ON A CHICKEN
When it came time to select a recipe from Cucina & Famiglia I dodged the normal pasta preparations and skipped the timpano, not having several days and hundreds of dollars available to recreate a recipe that I've already made.
Instead I gravitated toward something that looked about as homey and comfortable as anything I've ever read about anywhere: a whole chicken prepared with lemon and rosemary and garlic, flattened out by a brick and cooked on a charcoal grill.
When I posted a photo of my bricked chicken on the grill, I immediately caught some flak.
"did you spatchcock it? Looks kinda thicc," wrote one commenter on Bluesky.
My reply: "I spatchcocked the hell out of it. Broke the ribs, banged on it with a meat hammer, removed the spine, the works. It was just incredibly thicc. I blame Kadejan (who raise incredibly delicious chickens.)"
I don't blame the heckler, as a spatchcocked bricked chicken should look considerably flatter than the one I posted, but I don't blame myself, either - I really undertook heroic measures to flatten that bird out. If you attempt this recipe, get a normally to less-than-normally thicc chicken, or just be prepared for less of a pancake-like bird than you might ideally enjoy.
As it turns out: Whatever. The bird was delicious, smokey and charred and lemony and kicked up with garlic and rosemary flavor.
POLLO AL MATTONE CON LIMONE E ROSMARINO
Chicken on a Brick with Lemon and Rosemary
One 3-pound free-range chicken, washed and patted dry, giblets discarded
1 Tbsp very thinly sliced lemon zest
1 Cup white wine
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp red wine vinegar
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 Tbsp fresh sage leaves, chopped
2 Tbsp fresh rosemary leaves, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
Trim the chicken wings at the second joint (save for stock.) Place chicken breast side down on a cutting board and use poultry shears to cut along either side of the backbone (remove backbone and reserve for stock.)
Flatten the chicken with your hands, breaking the ribs in the process. Place chicken between two pieces of parchment paper or plastic wrap and pound until about 1/2 inch thick.
In a large baking dish, whisk together lemon zest, wine, olive oil, and vinegar. Add the chicken and season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with sage, rosemary, garlic, and red pepper flakes. Turn the chicken several times to coat with marinade. Place in fridge for as little as 1 hour or as many as 24 hours. If you’re marinading overnight, do not add the salt until after the overnight rest.
Prepare a charcoal or gas grill. Wrap a brick in aluminum foil. Remove the chicken from marinade, reserving the marinade. Place the chicken skin side down on the grill. Sear for about 5 minutes, then rotate 45 degrees to make cross-hatched grill marks. Sear for another 5 minutes.
Turn over chicken and baste with some reserved marinade. Place the brick on the chicken, cover the grill, and cook for 30 minutes until golden brown. Remove from heat, cover with foil, and rest for 5 minutes before serving.
CUCINA & FAMIGLIA
(***BUY IT*** / BORROW IT / SKIP IT / SCRAP IT)
Well, I simply loved this cookbook - loved the writing, the conceit, the recipes, the food, the history, the family stories - it's a treasure trove of good stuff, and I trust the authors implicitly at this point. If you see it or feel inspired to hunt it down, it will reward your faith in its good intentions.
FOOTNOTE
[1] What do I like about these guys? Shalhoub is a paisan, a fellow Wisconsinite, who came back to protest Gov. Scott Walker and has strong connections to his native Green Bay. He's a hilarious dude, has done masterful work in piles of films (including some of my favorite Coen Brothers flicks) and held down the fort as Adrian Monk, one of the finest and funniest of the literally thousands of TV detectives who have come and gone over the years.
Tucci, well, his cinematic work speaks for itself. But his culinary work is equally serious - his region-by-region travelogue series Searching for Italy really inherited the mantle of Anthony Bourdain in terms of bundling food, people, history, culture, and politics together into one complex and intoxicating package. Plus: he taught me how to make a really good martini. Not Tucci personally, but his memoir, Taste. Really worth a read. Here's the martini recipe, as interpreted by yours truly:
Fill a beaker with ice. Add 1/2 shot of vermouth. Stir 15 seconds. Rest 15 seconds. Add 3-4 shots of good gin or vodka. Stir 30 seconds. Rest 30 seconds. Stir 30 seconds. Rest 30 seconds. Strain into glass with 1 or 3 olives on a skewer, or a lemon twist.