THE COOKBOOK TEST #098: THE TOP ONE HUNDRED ITALIAN DISHES

INSTALLMENT #098 (PAID) ITALY DOESN'T EXIST / ODDBALLS AND OFFBEATS / LEMON CHICKEN / THE PANCAKE CUPOLA

Dear Subscribers,

I've been in Purge Mode recently, chucking deficient or uninteresting cookbooks as fast as I can lay hands on them. Ever since I started writing THE COOKBOOK TEST, these goddamned volumes have been marching into my house on their own feet, so it's about time that I turned the tables and sent the weakest members of the tribe out into the world to earn their keep, vacating priceless shelf space for the latest influencer-authored book of the week.

When I picked up THE TOP ONE HUNDRED ITALIAN DISHES, I thought: "This one's a goner, for sure." Top 100 according to whom? And how many kinds of sauced-up pasta are we supposed to tolerate, even in today's degenerate, crumbling imperial atmosphere?

I started (as I usually do) by reading the introduction, ready to smugly deconstruct the Italian cookbook author's most basic fallacy: the delusion that "Italy" exists in any culinarily meaningful way. I was encouraged by the opening words, as banal as dishwasher soap and not quite as interesting:

Italians love to eat, and they have an innate sense of hospitality. Their spontaneous warmth is one of the factors that contributes to the success of Italian restaurants all over the world.

Real weighty stuff, and a clear sign that the book was fit for chucking. But something about the self-assured tone led me to read on. Soon the author was writing about regional home-cooking in a way that was intriguing. Then she was talking about the art of arrangiarsi - adapting yourself to the prevailing circumstances and being willing to improvise. OK. More interesting. And then she won my heart:

Italy has only existed as a unified country for 130 years, so traditional Italian cooking tends to be regional rather than national.

The region-by-region breakdown that followed this declaration led me to think: OK, this might be a keeper after all.

at your service,

James

THE TOP ONE HUNDRED ITALIAN DISHES
DIANE SEED
TEN SPEED PRESS | 1991

My uplifting and potentially misguided sense of hope was further rewarded by a quick spin through the book's recipes. For every expected Spinach and Ricotta Dumplings and Lemon Chicken there were five or six recipes like:

Beef Cooked in Red Wine in the Grand Duke Style

or 

Ceps Cooked on a Vine Leaf

or 

Mussels and Marrow Flower Soup

Which is to say, The Top One Hundred Italian Dishes isn’t a hostage of conventional taste or expectations. While the author never explains the number or ranking system that generated this list, she is to be commended for finding so many intriguing, unexpected and downright weird recipes to include in the book rather than copping out and replicating the deep cuts from an Olive Garden takeout menu.

With all that said and done, when it came down to picking things to cook, I picked two recipes: a pretty conventional one and a pretty weird one. Let's start slow.

LEMON CHICKEN

What drew my eye to boring ol' Lemon Chicken? First, the use of juniper berries, a spice I was only vaguely aware of and had to go over to Lunds to purchase. Second, the aggressive use of lemon, which I commend and applaud. Like garlic, it's hard to overdo it with lemon, in my opinion. (I also upped the garlic in this recipe when I made it.)

I changed very little about this recipe besides upping the garlic. I simplified the herbs - instead of using one sage leaf, 1 sprig of thyme, and 1 sprig of rosemary (a painfully expensive and parsimonious use of herbs), I bought a container of sage leaves and used four or five. And I doubled the crushed peppercorns and juniper berries, after using The Force and determining that 6 portions of chicken was going to want more than 4 crushed juniper berries and 6 crushed peppercorns. 

I've actually tripled it in the recipe below, because I think I could've stood to have tasted more of both, particularly when put up against the amped up garlic and already fearsome lemon. I reduced the white wine a bit, figuring 320ml was plenty for the chicken to float around in, and constrained by the fact that I only had two tiny bottles of white wine in the house to utilize.