FOOD ON THE FOOD

Cookbook Friday: Italian Pie Crust

This is the wedding photo of my grandmother Dora’s younger sister, Dava Barbaresi, taken sometime in the early 1940’s.  Dora [Barbaresi] Donroe was her maid-of-honor.  Dava’s husband, Eddie Apuzzo, and Dora’s husband, Freddie Donroe, were best friends.  On the far right is my great grandfather, George Barbaresi.  On the far left, I’m not sure, but it looks like maybe a brother of Eddie’s.  The young men, as well as Freddie, were getting ready to ship out with the military, headed for Europe during World War II.

Dava was the baker in the family.  She used this pie crust for her famous rice and Italian cream pies.  The crust, I was told by Dava’s daughter, Roseann, is temperamental, and no one in the family has been able to master it.  After my first attempt, it was clear that I hadn’t mastered it, either.  Unless Dava’s technique happened to involve causing the dough to fall apart into a million pieces and then pressing them into the pie dish in a perturbed fashion.  Could that have been it? 

So, I’ve taken some liberties to make the recipe easier to work with.  My apologies in advance for inserting a food processor into an otherwise vintage recipe.  Also, under normal circumstances, you want to handle your pie dough as little as possible so the gluten doesn’t develop and cause the crust to toughen up.  But, in this case, I found that gently kneading the dough really helps the eggs to incorporate and allows just enough gluten to develop to hold everything together.  It also improved the texture, making the finished crust flakier.

Anyway, it meets my specs as far as crusts go, but I’ll need someone else in the family to try this and see if the crust tastes the way you remember it.  The rice pie filling is coming up next week and, by god, if you do decide to try it, make sure your wills are in order.

Italian Sweet Crust

This spiced crust is like a cross between your typical pie crust and a soft sugar cookie.  Dava used it for her rice pie and Italian cream pie.

3 cups flour
¾ cup sugar
3 tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. nutmeg
¼ tsp. cinnamon
¾ cup shortening, cut into medium hunks
2 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla

By hand: In a large bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices.  Cut in shortening.

In a food processor: Mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices.  Add shortening and, using the on/off turns, pulse 10-12 times until the shortening pieces are the size of peas.  Dump mixture into a bowl.

Make a well in the ingredients, and add eggs and vanilla.  Fluff until eggs are incorporated.  Knead gently until dough is smooth. If you’re worried you overdid it, just wrap in plastic wrap and set in the refrigerator for a half hour to relax the gluten.  Dough will be soft.  Cut into three parts.  Roll as a pie crust. 

Makes enough dough for two 10-inch rice pies plus lattice, or one 10-inch Italian cream pie with a top crust (plus an extra crust you can freeze).

Dava [Barbaresi] Catone
Hamden, Connecticut
1921-1998

Next Recipe: Sweet Rice Pie

     (Previous Recipe: Cappellettis)

Cookbook Friday: Cappellettis

This is my grandmother, Dora [Barbaresi] Donroe, beaming with what must be her first child, Margaret Ann, in 1942.  The U.S. had been at war with Japan and Germany since the bombing of Pearl Harbor the year before.

Cappellettis are among the top three all-time favorite family recipes, along with crescia and passatellis.  Pronounced “cop-LETS” in the dialect Nonni spoke, these are meat-filled tortellini shaped like little hats (that’s what the name means in Italian) and served in chicken soup.

Nonni still makes these filled pastas by the thousands, despite the rheumatoid arthritis that has permanently bent her fingers.  She freezes them in big bags and sends them home with me (if I play my cards right) or my dad (if I don’t) along with containers of homemade soup.  Her youngest son, Eddie, now in his fifties, has a standing order for shipments of cappellettis and crescia to be sent to him from Connecticut to Washington State several times a year.  Although the prognosis for pork traveling through the U.S. postal system is grim at best, he still lives to tell a happy tale.

 

Cappellettis

I recently revised this recipe (12/10) to make half the filling and double the pasta so you end up with about the right amount of each.  That recipe can be found here.

For the filling:
3 Tbsp. oil
2 lb. ground lean pork
½ cup breadcrumbs
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese (or more)
2 eggs
Pinch of nutmeg
Salt and black pepper to taste

For the dough:
2 cups flour
1 egg (sometimes 2)

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat.  Brown pork until cooked through.  Remove pan from heat and mix in breadcrumbs, cheese, eggs, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.  Mixture should be thick enough to hold together.  If too wet, add more breadcrumbs and/or cheese.  Let cool while making dough.

In a large bowl, add flour and make a well in the middle.  Crack egg in the center and stir with a fork, gradually scraping in the flour from the perimeter to incorporate.  When it gets too thick to stir, turn out onto flour board and knead, adding more flour if necessary. Roll into a cylinder and cut into 2-inch pieces.  Put in a lightly oiled bowl and cover to keep from drying out.

Set up pasta machine with rollers open to the widest setting.  Run one piece of pasta through the machine.  Decrease the number by one and run the pasta through again.  Continue decreasing the space between rollers until the pasta is so thin, you can almost see your fingers through it.

Working quickly, place rolled-out pasta on lightly floured surface and cut into 1½-inch squares using a sharp knife.  Place one teaspoon of filling in the center of a square and fold into a triangle, corner to corner, pressing on the edges to seal.  Bring the two pointy corners toward each other, overlapping slightly, and press to join.  They should sit flat like the little hats they are.  Lay them in a single layer on a rimmed cookie sheet and cover while filling the rest of the pasta squares.  Repeat until all the pasta is used, freezing the pans of completed cappellettis as soon as they are filled.  Once the pasta has frozen, you can transfer them to plastic freezer bags.  Any remaining filling can be stored in the freezer for future use.

To serve, bring homemade chicken soup to a boil.  Add frozen cappellettis (don’t defrost them), stirring occasionally.  Let soup come back up to a boil, then turn down heat to a gentle simmer.  Cook until al dente (fully cooked but still firm) about 7 minutes. 

Dora [Barbaresi] Donroe
New Haven, Connecticut
1918 –

Nonni's freshly made cappellettis.  Photo by Trish Barker.

Next Recipe: Italian Pie Crust

     (Previous Recipe: Sausages and Peppers)

Cookbook Friday: Sausage and Peppers

So, back to my grandmother.  We left off with Dora Barbaresi marrying Freddie Donroe in 1940.  This picture was taken two years later on the Fourth of July of 1942.  Nonni, visibly pregnant, is sitting with her niece, Terese [Bontempo] Cirasuolo, and nephew, Gerry Piccolo, who are enjoying some tasty raisins.  Speaking of picnic food, which I hope to be enjoying in the near future, here’s an Italian standard that’s easy, portable, and lip-smacking good.

 

Sausage and Peppers

The secret is in the sausage.  Get the most authentic Italian sausages you can find.  I love the ones from DePasquale’s in Nonantum, MA, which you can buy from their tiny little shop on Watertown St. or at Russo’s.  I throw a couple of spicy ones in with the sweet to keep things interesting.

2 Tbsp. olive oil
2 onions, sliced thinly
3 green bell peppers, thickly sliced
1 red bell pepper, thickly sliced
2 lbs. sweet Italian sausages, links separated, pricked
6 Italian sub rolls

Preheat oven to 350°F.  In a large baking dish, add oil, onions, peppers, and whole sausages.  Cover with foil and bake until sausages are cooked through and peppers are soft, between 1 and 1½ hours, depending on the thickness of the peppers.  Serve in sub rolls.

Dora [Barbaresi] Donroe
New Haven, Connecticut
1918 -

 

Next Recipe: Cappellettis

     (Previous Recipe: Crescia)

Cookbook Friday: Crescia

This is Gerry Barbaresi, brother of Dora Barbaresi (my Nonni).  He was the youngest of the seven, and arrived on the scene in 1927 (the original family portrait was taken two years before he was born).  I have no idea when this particular shot was taken, but I’m going to say 1940 just to keep my fragile chronology intact. 

Gerry was the only son and the only one of his siblings to be able to go to college.  There, he met his future wife, Regina Lipowski.  Growing up in a household full of Italian women, Gerry was also the only one who married a non-Italian (he was no fool).  After graduation, he started working as a teacher and eventually worked his way up to Superintendent of Schools in New Haven and, later, New Fairfield, CT.

Gerry was well known for his sharp wit.  He loved crescia, the traditional Easter bread from the Marches region of Italy where his parents were born.  Nonni often made crescia for him, and she remembers Gerry giving his wife a hard time when it came to sharing his beloved loaves.  He used to say to Regina, “My sister made this for me.  You let your sister make you crescia.”  Regina didn’t have any sisters.  She was an only child.  Of Polish immigrants.  “Go ask your sister to do it,” he would say.  “My sister will do it for me, your sister will do it for you.”

Gerry passed away in 1998.  Regina still lives in the New Haven area where she, Nonni, my dad, my boys, the Easter Bunny, and I hope to all get together this weekend.  I’ll be bringing crescia.  I promise to share.

 

Crescia

Nonni’s recipe for this Parmesan pepper bread makes five loaves.  If this seems like a ridiculous amount of bread, then I’ve failed to express how much the people in my family love it.  You can cut the recipe in half, or store the extra loaves in the freezer wrapped in foil inside an airtight freezer bag.

7 cups flour
6 cups grated Parmesan cheese
½ lb. fresh yeast*
1 Tbsp. black pepper
13 eggs
1 stick butter, melted
¾ cup oil

Preheat oven to 300°F.    Grease 5 medium loaf pans.

In the largest bowl you can find (or a stockpot), mix together flour, cheese, and black pepper.  With your fingers, crumble yeast as finely as you can and mix.  In a large bowl, beat eggs with butter and oil.  Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add the wet ingredients.  Stir together until well mixed, but do not knead.  Cover and let rise for 1 hour at room temperature.  Divide dough into pans and bake for 45 minutes to an hour.

*A note about yeast: I know a half-pound of yeast seems like a mistake, but it’s not.  I must have asked Nonni more than a dozen times to check this figure before I tested the recipe.  Usually, by the 14th conversation, I’ve gotten the straight story.  Sure enough, the recipe works as written.  The best and most cost-effective thing to do is get fresh yeast from your local bakery, which is what Nonni does and what I, in turn, did.  It comes in 1 pound bricks, which you can ask them to cut in half, and they might charge you anywhere from $1 to $4.  If you’re smart, you’ll ask for a few cannoli on the side.  Everyone wins.

Dora [Barbaresi] Donroe
New Haven, Connecticut
1918 –

Next Recipe: Sausages and Peppers

     (Previous Recipe: Clam Sauce)