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A menu for a new year + wild boar with chocolate sauce

It may not be new — the inspiration from this menu comes from Pellegrino Artusi’s nineteenth century cookbook — but it certainly is a nice way to start a new year. I’ve written about Artusi’s menus before, but in the very early stages of this blog (which has just turned 6 years old!). They have always charmed me and fascinated me, as an insight into what might be on tables in the late 1800s.
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Pollo al burro (chicken in butter)

You know when you have a dish in a restaurant that you can’t stop thinking about and every time you go you can’t bear to veer away from that dish so you keep ordering it, never trying anything else because you have been constantly thinking about it since your last visit? Well this, for me, is one of those. It is quite simple – chicken in butter, presented just as it sounds, a tender chicken breast floating in a delicious sauce of butter.
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Cotoletta alla Milanese

This is one of those dishes that make a regular appearance on our table at home. It’s simple, it’s crunchy, it’s meaty and always satisfying. But while simple, there is somewhat of an art to getting this golden, breaded veal chop perfectly crisp outside and moist inside. All the credit to cooking and testing countless recipes, I have to say, goes to my husband Marco, who is obsessed with getting the most incredibly crisp breadcrumb coating possible.
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Sarde a beccafico

Whenever I see fresh sardines at the market, shimmering with their silver scales, I have to have them, regardless of what was going to be on the menu before I noticed them. Packed full of flavour, nutrients and cheap as chips, they are an essential ingredient in regional Italian home cooking from top to toe of the peninsula. Pasta con le sarde is probably my all time favourite pasta dish, in any of its guises (though I’ve always loved the Sicilian one with toasted pine nuts, currants, fennel tops or dried fennel flowers and golden breadcrumbs), while sarde in soar, deep fried, vinegar-marinated sardines, are one of my must-have Venetian cicchetti – I could eat an entire platter of them in one sitting.
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Slow-braised stuffed squid & The Jewelled Kitchen

They say that whatever country the Arabs passed through, they left a part of themselves in its kitchens. Although this references trade routes and voyages of over a thousand years ago, I like to think that this is still true in a more modern sense, like picking up a Middle Eastern cookbook or discovering a certain spice that you then cannot resist using in everything.
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Braciuole nella scamerita, an Artusi classic

After a good five weeks away at our “other home” in Tuscany, Melbourne’s autumn is being particularly kind in letting me ease into the idea that winter is on its way. With crisp weather that doesn’t bite you if you don’t do up your coat or you forget your scarf, trees slowly dropping their beautiful yellow leaves like slow motion confetti and even some gorgeous sunny days, the only thing I can really complain about are the shorter days.
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Italian Table Talk: Olives & Hunter’s stew

After living in Tuscany for so many years, November has come to mean many things to me: rainy days, changing colours in the landscape, vino novello (‘new’ wine, that young, grape juice-like wine produced from September’s harvest), white truffles, a cappuccino in the morning to warm up and above all, the olive harvest and that first press of bright green olive oil.
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The Perfect Bistecca Fiorentina

Whenever someone asks me about the quintessential Florentine dish, two things immediately come to mind, which should also be an indication of the carnivorous Tuscan diet. The first is panini al lampredotto – tripe sandwiches, which are not everyone’s cup of tea (but they should be!). The other is the colossal bistecca fiorentina – Florentine steak. Curiously, the Italian word bistecca is actually borrowed from the English “beef steak.” Pellegrino Artusi has a recipe for bistecca fiorentina in his 1891 cookbook, which is still – as with all of Artusi’s recipes – the classic way to cook a real bistecca.
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Valentine’s Pigeons, a recipe for lovebirds

There is a legend that recounts that Saint Valentine miraculously helped two young people fall in love by rounding up a pairs of amorous pigeons to fly around them, inspiring the Italian term for lovebirds, piccioncini, which more precisely (and aptly) translates as ‘little pigeons’. Since then, lovebirds (or little pigeons as the case may be) all over the world have been celebrating the Saint’s day on February 14th all in the name of love and what a better way to do it than romancing your better half by cooking them a pigeon.
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