DOMENICA MARCHETTI HIGHLIGHTS ABRUZZESE CULINARY HERITAGE
Our 3rd program this year, on May 21, 2017, featured a wonderful, very informative talk by chef and AMHS member Domenica Marchetti. About 45 members and guests met at Carmine’s restaurant to hear Domenica tell us about her life as a chef, author, blogger and businesswoman and on top of that, she still finds time to lead culinary tours to Abruzzo, known as the home of many famous cooks (as Romeo Sabatini likes to remind us).
Although she has a journalism degree from Columbia University and worked as a reporter, Domenica said she realized early on that she was not going to be “the next Woodward or Bernstein.” So she made a career change to where her real interests lay—her passion for cooking and for passing that on to the world. She grew up in an Italian family where at the dinner table she said they spent more time talking about what they should eat the next night than about politics or the news of the day.
She said her mother had her shaping gnocchi and ravioli by the time she could see over the kitchen counter. Domenica’s mother is from Chieti, her grandmother was from Isernia and her father was from Perugia. She remembers spending summers in Abruzzo near Gran Sasso and at a house at the seashore withviews of the trabocchi and enjoying wonderful seafood.
She spent summers in Abruzzo with her mother’s three sisters who were all great cooks. So it’s not surprising that Domenica says Italian home cooking is her first passion in the kitchen. As she observes, food is at the center of Italian family life and she has said it feels like she has probably spent the equivalent of half her hours on this earth in kitchens and around dinner tables, cooking, eating, talking, arguing, and socializing. She says the food she cooks is the food she loves to eat and feed others--simple, honest dishes that reflect her heritage and the seasons.
While in Abruzzo, she learned to make spaghetti alla chitarra and she now has the chitarra her mother got at her wedding. She explained how the type of pasta called mugnaia is made in big loops. She said in her opinion some of the best porchetta is made in Abruzzo (so apparently Joe Novello comes by his porchetta-making skills honestly). She recalls the trucks in the piazza selling the porchetta on certain days of the week, and if you got there early, you could get the pig’s ears.
Domenica had a wonderful slide presentation and shared with us some personal stories about her travels in the various regions of Italy, where she pointed out that everywhere there is a plot of land, something is growing, and there is still a desire to preserve the cooking traditions. She visited an organic olive oil pressing operation and showed us how they do things the old-school way—turning the press with a blindfolded donkey so the donkey wouldn’t realize it was going around and around. On a trip to Genoa, she visited the “pesto king” who travels around the world with a mortar and pestle to teach people the proper way to make pesto, and who sponsors a pesto-making contest. He took her to the hills near Genoa to see basil growing, and she went to a basil farm, which was all terraced. Of course Liguria is famous for its pesto.
He explained there should be 4-6 leaves on each stem and they must be tender and, very importantly, fresh and not old. As always throughout Italy, the key is recognizing the importance of fresh ingredients.
In Piemonte, she found a couple who preserves such delicacies as peppers stuffed with tuna and olive oil jam. In Campania, she visited a farm where organic tomatoes are grown and they are so beautiful, they look like Christmas tree lights. Then she visited another farm where everything is automated and stateof-the-art, where the buffalo get massages with bristle brushes, and each buffalo has a microchip. Yet making the mozzarella is all old-school, done by hand.
They also make buffalo yogurt, and even buffalo gelato!! And everything is sold out by noon; nothing is shipped or distributed in order to ensure freshness. Domenica is the author of seven books, beginning with the “Glorious Pasta of Italy.” She also wrote “Ciao Biscotti,” after realizing that instead of just one recipe for biscotti, she actually found 50. In Domenica’s latest book, “Preserving Italy,” she recounts her travels across the regions of Italy as well as the recipes handed down through her family--sweet and sour peppers, Marsala-spiked apricot jam, lemon-infused olive oil, and her grandmother’s amarene, sour cherries preserved in alcohol.
After her talk, Domenica chatted with audience members who wished to get signed copies of her books and then she graciously sat with audience members for a while to answer their questions and talk with them about their own culinary experiences. Domenica’s books can be ordered from Amazon or else from her website (www.domenicacooks.com) which has a wealth of interesting information. She kindly donated a copy of her book, “Big Night In” as a raffle prize at our July 23 meeting.