Simona Carini

Eating is our most fundamental link to the natural world, and by looking to local sources we become attuned to the abundance and the limits of the soil under our feet and the climate we dwell in. – Eddie Tanner (quoted in Locally Delicious) I grew up in a city in Italy, living in an […]

No fruit is more to our English taste than the Apple. Let the Frenchman have his Pear, the Italian his Fig, the Jamaican may retain his farinaceous Banana, and the Malay his Durian, but for us the Apple. — Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert (1929) In The Anatomy of Dessert, nurseryman and pomologist Edward […]

Boxes full of watermelons in grocery stores invite us to touch, smell, weigh with our hands, employ whatever method of assessment we rely upon to choose the specimen to carry home, cool, slice and savor. And quite of bit of that happens in this country: According to USDA figures, domestic per capita use of watermelon […]

"The original bean of Europe, West Asia and North Africa, has been an important staple food for millennia," is how the Penguin Companion to Food introduces broad (or fava) beans. This historical perspective was unknown to me when, as a child, I watched my mother bring home a bag full of green pods with her […]

Lei i libri li divora (she devours books) was the way in which, since I was a child, adults described my relationship with books. Regular bedtime for my brother and me was at 8:30 p.m. Of course, I did not go to sleep that early: I read under cover, literally. When the situation was right, […]

“Non si dice: fa schifo. Si dice: non mi piace.” (Don’t say: It’s disgusting. Say: I don’t like it.) My mother had to repeat that fairly often to me. As a child, I had difficulty seeing the difference: To me, the fact that I did not like something implied that it was inedible. And the […]

Italians abruptly awaken to the fundamental otherness of the rest of the world the first time they drink coffee abroad. All right, that was a big generalization, so I will narrow my scope: That’s what happened to me the first time I left Italy on my own, taking a trip to London some 20 years […]

In the refrigerator Montalbano found a plate of cold pasta with tomatoes, basil, and black passuluna olives that gave off an aroma to wake the dead, and a second course of fresh anchovies with onions and vinegar. Montalbano was in the habit of trusting entirely in the simple but zestful culinary imagination of Adelina, the […]

I take a small bite and I hear the light crackle of the crisp thin outer layer. My teeth sink into finely chopped walnuts supported by a framework of egg white and sugar. In the morsel that now takes center stage in my mouth, the sugar dissolves and creates a substrate over which the walnut […]

If I were to give to each season its own smell, fall would get the smell of chestnuts. Not only the better-known smell of roasted chestnuts (called caldarroste in Italian), but also that of boiled chestnuts. A big case of freshly picked chestnuts was one of the items my parents would get during our fall […]