Lottie Lomme
Puglia (Apulia in Dutch) is highly valued in Italy when it comes to maintaining quality in the kitchen. Simple dishes with the right ingredients. That's the key. Simplicity. I got the cookbook Taste Puglia in hands, which was recently released by Forte Publishers.
It has a beautiful design and certainly also some original recipes that you don't often come across in the large, classic Italian cookbooks. Lots of seafood and fish of course, the Puglia region is known for its many old-fashioned fishing villages.
Italian simplicity and Dutch ingredients
I made the at home turnovers, the traditional Pugliese street food. A round-shaped piece of dough, folded in half with a filling of whatever you like. You should actually fry it, but baking it in the oven is a healthy alternative, I completely agree. It won't be very special if you make it with the canned Dutch tomatoes and mozzarella from the euroshopper. That's actually not possible.
That is often the problem with Italian cuisine and cookbooks, but certainly with Pugliese cuisine, which relies on simplicity. You need premium ingredients that are expensive and hard to come by. You have tomatoes and you have tomatoes. Canned tomatoes, according to the Italians, are the best San Marzano DOP because the tomatoes from the Euroshopper already turn white if you hold them under the tap for a while.
The Italian name of the dish or the Dutch one?
Is it a marketing ploy to top a recipe'panzerotto' instead of 'stuffed sandwich'? Perhaps the average Dutch person would like more ease of use when browsing a cookbook. So the Dutch translation is included. Most cookbooks stick to the Italian names, but it would be nice if they included a Dutch translation, to give us simple citizens, who are not all fluent in Italian, insight into the type of dish.
If you get the recipe from 'panzerotto', I think you should add that you should use San Marzano and Buffalo bell-mozzarella. Otherwise it will still be a tomato sandwich. Then the high expectations do not quite come true. It is good again that Taste Puglia provides an alternative for, for example turnip greens, which is also difficult to obtain in the Netherlands. It is therefore partly adapted to the Dutch situation, but not optimally.
Canning vegetables
The plus of Proef Puglia is that it contains tips and tricks for fun and tasty canning of vegetables. That doesn't happen a lot in cookbooks, but it's actually quite easy and fun to do. I did feel like it and called on pregnant acquaintances to deliver their empty pickle jars to me. However, this is a long-term project, because they have to be in the pot for three months before they really start to taste good.
Taste Puglia: poor man's kitchen
Sympathetic is also the emphasis on the poor kitchen, the poor man's kitchen in which broad beans, chickpeas, herbs and breadcrumbs are optimally used to make simple vegetables tasty for a budget household. It's a bit of the coarse farmhouse kitchen. So no liflafjes or mousses. That certainly appeals to me. My next dish I want to make at home from the cookbook is the calzone del contadino. A kind of savory pie.
dazzle your man
There is also the court cecamari in, which is so delicious that you literally 'dazzle your man with it' by cooking it for him. Funny, although a split pea soup isn't quite my thing. But I think there are plenty of people who would like to try an Italian version of pea soup.
Make your own orecchiette?
Very well known from Italy are also the orecchiette, a pasta that is also difficult to obtain in the Netherlands. Fortunately, in this video you can see how you could make it yourself. So practice, practice, practice. A nice challenge (a nice challenge!)
Taste Puglia – The honest flavors of southern Italy
by: Luca Lorusso and Vivienne Polak
240 pages
Price: € 24,95
Forte Publishers, 2015
ISBN: 9789462501164
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