Dinner at Cinzia's house in Florence

Hello Cucina Cinzia diners!  Eccoci!!

As many of you know, we have stopped doing regular Cucina Cinzia dinners, but we had said to a number of you that we would eventually do some special seasonal dinners.  Our collective mojo made a reappearance and so we are planning to host two dinners the weekend of May 20/21st!  We would be delighted for you to join us and we are planning something very special.

Aperitivo and antipasto will be decided at the last minute, depending on what looks good at the Mercato delle Cure the week before, but is likely to include Cinzia’s famous fried sage leaves.  For the primo we are planning an unusual lasagne, made with carrots and gorgonzola.  And for the main, Stracceti di maiale con rucola e balsamico, a pork dish with rocket and balsamic vinegar.  Dessert, again, will depend on the market.  The price will be £35 pp and please bring your own wine.  Hopefully the weather will cooperate and we can start the evening out in the garden!

Meanwhile, we are looking forward to some travel down to Tuscany in April, (and wishing we were down there right now for the marzolino cheese season!).  We look forward to seeing some of our familiar faces and also some new diners in May!  Please get in touch on info@cucinacinzia.com if you have questions, and bookings can be made on Eventbrite by clicking here.  (Please note that we are not planning to offer alternative menus in May.)

Last weekend we held the last, and quite possibly the best, Cucina Cinzia suppers.  All the stars were aligned.  The menu was original, authentic, and exquisite (if I say so myself).  The diners were charming and delightful (as usual).  Cinzia and I were in high spirits, putting out of our heads the fact that this might be the last of our suppers.

So if we love it so much, why stop?  Well, we may still do them from time to time, once a season, or on the side when Cinzia is coming to London for something else.  In fact, if you would like to invite Cinzia to cook, to cater a party or to organize a cooking lesson for you and a group of friends, should would be more than delighted.  And we’d probably do a supper on the following night.  Cinzia was quite happy to keep going despite the travel and having to be away from her family.  She found in the supperclubs something that she doesn’t always get back home – a houseful of strangers and friends, people enjoying discovering her special gifts and family recipes, an outlet for her passion for cooking authentic Tuscan food.  I was the one getting bogged down.  Not by the suppers, but by the rest of my life.  My two kids, my husband, my dayjob – a new business that needs my full attention at the moment in order to be successful.  I was running low on bandwidth and I’ve had to pare things down a bit.  I love the suppers, but now I will have more time to go as a client, rather than running ours.  Any of our former diners reading this, let me know if you need a supperclub buddy as I would love to try out more of them and now I’ll have a little more time and foodie energy.  The final thing was that part of the joy of the supperclub is the spontaneity of it.  As ours was getting more mature, it was feeling more and more to me like a business (albeit a not-very-profitable one!) and less like a culinary jam session.  So, we move on from here.

But first, let me bask in the moment of our  last regularly scheduled dinner.  It was awesome was it not?   We had our signature fried sage leaves.  It’s just flour, water, salt and sage.  But… wow.  Then we had crostinis – crostini toscani as usual, but also some cavolo nero (black cabbage) crostini.   These are what Tuscan food is all about.  Just boiled/steamed black cabbage, toasted bread rounds, rubbed with garlic, soaked with a bit of the cabbage water, piled high with cavolo nero and dressed with a wonderful green olive oil from Marcello Paoli.  After that, we had our primo, which was for this particular supper the main dish.  Polenta from the Molino Grifoni, stone ground just a few days before.  “What’s in it?” asked the diners!  “Nothing but corn,” I responded.  Corn, with all of its oils, zero processing, fresh off the stone presses just above Florence.  It was creamy, light, in fact, I’m eating some it as leftovers right now!  The fab polenta was topped with a sauce of wild boar.

Sugo al cinghiale (Wild Boar Sauce)

Take 1 wild boar from your local huntsman (5 kg or so of it, cut into pieces).   Add red wine and juniper berries, carrot, celery, onion and bay leaf.  Marinate for three days.  Take out the boar.  Stick it in a pot with some bay leaf and slow cook for a day or two.  Voila!  Boar sauce!

It seems like it has special spices, maybe some tomato or oil or… something.  But it’s just boar.  In this case, a particularly good boar.  Not a gamey or stringy one, this must have been a beautiful young one.  It was delicious and I think you’d be hard pressed to find anything like it on any menu in London.

Since the primo was pretty substantial, we had a cheese plate for the secondo.  We had a young pecorino (ewe’s) cheese and a more mature pecorino.  We served these with a selection of jams that Cinzia had made – spicey onion, sweet chili, red pepper, and my personal favorite miele di castagno – bitter chestnut honey.  Along with that we served zucchini al funghetto, or roughly translated, courgettes made like mushrooms.  They are cooked with oil, garlic and nipitella, an wild herb (kind of a minty thyme) that grows alongside porcini mushrooms.  The classic porcini dish is with this herb – which is not sold but given away or foraged with the porcinis.  Once the porcini season is over, the herb is used with courgettes and recalls the porcini dishes.

We wrapped up the meal with our espresso mousse, and vin santo, followed by tiny ristretto coffees..  Then we hung out chatting, getting to know one another, enjoying the company around the table, thankful for a warm spot, new interesting friends, and a full belly.  And thankful for Cinzia for bringing it all to London.

Do check back with us as we may have further dinners from time to time – which we will advertise mainly through a direct email to people on our list!  If you would like to be added, drop an email to info@cucinacinzia.com.  If you dined with us, we’d love to get your comments on our guestbook!  Thanks to all of our diners for making it the wonderful year that it was!

Un bacio,

Jill & Cinzia

We’re just a couple of days away from our November dinners and I’m only now getting around to posting about the October dinners!  Well, that’s the way I roll these days – a day late and a dollar short.  We had  a great menu and as usual a fantastic atmosphere with our diners!

We started with a glass of prosecco, amazing fried sage leaves, and sopressata, which I’m told is the Tuscan equivalent of the British “brawn” or what we call (not very appetisingly) “head cheese” in the States.  One major difference is that sopressata does not contain brain.  It’s very tasty, with particular spices, especially if you like eating your meat from the snout on!  We don’t always do the fried sage leaves – Cinzia has a guy at her market that keeps the biggest, freshest ones for her and if they make the grade then we batter them and fry them up – simple and delicious.  This has to be one of our diners’ favourites and has become a Cucina Cinzia signature.

Once everyone had arrived and relaxed, we went to the table and served crostini toscani, along with the seasonal cecina with finocchiona salame.  I described the cecina in a previous post - a kind of flatbread made from stone ground chick pea flour.  The almost sweet and creamy cecina is lovely with the saltiness of the finocchiona.  And look how we glammed up the crostini toscani with a layer of marscapone cheese!  Because everything is better with marscapone!

Following these antepasti we served our primo of pappa al pomodoro.  Again, I’ve written at length about this rustic dish in a pre-dinner post but suffice to say that this is comfort food at its very best with the unsalted tuscan bread, the tomato, the olio crudo, basil and a special secret ingredient.

For the main course, we served fagiolini all’uccelletto with italian sausages.  Cinzia had brought the sausages from her norceria in Florence, and the bright pink flesh can be surprising for those of us used to the British sausages full of colourants.  They are delicious, saporito, a great compliment to the delicate taste of the beans.  Alongside, we served a fennel sformata, a kind of italian gratin.

We gave everyone a breather with our fruit plate and then we wheeled out the castagnaccio which I wrote about prior to the dinner.  The stone milled chestnut flour – perfectly fresh – was so sweet that we didn’t have to add any sugar at all to the dessert.  A sweet made with olive oil and rosemary?  Yes!  And raisins and pine nuts.  It’s an unusual combination to the english (or any non-Tuscan) palate but it works served up alongside a good vin santo.

And now I’m waiting for Cinzia to arrive for this weekend’s dinners!  She has a suitcase full of new delicacies for this weekend!  A variety of pecorino cheeses and her own marmalades to accompany them.  And – fresh from a local hunter – wild boar which we will stew up and serve with polenta.  The prosecco is to be delivered tonight, along with all the candles and supplies.  With great happiness, and a little bit of sadness, we are preparing to serve up the last of our regular dinners, though we reserve the right to spring a seasonal special at you in the new year at some point.  But that’s another post.

Thanks again to our diners who made the evening very special and … bring on the November crew!

Buon apetito!

This weekend one of the things we are serving is pappa al pomodoro – a dish so classic that there’s a children’s song about it!

Translated from Cinzia:

Pappa al pomodoro - a rustic Tuscan bread soup – is surely the most striking example of the Italian edict – “never throw away anything and especially never the bread!”  I remember my grandparents always saying this,  that it was a pity to waste old bread.  Originally a dish from the farm, this dish has been lifted up from its origins by chefs thoughout Italy, some of the the newer versions giving a hint of nobility that, in my opinion, this dish never needed.

Created in Tuscany, probably in the Sienese hills, pappa al pomodoro can now be found throughout central Italy.  A “real” pappa absolutely requires the unsalted Tuscan bread as a base, and the extravergine olive oil of the region.  Pappa al pomodoro is delicious cold or hot, and while it  is never eaten with parmesan or any other cheese, some people add a bit of chili to give it a kick.

This post, for a change, is not about Cucina Cinzia – or even Italian food- per se.  Rather, it is a shout-out to the transformation occuring in Fulham, and specifically North Fulham, where I live.  I know that Fulham has certain bourgeois connotations, but where we live, just off the North End Road, the neighborhood is every bit as diverse, ethnic, down-to-earth and gritty as some of our favorite East London spots.  But there are changes a-foot and I am thrilled about some of the old favorites and  new arrivals!

First of all, the old favorites category, there is North End Road Market. This is 100% street market, not some yuppy cousin.  There are a few specialty stands – the french cheese guy, the duck egg sales person, a greek olive vendor.  But most of it is straight off the back of the truck, £1 per basket of whatever was stacked high at the wholesaler this morning.  The quality is not always higher than what you get at the supermarket, but the prices are lower and you do get more of whatever’s in season.  And the french cheese guy is pretty awesome.  It’s also handy for cheap bags, hoover bags, and net curtains, should you be in the market for those.  Besides the stands on the market, there is a very respectable fishmonger, Fulham Quality Fish, and  Dickenson Quality Meat, which has good quality, some unusual cuts, excellent prices, and usually a queue down the street!

There are also a couple of restaurants worth mentioning in the neighborhood:  My Dining Room took over where the Farm left off.  It looks really nice and they do £10 specials with local meats and produce.  The space is notorious with the long-time Fulham locals because prior to the Farm there was a very rough pub (I hear) where all kind of illicit activity took place, and in fact when The Farm started up, it had a NO CASH policy (?!) which may or may not have been part of its lease agreement, in an effort to fend off the previous regulars.  Our other local, more well known and the one I’ve actually been to, is the Harwood Arms.  In fact, I’m looking forward to going back again in just a couple of weeks!  Most people will know that HA recently got a Michelin star, making it much more difficult to get a seat!  I love their take on British food and last time I was there I loved the plank of venison cooked 4 different ways.  Looking forward to trying their Scotch Egg one of these days!  Besides being yummy it is also good value – gotta love that as so many restaurants we go to leave you feeling a bit roughed up, wallet-wise.

And finally there are some wonderful new faces in the ‘hood.  The Union Market (pictured above) is an absolute star!  They took over the old Fulham station, which had been obscenely turned into a TGIFridays at some point.  The building was listed and all of the original fittings had been preserved, but covered for TGIF.  The lifted off the coverings and revealed a number of small shops, which are now groceries, green grocer, bakery, cafe, wine shop, cheese shop, lovely and good value butcher, traiteur-style prepared foods, and an eat-in area which acts as wine bar and serves sandwiches, light suppers, cheese plates and charcuterie platters.  Beyond the lovely shopping, they also do events – a pie cooking demonstration and a wine tasting in the last week alone.  You can also order special items, and they have a generous game selection.  It’s just outside the Fulham Broadway commercial centre, to the left as you exit.  Definitely worth a browse and a taste!  The other recent and very welcome arrival is Vagabond Wines.  Fulham has been missing a quality independent wine seller, and Vagabond steps right into the void!  They carry 100 wines, all of which can be tasted prior to purchase, using their clever tasting system.  Buy a tasting card for £5 and for 50p a shot you can taste any wine in the shop.  They specialise in less-usual regions and small producers.  I tried a cracking Cote Roti, a lovely Vermentino from Liguria, and a Spanish red (La Planta, Cosecha) that has become a new favourite in our house.  They are also holding a number of events highlighting less-familiar wine regions, food pairing, and general winetasting.  They are located in Vanstan Place, next to the wonderful and well-established Del Aziz (wonderful bread, pastries and quick lunches inspired by the Levant) and a personal favourite Al Santo, which even in tricky economic times for a launch has become a fantastic local cafe (and try their porchetta, which they bring up from Italy themselves!).

And these are just the delights of North Fulham, without venturing down to the Parson’s Nose (I want to do their butchery class!) or Cope’s Seafood on the chic-er end of Fulham Road!

So next time you come to Cucina Cinzia, show up a little early and pop into the Union Market to check out the wares, and buy the wine for your dinner there or at Vagabond!  Hurrah for Foodie Fulham!

photo credit: Itinerari Scientifici di Toscan

One of the things that we’re planning to serve in October’s supperclubs, alongside our classic crostinis, is a dish from the Tuscan coast called cecina (“cheh- chee’-na”).  Note that there is also a town, where Cinzia and I spend a lot of time together called Cecina, but confusingly pronounced differently “Cheh’ – chee-nah”)!  The provenance of the dish then, should not be a surprise!

The dish itself is a torta salata (salty cake) made with chick pea flour(farina di ceci).  Cinzia’s daughter went to the Mulino Grifoni, at the castle San Niccolò, where they’ve been grinding the flour in the traditional way since 1696, in an old stone mill, powered by the high Arno river.  Cinzia has her grandmother’s recipe for the cecina and we’ll serve it with a slice of finocchiona Tuscan fennel salame.  The old mill is up the hill from Florence, near the town of Casentino, where one of Cinzia’s extended family has a little mountain bolt-hole.

Beside the farina di ceci she also picked up the farine di castagna (chestnut flour) from which we’ll make the castagnaccio dessert that I posted about last time!

So the menu is developing – we’re thinking about some fried sage leaves with the prosecco – crostini & cecina for the antipasto – pappa al pomodoro for the “primo” course – and sausages with “little bird” beans and a fennel sformata for secondo – followed by the castagnaccio and vin santo!

And wait til you see what we are putting together for November 26 & 27… Cinzia’s been negotiating with a hunter to get the real deal…

One of the things we’ll be serving on 22 & 23 October is the Tuscan dessert described below!  Cinzia wrote the following on the history and significance of the Castagnaccio – come to dinner to try it in October!  Book here!

“Castagnaccio“, or baldino or pattona or (in my house “migliaccio“) is a very special dessert, simple but particular, made with chestnut flour and studded with raisins, pine nuts, walnuts and rosemary.

Because the chestnut, main element of the castagnacio, is widespread in regions like the Veneto, Piedmont, Lombardy and Tuscany, there are respectable versions of castagnaccio all over northern Italy.  The  castagnaccio is most identified with Tuscany though, its  history closely tied to this region and especially the city of Siena. 

The cake was initially, like most traditional recipes, popular with poor peasants, as the main ingredient – chestnut – was readily available throughout the countryside.  What is certain is that this cake has its origins in a very remote past: in fact, in the 1500’s it was was well known, as noted by an Augustine priest in his writings at the time.  The creator of the castagnaccio seems to have been the Tuscan Pylades from Lucca.  The cake seems to have taken its current form in Tuscany in the 1800s, with the addition of raisins, pine nuts, and rosemary, and from there it was exported to other regions.

The castagnaccio is also perfumed with the superstitions associated with rosemary, an essential ingredient, which is supposed to have aphrodisiac qualities.  It was believed that if a young man had eaten “the gnaccia” with rosemary offered to him by a you woman, he would fall in love and seek her hand in marriage…

We’re back!

We took a break over the summer. After a very busy spring, we were gone practically every weekend in July and August, and had (ok, have) a houseful of people carrying out some pretty dusty home improvements.

Even though it is Cinzia who does the cooking, I found myself fatigued – not of the suppers themselves as actually they are a huge source of energy for me!    But daily life plus a passionate hobby was all becoming too much.

It was good to take a break. I got to be a client in a number of supperclubs, and to spend some time with some of the friends that I’ve made around our table. I had a chance to reflect on what it is that makes inviting a bunch of strangers over worth doing. I had the following strokes of insight, in no particular order.

When Cinzia and I decided to start up our supperclub, we were really just doing it for the cooking. Cinzia was looking at setting up a service to provide in-villa dining for visitors to Tuscany and she thought this would be good practice. She saw the supperclubs on an Italian TV show – I’d never heard of them but did a little poking around and got interested. I keep toying with the idea of changing directions and going into a cuisine-oriented direction, and this was a way to dip a toe in without a huge commitment of time or money or career momentum.

We thought those were enough reasons to give it a go, but what we discovered was that the people were what made it worth doing. When we have a full house and we hear everyone chatting and laughing, we feel absolutely euphoric! And we have been amazed at how little of a language barrier there’s been between Cinzia and the guests – who knew there were so many people in London who had studied italian or spent a year in Fiesole! Our goal of sharing the pleasures of the Tuscan table with the guests had gone beyond the food and into the long evenings spent over a glass (or bottle or two) of wine, swapping stories and email addresses. We got so much more than we bargained for on that front!

Cinzia and I have been guests at a number of other supperclubs, and we have loved the experience there, too. While some are more about the food, and some are more about the ambience, we’re very proud to be part of this energy that’s circulating around the London food scene! We love checking out the personalities of the other supperclubs. And we are thrilled to be a part of it in our own way.

We decided early on that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it in a way that was meaningful to us – this was something that we were doing without a boss, purely as a reflection of our own values, interests, and a desire to share something we love with others. We’re not trying to be the chef-iest, though we enjoy the cheffy clubs!  We aren’t located in Shoreditch and we love the Hackney vibe but don’t aspire to it ourselves.  We are keen amateurs, and we want to share the recipes that I’d loved discovering while I was living in Italy, and the spread the warm glow of Italian family dinners.   We want people to come to the kind of dinner party that we are proud to throw for our friends and families.  We had a question early on about whether or not to put away the good wine glasses and buy some cheaper ones to serve the guests and the decision was – if we are going to invite people into our house to have our food and our dinner experience, then we want them to feel special, welcome, and to treat them with the same attention (and same glasses) that we would use with our friends and family. And if you don’t use the good china now, when are you going to use it?

We want every guest to come away having tried something that they hadn’t had before, with a wider view of what Italian and Tuscan cuisines are about. Cinzia cooks for our dinners as she would cook for guests in her own home (which can occasionally break the London food-scene orthodoxy – there are times when italians prefer dry pasta over homemade!). We put together thoughtful menus, prepare them with a lot of love, with our goal being to delight our guests and hopefully to pay for the ingredients and Cinzia’s plane ticket.

It’s not all easy. Cinzia lives in Florence and spends several days a month away from her family, which is a big deal for an Italian matriarch. I have a demanding day job plus two kids who are often very interested in what’s going on in the dining room.  Our set up probably isn’t typical, if such a thing exists. But that’s the beauty of it. We don’t have to be typical! We don’t want to be typical!  We want to be special.  All of the supperclubs *are* special.  I was watching a show on the BBC the other night on the birth of hip hop, disco and punk and they were talking about the beginning of those movements and how they started in empty spaces, loft apartments, people’s homes and it occurred to me that the supperclubs have some of this same energy – getting like-minded people together to make some great music/food, jam all night on our own terms, creating something out of nothing just for the love of it.

Next supperclub dates are 23 & 24 October.  Autumn, after all, is the absolute best time of year to cook!  Click here for more information, click here to book through EventBrite, or please feel free send me an email on info@cucinacinzia.com if you have questions or any problems booking.

A recent trip through Northern Italy took us through Piedmont, twice. And in Piedmont there were two things that lit me up. One was a local specialty, and one was the place where I first experienced it.

I’m a well-documented anchovy lover . And I love olive oil. And garlic. And veggies. If you put all these things together, along with some heat, you get bagna cauda, Piemontese dialect for “hot bath”. Bagna cauda is a warm, salty dip for crudites, especially fennel, radicchio, cabbage. While it is probably more popular in autumn and winter, it is such a simple classic that it is enjoyed year round.

My first experience with bagna cauda was about 12 years ago, when I was first thinking of moving to Italy and had bought a book called A Passion For Piedmont by Matt Kramer of the Wine Spectator. This book mixes anectdotes about the author’s year in Bra and Alba with recipes, and for me it was like a young man’s first look at naked skin. My fire was lit and I’ve been chasing Italian gastronomy ever since. It helped that we were planning a move to Milan at the time, and that part of the pull was my husband’s paternal grandfathers provenance from the northern parts of that region. I tried out Kramer’s recipe for bagna cauda, not knowing what the “real thing” should taste like, and now realize that I had hit it pretty much dead on. I remember that first bagna cauda when we spent a night in Aoste a couple of weeks ago, and had dinner at the Osteria dell’Oca.

Cedric ordered it and it came in a kind of fondue pot, with piles of fresh veggies next to it. Mmm – the bitter and sweet crunchy veggies dipped in that warm anchovy dip, next to a bottle of the local pinot noir. We also had it, as part of an antipasto platter dinner, during our night in Ivrea. Thought that time it was just  one of a selection of local specialties. It was good that time too, but then it was hard to compete with griddled polenta topped with near-liquid gorgonzola!

The first time I had a “real” bagna cauda was at El Fornel, in the tiny village of Alice Superiore. We had gone to Alice during the Ognisanti (All Saint’s) holiday a few years ago, to visit my husband’s grandfather’s hometown. It hadn’t occurred to us that the holiday was a celebration of dead ancestors, and so we found the cemetery packed with living and dead relatives! Following our exploration of the family plots, and a walk through the town, we realised that the abject poverty that had sent his grandfather packing (and remained through much of the last century) was over and the town was now smartening up. Well, relatively. We made our way past tumble-down buildings and construction sites, ankle deep in chestnuts at some points, and found a little bar next to where we had parked our car. Thinking we might be able to get a panini, we went inside. It turned out to be a lovely restaurant, where we had a seat and began to order of the menu. “No, signora, there is no need to order, we serve you everything on the menu,” said the waiter. C and I looked at each other starting to smile and realised that we were about to have one of those amazing moments when we stumble onto a world-class meal when we least expected it. I can’t remember whether we had one sleeping kid with us or two, but I do remember most of the menu – bagna cauda, tagliatelle with funghi porcini, veal, and for dessert chestnuts soaked in grappa. There were a few other courses in there that I’ve forgotten, there were five or six altogether. It was a piemontese feast! And I had a memory that it was crazy cheap.

We went back there this trip, just to see if it was as good as we remember it in what has become family folklore. And it was. The theme this time was white wine. We had an amazing selection of salamis on wonderful bread (and bread is not usually a forte in Italy). Then we had a delicate risotto of borage and white wine. Next was a very fine pork cut, with roasted potatoes and a delicate sauce. For dessert there was a semifreddo and along with all of this we had one of the local wines. The cost of lunch for two, along with small portions for our two kids? Forty euros. We pointed out that we were four people, but they said that they had thrown in the kid’s portions for free and that the wine and coffee was included. Amazing. I still feel slightly guilty, wondering if we were undercharged – but the menu stated €20 per person so I suppose that it was correct besides the kids! Tragically, all the lovely photos I took of this lunch were lost when my camera was stolen. This is one of these restaurants that I love so much that I hesitate to share it with the world for fear that the next time I go the prices will have tripled up to their rightful place. But it is in such an obscure location that surely it will maintain its rural charm,  and it really is too wonderful to keep to myself, so I will share:  El Fornel. If you ever find yourself in Ivrea or Torino, it really is worth the trip up the hill.