Just so you don’t blame the cookbook, I wanted to let you know, dear reader, that the cookies I made from Cooking with Italian Grandmothers were fantastic. While Mr. Bookdwarf worked on making the gnocchi, I made Walnut Black Pepper Cookies which Jessica Theroux made with Carluccia in Zambrone, Calabria.

It’s a very simple cookie recipe with no leavening agent added. You cream butter and sugar. Add some flour, crushed walnuts, honey, a bit of sugar and black pepper. This is from memory, but I’m pretty sure that’s it. They used walnuts picked from Carluccia’s trees and peppercorns foraged from the Calabria’s wild coastlines. I also assume they used local honey. I don’t have walnut trees or Calabrian coastline nearby. I used what I had at hand. My walnuts were a  little stale and I didn’t add quite enough black pepper. But you know what? They were damn good. I ate the last one last night and they hold up for days. You know how you make cookies sometimes and they only really taste good for that one day? These were good for many days.

Even though I want to cook pretty much every recipe in Cooking with Italian Grandmothers at this point, I’m going to make them again, perhaps tonight even.

On Friday I brought home a new cookbook called Cooking with Italian Grandmothers. It entranced me from the get-go.

Author Jessica Theroux spent more than a year doing exactly what the title suggests: Traveling around Italy cooking with grandmothers, the keepers of traditions and culture. It might sound like a gimmick, but it was a serious quest. In the introduction, Theroux explains some of her motivation to spend time in kitchens to learn the more rustic styles of Italian cooking:

Good cooking, the kind that feeds the soul and nourishes the body, is the result of listening openly and acting simply. All of the women in this book taught me something about the power of food to connect us; to ourselves, our history, our land, our culture, to our past and present moment.

I spent most of Saturday sitting on my porch in the sun reading this book, cover to cover.

Each chapter focuses on one of the grandmothers as Theroux introduces them and what she learned. She makes it to different regions of Italy and cooks several recipes specific to the region. Most of the women seem to cook by memory. Some forage and make something delicious out of whatever they find. Some prepare specific recipes. Old and young, they put a lot of thought, care, and energy into their food; it really shows as Theroux absorbs their lessons. The book includes lots of wonderful color photography of where she stays and of the food of course.

We decided to try our hand at the Gnocci con Ragu (Potato Gnocci with Tomato Beef Ragu). We’ve been making pasta for months, but this turned out to be more difficult than we thought!

Forming Gnocchi

Our first crucial mistake was in undercooking the potatoes. They seemed all the way done, but when we tried to mash them for the dough, the centers were still a little firm. The recipe says to run them through a ricer or mesh strainer, but our strainer was too flimsy for the firm potatoes. So we grated them, which gave us a mixture that was both lumpy and glutinous at the same time. The flavor was good, but the texture made shaping them difficult. Cooked, they were soft like proper gnocchi, but they didn’t have the toothiness that we wanted.

Gnocchi in Sauce

The second mistake was with the sauce. It was a very simple recipe: Onions, beef, tomato paste, water, and precious little else. But the onions and beef didn’t brown up like we wanted. And when we added water, we put it all in at once, and it turned out to be more than we needed. Even after two hours simmering it was still too watery and it seemed underflavored.

That’s not to say that our dish was bad – I mean, we still ate two portions each. But before we serve it to friends we’ll have to practice a little more.

You can look up videos of Italian grandmothers making these recipes and they make it look incredibly easy, the same way Olympic athletes make their performances seem simple. But that ease is honed with decades of practice, and I guess we couldn’t expect to get it just right the first time.

Unlike the Arax Market across the street, or Sessa’s in Davis Square, La Romagnoli and Son is not packed wall-to-wall with foodstuffs. Instead, there’s a carefully curated selection of only the best meats and cheeses, and a small refrigerator and freezer stocked with a couple of outstanding sauces.

And crucially, unlike any of the competitors, including Dave’s Fresh Pasta and Capone’s in Somerville and Cambridge, La Romagnoli & Son have a full kitchen, right in view. Not just panini, but pastas, fritattas and more are available, cooked to order, by the owner.

When we came in on Saturday afternoon, signora Romagnoli was patiently and carefully explaining a recipe to a sous-chef, in between taking and filling our orders. The special pasta that day was a carbonara. It was incredible, heavy on the cracked pepper and shot through with bacony smoke from the pancetta. Mr. Bookdwarf ordered an eggplant parm sandwich. He’s a fan of a greasy, sauce-heavy, spicy eggplant parm, but wanted to see what Romagnoli would do with it. She made it as he probably should have guessed she would. It was a reminder of what eggplant parmigiana ought to be: Flavorful bread instead of fluffy nonsense, excellent mozzarella instead of low-moisture part-skim commodity cheese, and exactly enough home-made sauce to dress the eggplant without hiding the flavor of the vegetable itself.

While we were eating, a crotchety old couple came in, asked a million questions, rejected suggestions of soup (“I don’t like beans”) and sandwiches (“I’m not a bread person”) and flavorings (“What’s pancetta meat?”). Signora Romagnoli handled them with aplomb, went off-menu, and brought them a dish that they seemed delighted to have. It looked pretty good to me, too, but by that point I’d already stuffed myself with carbonara and Mr. Bookdwarf was grabbing mints from the dish by the door and heading to Arax for Armenian string cheese and baklava.

We’ll be back.

We started it last year with Frank Stitts’s Bottega Favorita cookbook: everyone prepare a dish or two from the same cookbook and we have a dinner party to see how the recipes work out. We’ve had many successful parties in this manner. Last Sunday was no different. A the resident cookbook junky, I chose Dorie Greenspan’s new cookbook Around My French Table since I’m such a huge fan of her book Baking: From My Home to Yours and of her blog.

One of reasons why I enjoy her cookbooks so much is that each recipe starts off with a lot of text either explaining the genesis of the recipe or a funny anecdote or something. As someone sits and reads a cookbook cover to cover, I love it. This book is not strictly French food either. It’s recipes you can imagine people making in their homes with all of the influence of various ethnic cuisines melded together. I chose to make the Chicken in a Pot (featured on the cover) which used preserved lemons and an Olive Fougasse. More detailed photos of the various foods made are here. At some point hunger won out and we sat down to eat before I could take more pictures.

I’ve been playing with new camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3, which is so awesome but I have no idea how to use it. Taking pictures of food is hard! The color and texture don’t often translate. Plus I have no special lights and it’s getting darker earlier, so natural lighting is scarce. Here are two photos I took of the baked Olive Fougasse:

The first one was taken with the bread in front of the window with the sun shining on it.

In the second picture, the sun is behind me. Very different, no?

The recipes were so simple to make and utterly delicious. We had kir and gougeres to start, some cheese and crackers from Formaggio Kitchen and the Olive Fougasse. For the main course, we at the Chicken in a Pot, Delicatta squash with Apple and Grapes, Spice Butter Glazed Carrots, and Potatoes Au Gratin. We finished with a fantastic Apple Cake recipe with Cinnamon ice cream from Christina’s.

Like I said, check out the pictures here. There are dozens of recipes I want to try making from Around My French Table. I can’t wait.