The best budget-friendly Italian recipes for winter
Ninety-seven Orchard Street on the Lower East Side in New York is a place of learning and nostalgia. It’s a museum, the Tenement Museum, but it isn’t full of glass cases and artefacts, it’s a tenement full of rooms, each created to represent the life of a specific immigrant family who moved there at different times in the 19th and 20th century.
There’s the kitchen of the Irish family who lived through the potato famine and found a home here in 1869 and the living room of the German family who were their neighbours.
My favourite room is the kitchen of the Italian family, the Baldizzis, who took up residence here in the 1930s. Despite starting a new life during the Depression it’s a cheerful room with a bright red tablecloth and cupboards full of the tins and packets that would help make the frugal meals they could afford.
They would have been surprised that the ‘cucina povera’, the Italian peasant food they grew up with, would eventually become one of the most fashionable ways of cooking. Before the late 1980s, Italian trattoria, both here and in the States, meant checked tablecloths, pasta and oversized pepper grinders.
In the US, Italian-American food – dishes such as spaghetti with meatballs that weren’t actually cooked in Italy – was so popular it felt as though it had been around for ever.
Then ‘cucina povera’, the frugal cooking that had been the norm in Italy, especially in the southern regions, caught on. The River Café opened in London in 1987. No, it certainly wasn’t – and isn’t – a place to go for a frugal meal, but it put the spotlight on an Italy where there were no giant pepper mills.
Among the wood-roasted veal chops and turbot with Amalfi lemons, they presented some quite ‘ordinary’ dishes – pasta with nettles or mozzarella with broad beans and olives – made with inexpensive ingredients. Most diners didn’t expect the cheaper dishes to taste as good as they did.
Several years later the first gastropub in London, The Eagle in Farringdon, showcased inexpensive dishes from all over the Mediterranean. Italy, Spain and Portugal dominated.
It created a revolution. Frugal became cool, not because we were really looking for ways to use up stale bread, but because we realised that this kind of food – dishes like pappa al pomodoro and sausages with lentils – was as good as fancy restaurant food if it was made with care and good olive oil.
Frugal cooking is important in every culture. Being frugal means making the most of what you can afford – cheap cuts, pulses, unpopular fish – and it abhors waste.
But it isn’t about ‘making do’, it’s about seeing the potential in these ingredients and cooking them in a way that gets the most out of them: sweating leeks and greens in olive oil until they’re soft and their bitter-sweet flavours meld; using breadcrumbs to make light little dumplings – canederli – of bacon, parsley and shallots and serving them in chicken stock. Italians are particularly good at it.
When I thought about the dishes to give you this week it was a struggle, not because I couldn’t come up with enough ideas but because there were too many.
I cook frugal meals a lot, mostly because it means I don’t have to shop every day. There’s always beans and pulses, pasta and rice, eggs, cheese and vegetables in the kitchen, plus a good stock of spices and pots of herbs.
Frugal cooking is usually simple but not necessarily easy; it’s cooking that requires thought. What can you do with a small pumpkin and a third of a tub of ricotta? Bake the pumpkin until its flesh is velvety, put cold ricotta and chopped chilli into the hollow where the seeds were, sprinkle on Parmesan and some good olive oil.
It’s amazing what you can come up with when you make supper out of what you have.
