Ricettario di Pasticceria e Cucina del Nord Italia

Introduction

One of my earliest memories is of my grandparents’ kitchen. My nonna was cooking octopus tentacles
in tomato sauce, one of my all-time favorite dishes. As a kid, I wasn’t really doing anything but hanging
around while she was cooking. However, that day I decided to become her commis and help her with
cooking preparations. My help mainly consisted of tasting her tomato sauce with some bread, and by
lunchtime I was already full, but I gladly ate more nevertheless. I like to think of that day as the first time
I realized I wanted to be a cook.
Writing a cookbook seems like a pretentious idea if you are not a renowned chef or food critic; it took
me almost six months to decide how to structure the book and choose which recipes to publish. I would
skim through many cooking blogs or recipe websites to find a pattern, or something that could inspire
me. Several ideas started popping up. One option was to simply reproduce the dishes I had been cooking
in my career as a line cook, but that sounded kind of like stealing dishes from other chefs. Moreover, the
dishes I prepared every day for twelve hours a day, five days a week, with little or no breaks or sleep
didn’t really embody the idea of cooking I wanted to share. With time, I realized that real cooking is
home cooking, the rest is a task, a job. If you truly love cooking, do not become a chef, unless you have
the time and money – and skills – to open your own restaurant and work on your own terms. This
Ricettario is for those of you who simply love spending time in the kitchen.

So, there I was, looking for ideas for the book, and one idea in particular was growing stronger and
stronger: to make a historical cookbook. First, I looked for Ancient Roman and Greeks recipes, thinking
I could modernize them and publish them. The idea still temps me from time to time, however the reason
I did not go with that is twofold. First, I do not think the recipes we have from that time are any good:
our tastes have changed so much and some ingredients are nowadays hard to find – especially if you live
in Northern Europe like I do at the present time – and those that can be found aren’t the same as they
used to be – plants, legumes, flours, and so on change over time. Second, there are already many valid
“Roman” cookbooks around and it seemed kind of too obvious for me to publish another one.

A further idea that came to my mind, and that I actually started to write down, was to just think of my
favorite recipes – divided into starters, pastas, main courses, and desserts – and publish them with an
enhanced text, which basically meant adding historical notes and tips for the preparation. Some
prototypes of those recipes are the Laganum recipe and the Pesto recipe I have published for free on my
Gumroad account. It was a good idea and I am contemplating whether or not to finish this work in the
future, but it still did not seem personal enough: what was so special about it? Yes, the historical notes
are interesting, and the comments on the preparation are something rarely found in recipes. So, I will
publish some of those individual recipes in the future, and I will decide what to do based on the feedback
I receive.
The final idea for the present book came from my grandpa. I like to see this as a circle that completes
itself, as the natural beginning for my first cookbook: why not start where everything actually started
off? My grandpa had been a pastry chef in Northern Italy – more precisely in the area surrounding
Bergamo – for more than 40 years, so it seemed appropriate to ask him for help. He gave me the idea and
the actual material right away. During his years working in a pastry shop, he compiled by hand hundreds
of pages filled with recipes, both for sweets and main courses. We decided to go over the material, select
some recipes, add some more, and create a cookbook that would merge his experiences with pastries
with my favorite salty recipes. The biggest part of this job was navigating through the material, thankfully
my grandpa always kept everything in order and it wasn’t hard for us to collect the first papers. Then, I
selected what I deemed to be the most pertinent recipes for a cookbook. The criteria were to choose
recipes that were fairly easy to reproduce without professional equipment, and to add some recipes that
were regional enough not to be found anywhere else, thus adding uniqueness and value to the book. To
give some examples from the recipes you will read in this cookbook, Biscotti Mezzaluna San Pellegrino
is a local recipe from San Pellegrino, a small village in Northern Italy famous for its sparkling water.
Even more illustrative of the regionality of this book is the recipe for Nusec Serinesi, a local savoy
cabbage roll. This recipe comes from Serina, a municipality in the Province of Bergamo, that nowadays
counts a population of 2.000 inhabitants. The area around Serina is where I spent most of my holidays
as a kid. Regional folklore is also represented in many recipes in this book such as the Baci del Gioppino
(Gioppino’s Kisses) recipe, Gioppino being a Carnival mask from Bergamo.

The idea of a cookbook so specific and characteristic of Northern Italy immediately resonated with me
and I started translating the recipes straightway. I was born in Milan; half of my family comes from
Bergamo and the other half from the South. I had the fortune to live in both hemispheres of Italian cuisine
and be able to take the best of both with me. Northern Italy is often underrepresented in the popular
culinary sphere, where recipes and dishes from the South are the most popular. Writing this cookbook
gives me the possibility of expressing the Northern Italy kitchen and to “save” some recipes that would
otherwise go lost in a matter of years. Having said that, not every recipe in the book is specific to the
Province of Bergamo and some of them are not even exclusively from the North – like the recipe for
Lasagne or Polpette – but they nevertheless represent the Northern interpretation of those recipes
otherwise found all across the Italian peninsula.
This cookbook guarantees you one thing: all the recipes work. While browsing through many websites I
noticed how a vast majority of them have over thousands of recipes in their database, and I wondered
how this could be possible. How is it possible that the editor of the website checked them all? Then I
noticed that many online recipes are wrong: wrong quantities, wrong technical passages, wrong cooking
time, and so on. Not only have I prepared each recipe of the Ricettario del Nord Italia and confirmed that
they work, but these are recipes that have been used in a professional environment for decades. My
grandpa wasn’t preparing, say, Baci di Dama biscuits once a year for Christmas, no, he had to prepare
dozens of them on a daily basis. The recipes had to be consistent, the biscuits had to come out right every
day of the week for years.

Having checked that the recipes are right and accurate, there is nonetheless a price you have to pay to
them. You have to try and put yourself into the recipes. The quantities are right but the quality of the
ingredients you use could be different, so you will be required to cook with your own eyes and intuition.
If you see the dough is getting too wet – it can happen with the Canederli for example depending on the
bread you are using – you will need to add more flour or breadcrumbs, and so on. This is mostly important
for the salty recipes in the second part of the book. As for the pastry recipes, execution is the key. All in
all, I think this is a little price to pay in order to obtain great desserts and incredibly tasty main courses.
The cookbook gives you the tool, but you need to prove that you want to achieve the results. Another
advantage of using this Ricettario is that you can always reach out to me and ask for advice if you are
stuck somewhere or if something is not coming out exactly as you expected. You can even try to contact
me while cooking and if I see your message I will definitely answer. I won’t be able to solve technical
problems – maybe your oven is too cold or your pan is crooked and does not cook evenly – but I promise
I will help you to the best of my abilities.

One last thing before I leave you to the Ricettario, a small premise about how the recipes work. All the
quantities are expressed in grams, this is a necessity in baking and I encourage you to get an inexpensive
kitchen scale in order to get the best result. Secondly, I have already written more than enough in the
introduction to bore you further with more childhood memories that each recipe evokes in me. One thing
that I have always found tedious in food blogs is when authors feel the need to narrate their life journey
and connection to a recipe. Most recipes online are unreadable, especially if you need to quickly check
something while you are already cooking. All the recipes in the Ricettario are kept lean. You have the
ingredients at the beginning and the passages after that; very few and simple lines that can be followed
step-by-step and retrieved quickly in case you need them while you cook. Also, there are no pictures.
This choice was made out of necessity and out of coherence. Cookbooks did not have pictures until a
few years ago and this book does not want to contribute in any way to “food porn” culture. Feel free to
experiment, give the biscuits the shape you want, do they look ugly? It does not matter (see the recipe
for Brutti Ma Buoni, literally “Ugly but Tasty”), you are not cooking to post pictures. Nevertheless, I
encourage you to try the recipes and let me know how you liked them, and yes, you can also attach a
picture. It would mean a lot to me.
Thanks for choosing to read the Ricettario di Pasticceria e Cucina del Nord Italia and I wish that you will
find everything tasty and fun to cook. Buon lavoro e buon appetito.