Article for 06-March-2006

Culinary Trials in Italy

Italian cuisine is amazing. Fresh ingredients make for amazing pasta and pizza in every restaurant and pizzeria from here to the Mediterranean. However, the college budget does not allow frivolous luxuries like eating out for every meal. This leaves a couple of options: starve, wait for someone else to cook like my roommate of Italian descent, Brad, or brave the cooking art on my own. Since I’m not a fan of starving and Brad goes a little heavy on the spices sometimes, I decided to try my luck with the pots and pans.

Now, I’m not by any means an accomplished cook but back home I feel rather confident. I make some of my Mom’s recipes or follow a recipe from a book but in Italy things are completely different. During my first trip to the grocery store I realized that if pictures weren’t on some packages I would be in trouble. Pasta had seemed like an obvious choice, all you need is pasta and sauce, right? Well, in Italy there isn’t any spaghetti sauce. You can find tomato pulp, which sounds like it might work, but no it’s not good. Now that I’ve been here awhile I have figured out how to make pasta to my liking, but it did take some time.

Believe it or not, it is possible to get sick of pizza and pasta. I didn’t think it would ever happen, but it did. Luckily the corner store, Di per di, has those soups that you just add a few ingredients to and you’re in business but even cooking soup can be a complicated process when you can’t read Italian. This reading dilemma has resulted in having to throw out two concoctions… and the pans that they were made in.

Jeff Johnson, fellow Tech student and roommate, celebrated his 23rd birthday on Saturday and really wanted Texas sheet cake. In order to make sure that we got it just right, we decided to make a “trial cake” a few days before his birthday. The recipe came from back home, so thankfully it was in English but buying the ingredients needed to make a cake proved to be the hardest part of the whole ordeal. When the first shopping trip had been completed we hadn’t found vanilla or baking soda, so we went without. It seemed like a good idea at the time but the cake was definitely lacking. Jeff and I decided to try and find the ingredients at a larger store and stared at what we thought was vanilla for a while until finally throwing one in the cart. The baking soda was decided the same way. When we got home, it looked like we had done well, the vanilla really was vanilla and the baking soda looked like baking soda. The cake was pretty good, not quite as good as Jeff’s Mom makes, but far better than the first.

Today our French friend, Dauphine, came over to work on a group project and we told her of our cake-making trials. She looked at the baking soda box and laughed. As it turns out, what we thought was baking soda was really some sort of thickener used in soups. Ah well, maybe we’ll get it next time. Till then, I suppose we should keep our translation book handy and try not to ruin too many more pans.