Alessandra Rovati
By Alessandra Rovati
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Recipes Breaking the Fast the Italian Way
After 25 hours of abstinence from food and water on Yom Kippur, your family and guests will treasure each dish on your table — even if it’s just peanut butter and jelly. So why go crazy in the kitchen? There are times when simple is best: save your efforts for Passover, and go with an…
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Food Venice’s Tu B’Shvat Tradition — Frisinsal de Tagiadele
Every time I bite into a slice of noodle kugel, I am reminded of another baked pasta dish: frisinsal, an unusual, savory and just slightly sweet recipe that we make back home in Venice around Tu B’shvat (the New year of Trees). For the Jews of Northern Italy, no recipe recalls the past as much…
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Recipes Twist on Classic Salt Cod Mousse
In 1432 a Venetian captain, Pietro Querini, returned home after surviving a terrible shipwreck off the Northern coast of Norway, and described for the first time the stocfisi (dried salt cod) he had tasted in the remote islands where he’d been nursed back to health. His description probably went largely unnoticed at the time, given…
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Food Shabbat Meals: Red Mullet alla Livornese
My most lingering impression of New York City, after the excitement of my arrival (in 2003) had worn off, was that all the buzz and the people were there only to hide a deep and persistent potential for loneliness. This feeling of being alone in a crowd reached its peak on Shabbat when, ironically, I…
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Food Buon Appetito: Celebrate Purim With Italian Sweets
Now commonly seen – at least in America and Europe — as a sweet and innocent event for the enjoyment of children, in the past Purim was once quite different. For the Jews of 16th and 17th century Italy, the holiday was a quite an extravagant affair, celebrated (in the wealthier homes) with close to…
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Food Cassola, Rome’s Jewish Christmas Treat
A popular Italian saying advises: “Dress like a Turk, and eat like a Jew.” Jews have enjoyed an uninterrupted presence in Italy for more than 2,200 years, producing a delicious cuisine with almost endless regional variations, that profoundly affected broader Italian cuisine. Contrary to the all-too-common American assumption that most Jewish food is bland or…
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