While At The Table No One Grows Old

“You must visit Nonna. She lives in the village and seldom has visitors, but she absolutely makes the best dolci!” An enthusiastic endorsement like this prompted many journeys for Francine Segan, food historian, author and speaker, in her search for the very best Italian sweets. These treasured recipes are now in her latest book, Dolci, Italy’s Sweets.

Ms. Segan wanted to collect not only the recipes from generations past but also the ones served today in contemporary Italian kitchens. She met with famous chefs, contacted infamous Italian bloggers and visited the kitchens of Italian grandmothers. Her book guides us through Italy’s hills and valleys, nooks and crannies, as she cooks, tastes and records these luscious desserts.

Ms. Segan celebrated the launch of the book at The National Arts Club in the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan on November 10, 2011. Always an engaging speaker, she recounted stories of her latest trips to Italy and her search for divine desserts. She told of one Nonna who kept Francine in her kitchen for 6 hours until she “got the recipes right”. Still, I can think of worse ways to spend a day than in a warm cucina filled with aromas of chocolate and fruit.

The book is beautifully illustrated and the recipes are taken from all over Italy. Chapters are devoted to after-dinner liqueurs and special coffees. Ms. Segan includes a smattering of history and folklore among the dolci, as well as some of her favorite Italian food proverbs. For example, instead of an apple a day keeps the doctor away, due dita di vino e’ una pedata al medico (two fingers of wine is a kick in the butt to the doctor). And my personal favorite: a tavola non s’invecchia (while at the table no one grows old).

You can purchase Dolci: Italy’s Sweets at amazon.com. To learn more about Francine Segan, visit francinesegan.com.

Francine Segan Shares the Joys of Italian Desserts

Author, lecturer and food historian Francine Segan spoke at 92Y in NYC on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 on the fun and flavors of Italian desserts. Fresh from her most recent Italian trip researching her upcoming book, Segan entertained us with recipes, anecdotes and several desserts that she made for the occasion.

One of the memorable quotes from the evening was something an Italian chef told her about the philosophy behind Italian desserts: “we are always thinking of ways to keep you at the table”. When you think about it, this explains so much about Italian cuisine in general, whether in a restaurant or at your Nonna’s house. So much attention and love put into each ingredient and stir of the pot, all designed to keep you at the table, keep the conversation going, keep the laughter ringing through the house.

Segan presented the history of Italian sweets from the Renaissance to modern times. She included desserts designed to be enjoyed with luscious liquores such as vin santo. She discussed the history of chocolate in Italy while circulating trays of Italian chocolate gathered on her recent trip. She enlightened us about the baking and uses of Panettone and Panforte. She fed us wonderful desserts that she made from these ingredients and sent us home with Panettone and Pandoro di Verona, compliments of the Bauli company.

True to the spirit of the season. Segan discussed St. Nicholas and Santa Claus and how they are so differently perceived in the US and Italy. In the US, Jolly Old St. Nick and Santa Claus are synonymous, while in Italy they are very different. St. Nicholas is a saint whose feast day is December 6. He is most famous for tossing gold coins into the empty shoes of poor people at night. On the other hand, Santa Claus is Babbo Natale, or Father Christmas, a wonderful but distinctly different character. And then of course there is La Bufana, who brings sweets to children on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6.

Learn about Francine’s upcoming talks at francinesegan.com.

Click here to hear Francine’s Essence of Italy podcast, Italy & Chocolate – An Affair to Remember.

The Opera Lovers Cookbook

This is a transcript of the podcast appearing on our Podcast Page.

Carolyn: Francine Segan is a food historian, writer, lecturer and frequent radio and TV personality. She appears on CBS, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel and of course, The Food Network. In her monthly feature for the Tribune Media Syndicates, she has interviewed chefs we all know; such as Jacques Pepin, Lidia Bastianich, and Mario Batali. Francine Segan has also written a collection of wonderfully themed cookbooks: The Philosopher’s Kitchen, Movie Menus, Shakespeare’s Kitchen and the one we’ll be talking about today, The Opera Lovers CookBook.

The Opera Lovers CookBook is a 2007 Cook Book Award Finalist of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and a 2007 Book Award Finalist of the James Beard Foundation.

Thanks to the support and collaboration of New York City’s Metropolitan Opera Guild, The Opera Lovers CookBook is even more than a wonderful collection of recipes. The book is illustrated with rare photographs and drawings from the archives of the Metropolitan Opera.

Carolyn: The book is so interesting, not only the recipes which are just great, but there are all these little things, opera notes, little snippets, trivia about operas and how certain dishes became focal points in certain performances. It’s more than just recipes.

Francine: it’s kind of this wonderful project of trying to get people who may not know opera, to have a little taste, in every sense. So there are of course recipes, which were inspired by different operas. And then are also little sidebars, little tidbits of information, like little morsels, little nibbles at a cocktail party, of information about composers or maybe a wonderful aria or song about toasting or drinking. Or something special about a composer and his connections w/ food. Little trivia things like, food that was inspired by opera and all that is weaved into wonderful recipes, wonderful photographs, photographs from the Metropolitan Opera.

Also, because this is so much a cookbook to get you to enjoy music and maybe share it with friends, it also has tips on how to entertain, how to do a little party or buffet or a dessert party. Just to invite people over, put on a little CD of opera music and kind of experience it in a different way.

Carolyn: One of the things that I like about it as well is the title, Opera Lovers Cookbook. You take it from many different angles. For instance, there are recipes that seemed to have actually been featured in certain scenes in certain operas. Then there are dishes that are named after composers or opera singers. Then there are dishes that come from the town of a great composer, or maybe a favorite dish of a composer or a performer. So you really do take the whole spectrum of the connection between food and opera and it’s wonderful.

Francine: Well thank you. Doing a cookbook is a lot like cooking. You take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and you stir a little bit more and you taste it and what does it need? It’s the same thing when you create a cookbook. Especially when you collaborate with such a wonderful organization like the Metropolitan Opera House.

Carolyn: Let’s talk about some of the Italian inspired recipes.

Francine: You can really see my Italian roots because it has 12 chapters and 5 of them are Italian language opera-centric. So there’s a very heavy emphasis. I did a Bel Canto chapter, composers like Donizetti from Sicily. And in his day there was a wonderful dish in Sicily spaghetti with eggplant and a wonderful tomato sauce and they, to honor their wonderful composer-son, named the dish after one of his best operas, Norma. So Pasta alla Norma which everybody knows, is really named after his opera, in his honor. So that’s one of them.

I give Verdi a whole chapter. Verdi’s a wonderful composer of so many important works there’s lots of different dishes that are inspired by him. Including an Aida pyramid dessert. You know the little, wonderful, the balls that the Italians we do for the Christmas time which we fry, the little honey dipped balls, we always serve it in a little pyramid. So I thought, how perfect is that for Aida? So I kind of did a little free association there.

Carolyn: Oh that’s great.

Francine: But then, Puccini’s got a chapter. So for La Boheme in the second act, he has a line where he has people strolling and saying a list of ingredients. It almost jumps out as a recipe to me. It says dates and ferone and candied fruit and all I’m thinking is: Macedonia la frutta seca, which is a kind of dried fruit salad that Italians make in the wintertime. And it’s a very homey dish. It’s all sorts of nuts and candies that are left over, like ferone, little bits of amoretti, dried fruit. They’re all mixed together, put a little splash of some liquor. and just that scene with all the ingredients being called out just kind of made me think of that.

Carolyn: Oh that’s wonderful. I’ve love for you to tell the story about what opera was like in the Baroque period. So different from what opera is like for us now.

Francine: When you’d go to the opera house, back when Rossini was a composer, you would enter and of course you’d be elegantly dressed with the long gloves. You’d mingle w/ friends and you’d take your seat. But unlike the theater today, right away you’d notice some differences if you went back in time.

First of all the lights don’t get dim in the audience the way it does nowadays. and also the theater stage wasn’t set up high, it was kind of the same level that you were. Those 2 changes, the proscenium going up and the house lights going down didn’t happen until Wagner, until like the 1870’s. In Rossini’s day the lights were on. A little bit because you had to read your libretto but a lot because you were chatting, looking at your friends what they’re wearing, getting up and down. Because also in Rossini’s day, there was no intermission. So you’re sitting for this long opera and the composers knew, the audience knew, the performers knew that you’d have to get up and stretch your legs, get a little snack.

It was so known that in fact there are arias that are called Arias di Sorbetto, Sorbet Arias. Meaning in the middle of the opera, Rossini and other composers from that time period would stick in an aria because they knew you were going to get up and get a sorbet. Sorbet was really nice snack that they used to serve in the opera houses. Very elegant. So this Aria di Sorbetto which is always at the mid point, is always secondary characters, they’re not singing anything that’s going to advance the story, not particularly important, you can miss it. But it’s nice background music while you’re getting up and getting your snack.

The other thing that you would have seen if you went to the opera in Rossini’s time was that in the back of the house they would also have card tables set up. And people who were less interested in the opera would go in the back and play cards, they would gamble. And it was OK. Rossini got a cut of the house proceeds of the profits that were made from the gambling that was going on in the back.

So nowadays we sell popcorn and Jordan almonds in the movies, in those days you used to have sorbetto and your little gambling to make a little money.

Carolyn: Such a great story. I love that.

Francine: One of the things that I think also, just to kind of finish on Rossini, who’s of course the composer of L’Italiana in Algiers, La Barbara of Seville, lots of really wonderful works. He was probably the number one foodie composer. He loved food. He obsessed about it. He was a gourmet cook. When he would travel and he would have to put up a show, let’s say in Paris and he would have to stay there for a number of weeks. He would write home letters and I recently just saw one at a sweets shop in Genoa, that still exists today from Rossini’s times. It was a sweets shop that started in the 1700’s. And Rossini wrote a letter home to his friends, 2 separate letters to 2 separate friends, saying, please go to Romanengo and get me, and he’d make a list of all the sweets that he wanted, because here in Paris they don’t have such good food. He was so connected to Italy, he would always make fun of Paris. You know there’s nothing good to eat here, please bring me the salumi from Giuseppe’s Salumiere, please bring me the…You’d think that Paris was the wasteland of food. He just couldn’t tolerate it.

And of course this all spread and people knew, including the Baron Rothschild, from the famous vineyard. He was a wonderful opera lover. And he wanted to give a gift to Rossini. The opera season coincides with the grape harvest. So he took his most wonderful bushel of grapes and he had it personally delivered to Rossini’s dressing room and hotel. Rossini took the grapes, was very grateful, wrote a thank you note to the Baron saying, ‘Dear Baron Rothschild thank you so much for the grapes. But in the future I would like you to just know that for me, I prefer to take my wine not in a pill form. I like it liquid.’ So the Baron got the hint and he sent a case of Baron La Fete Rothschild, a nice case of wine to Rossini.

There’s also one, a funny Rossini story. When I was going thru the documents that the Metropolitan Opera had on all the composers, I was looking at the librettos because Rossini liked to dabble in art and he liked to draw. And on these librettos, when he was in Paris or Milan where his operas were sort of being tested, before they were finalized, in the margins he would draw these little Chianti bottles, these little bottles of wine in the margins and I would see 2, 3, or some pages that had 6,7 bottles of wine.

Carolyn: So these are like the old fashioned Chianti bottles with the raffia, wrapped?

Francine: Right. That little chubby bottle. So I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time. And then finally it dawned on me. In Italian, those kinds of wine bottles are called fiasco. Meaning like in English, fiasco, a disaster. They’re made from like leftover bottles or cheaper bottles. What he was saying was not, I need a drink, but this section of this opera needs help, it’s a fiasco!

Carolyn: So that was his shorthand?

Francine: That was his little crib note in the sides.

Carolyn: The trouble spots.

Francine: And he’s got some wonderful, wonderful urban legend and true food stories about him. Including, you know, going to a restaurant and asking for a dish and then not liking how it’s prepared so asking if he could go into the kitchen and re-cook things.

And there’s one dish that’s very famous. It’s named after him, it’s called Tornados Rossini, like a tornado, that’s how it’s spelled, that’s how it’s pronounced. And the story behind that name is that he was in France and he went into the kitchen to tell these French cooks that they didn’t know what they were doing, that they needed a nice Italian hand in there and he wanted to show them how to remake his favorite combination of food, which is filet mignon, truffles and foie gras. And so he was redoing it and the chef, of course, of this 4 star restaurant is screaming I can’t stand looking at you in here! I can’t stand looking at this! What are you doing I can’t look at this anymore! And Rossini turned and said, so then, turn your back. Tornez le dos in French. Which sounded sort of thru the way that the story got evolved to tornados instead of Tornez le dos.

Carolyn: OK, so it’s really, what’s the full name of the dish?

Francine: It’s really called Tornados, mispronounced, misspelled you know, like a storm, but it’s really called Tornez le dos. Turn your back.

Carolyn: I love the way these stories evolve.

Francine: A little urban myth, a little fact. It’s a delicious dish anyway. It’s a really heavy dish when you do it as a main course. In Opera Lovers Cookbook I do it as a little appetizer so you get just a little nibble. So one little filet mignon could serve like 6 people.

Carolyn: Puccini. Each dish celebrates his exotic operas. Can we talk a little bit about that?

Francine: Well, Puccini is uber Italian. I mean he was very connected to his Tuscany, very connected to Italy. But yet he set his operas in some pretty far flung locales. I mean, he’s got Madame Butterfly in Japan, he’s got La Fanciulla in America so I did a very eclectic buffet for Puccini. So I do some fun things. Tea eggs for the MB chapter and a ginger martini, sort of a Japanesey flavors. Tea eggs are just eggs that you boil then you crack the shells so it looks all broken up and then you soak it in the fridge for a few days in tea and some spices which flavors the egg but also gives it this pretty marble look. So that’s one example of a kind of far flung kind of recipe. It’s not Italian but it’s inspired by how eclectic his locales are.

Carolyn: The other thing I love about the book is I don’t know of another art discipline, or theatric discipline that’s so connected with eating as opera. I mean there’s just so many operas where you’ve got these fantastic ballroom scenes and banquet scenes and the actions revolving around the food.

Francine:One of my favorite categories are all the wonderful drinking songs in a sense, the toasting songs. Like in Don Giovanni, there’s a wonderful what they call a champagne aria. It’s really called Fin ch'han dal vino, just this very lively, one minute aria where he’s kind of telling his servant, go get every male guest drunk at the party because I want to sleep with all the wives.

Of course Don Giovanni is just this horrible character. But it’s a funny song and it’s one of the classic drinking songs. And of course the most beautiful probably is Brindisi from La Traviata. Libiamo, just that beautiful song that I think is the essence of the Italian spirit of you know, lift you glass, rejoice. The sparkling wine, the bubbliness, the effervescence of life that is in this glass of champagne or prosecco is something to be celebrated. And all the bubbliness of Italy’s wonderful sparkling wines just goes with the rhythm of the music and just is the perfect, perfect backdrop to a wonderful song celebrating what I think is some of the best of Italy. Our wine, toasting, having fun, enjoying life, celebrating life.

Carolyn: When Francine was a little girl, her Grandmother’s cooking rituals brought opera to life.

Francine: My grandmother would really cook to different arias. She’d pull out a certain one and so really felt like it was part of the recipe. Grandma’s got to go get this particular album, puts it on, puts it in a certain place. OK, now it’s the time to stir the risotto because this section’s going to last for whatever, 15, 17 minutes that she needs to make risotto. When she was going to cut onions, she go take out Madam Butterfly for the suicide aria and she says, I’m going to cry, I might as well have a good reason. And you can kind of hear the heart-wrenchingness of it, without hitting you on the head. It was just a wonderful music lesson to show the emotions that are in it, the fun of it, you know, when something is bubbling and boiling she’d put on something else very lively. So I think that cooking to opera can be a lot of fun and a great way to introduce it to yourself or to kids.

Carolyn: You know what’s wonderful about that? It makes opera approachable. This is something that you use while you’re doing your everyday things like cooking, opera is your accompaniment to that. As opposed to opera being some sort of rarified event that’s very formal and very separate from the rest of your life. This is like, no, it’s in my kitchen!

Francine: That’s a great point and why I like sharing with everyone that Rossini knew people needed a break. I do think it’s become something so fu-fu, high brow that we forget that this was supposed to be an entertainment form. This was fun, it’s OK to take it in snippets, you don’t have to sit with your hands folded in your lap. You can have a little bit. You can have more and you can take it when you like and that’s why I love the fact that CDs are now so great. You can have a little bit of it, and I also love that it’s in movie theaters now. So you can go for a very affordable price and experience the movie in a theater setting. If you do choose to want to sit and sort of see and listen to the whole thing from beginning to end, but I think it’s OK to just pick and choose your arias. And the Metropolitan Opera in fact, even made a little CD of just an assortment of different arias. They put the label of Opera Lovers Cookbook on it, and it’s a kind of CD for entertaining.

Carolyn: No kidding!

Francine: It’s sold in their wonderful giftshop, it’s the Opera Lovers Cookbook CD. Some of my favorites, some fun ones, a whole big mix. So when you are entertaining you can have a nibble of that, little piece of that, little bite of that.

To learn more, visit francinesegan.com.

Italy and Chocolate: An Affair to Remember

This is the transcipt of the podcast appearing on our podcast page.

Carolyn: Ahhh, chocolate! It makes everything better. It enhances romance, creates mouthwatering desserts and warms cold, wintery nights. Beautiful cacao trees grow in humid climates and are graced with small, pink flowers. The fruit of the tree is a brightly colored pod containing 20 to 60 seeds, or what we know as cocoa beans.

Here to speak with us about the history of chocolate and Italy is food historian, writer and lecturer Francine Segan. Francine appears regularly on radio and TV including CBS, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel and of course, the Food Network. Francine is the author of such wonderful cookbooks as The Philosopher’s Kitchen, Movie Menus, Shakespeare’s Kitchen and the Opera Lovers CookBook.

In this program, Francine takes us on a journey through the history of Italy’s unique relationship with chocolate, past and present.

Francine: For me, chocolate and Italy are extremely tied. The first connection is that Columbus was the first European to set eyes on cocoa beans. On his 3rd trip over, he was gathering things, looking for trading vessels and he saw a Mayan trading ship near what’s now modern day Honduras, he got on the ship and with sign language he saw this basket filled with these beans. He called them almonds, he couldn’t tell what they were, he’d never seen this. He knew they were very expensive so he wanted to bring some back to Queen Isabella. So he was the first European, so he “discovered” cocoa beans just like he “discovered” America and brought them over to Europe. So he’s the very first.

So it’s got, like immediately we’ve got the Italian connection. And then the next big wave of connection just from an historic point of view. What happened was then, the Spanish were the main ones who were doing first trade. So chocolate first came into Spain, but then scooted right into Italy. When the Italians got a hold of it, they immediately, just like they do with ingredients, they played around.

The Italians first saw chocolate as a drink. That is the way chocolate was for most of its history, 90% of its history. It was a ceremonial drink in the New World, when it went to Mexico it was a drink. In Spain all they did was make hot chocolate, just like, that’s what they had heard that it’s done in the New World, that’s all they did.

The Italians used it as drink, they did it as a drink, but again, because they liked playing with food, they said, “Wait a minute! We have espresso. I think espresso and hot chocolate would go well together.” So they mixed it.

So they made a drink called bicerin which was very popular up in the north, near Torino, where it was created. The saucer was really invented because of hot chocolate. The fancy ladies were drinking the hot chocolate and it would spill on their gowns. So they started to make more of a bigger base of a saucer and more of a base for where the space goes for the cup. And that’s all because of hot chocolate.

Carolyn: This was just the beginning of Italian innovations with chocolate.

Francine: The Italians said, “Wait a minute! This is a seed. We have other seeds, fennel seeds. We cook with fennel seeds. We could grind these. We can cook with this. Why are we only making a drink? Let’s grind this and see what happens. They were the very first. It is not the Mexicans with mole sauce. Mole sauce was a sauce that was an old, old Mexican recipe, but only the addition of chocolate happened a little bit later actually than the Italians.

It’s kind of like that double invention. They both came up with it. I’m not saying the Italians came over and showed the Mexicans. It was kind of, both of them did it at the same-ish time, but it was the Italians first. More documented. They would grate it, grind these little cocoa beans after they toasted them, put it on polenta, risotto and pasta dishes. Then they did a lot of sauces for wild game.

Rabbit, duck, boar that had a little cocoa. Little chocolate. And still today you’ll find it, especially in the Piedmont area and Tuscany. Just that little hint of chocolate. Again, just like a seasoning. It’s not incredibly overpowering. The Italians were very wise about how they just put things in little tiny measures so you taste every ingredient. Now all the gourmet restaurants have some kind of chocolate savory dish. But the Italians were the first.

They were also the first to flavor chocolate with flowers. There was a very famous scientist who was actually a physician to Cosimo de Medici and his name is Francesco Redi. But he’s also known for saying, “If I put some nice jasmine flowers into these ground up cocoa beans I think it will taste good.” And so he made a flower infused chocolate which nowadays, we infuse flowers in so many flavors. But he was the first.

Carolyn: No chocolate journey is complete without understanding how it took on its most famous form: chocolate candy.

Francine: and so he made a flower infused chocolate which nowadays, we infuse flowers in so many flavors. But he was the first.

Italy then played more and they made the very first paper coated piece of candy. What happened was in the middle of the 1800s there was a war, there was embargo, there were shortages. And Northern Italy, the very rich part who loved their chocolate didn’t get enough chocolate from the New World. The ships were too busy fighting.

So they said, “What are we going to do? We need to expand, extend this chocolate, we need to stick in some other ingredient.” But they don’t like to put fillers; Italians love pure flavors. So they said, “We don’t have any more cocoa beans, we’re running out, what can we do to expand it a little? We have hazelnuts. Let’s toast it, grind it, see if it goes together.”

It was delicious. And that’s how was born a candy that’s the #1 selling candy in Italy now, Gianduiotti. That’s that little upside canoe looking candy of hazelnut and chocolate. And then in the 1800’s they made it out of the machines and it comes into this little long form and it was about 50% hazelnut and 50% chocolate. So they got to have double the candy for half the chocolate and they wrapped it in paper so they could toss it out at Carnevale as a way to introduce it to people.

It became a huge, huge best seller and it was an Italian chocolate company called Caffarel who invented it. And still today, they’re up in Piemonte making wonderful chocolate and specializing in Gianduiotti and other candies.

and that whole wonderful arc of the Italians being so fantastic with chocolate treating it as the spice that it really is, and using it in savory foods, playing around with it and creating wonderful candies that are floral infused or treated with hazelnut. Of course they invented Nutella.

That was the same thing. A shortage after WWII caused the need for the Italians to say whoops, what are we going to do? We have expand this chocolate. So they took the Gianduiotti idea and did the hazelnut but made it a little bit more creamy so it can be a spread.

And Ferrero who makes Nutella just recently did a wonderful show in the town where the factory is located, in Alba, an art exhibit, artifacts and antiques, tracing chocolate’s history from the ancient Mayan times thru to today. Showing the way the Mayans ground it, the pictures and paintings that were done of it, of all the kinds of drinks, the wonderful hot chocolate cups that were used.

Carolyn: Each region of Italy treats chocolate differently.

Francine: I feel like what the Italians do is, they look at something and they say, ok, I want to do this, too, I want to make something chocolate. What can I do to put my fingerprint on this?

I love the Baci! There’s a whole hazelnut in there! and that ground up hazelnut, it’s like a perfect thing in your mouth.

Peyrano in Torino, an old, old company does this wonderful chocolate with spirits. Sicilian chocolate is known for retaining the style of making chocolate back to the way it was in ancient times. They stone grind it only, so it’s coarse, it’s not conched, it’s not made fine, fine, fine so there’s a kind of graininess, earthiness to it. That comes because when they got it, they chose to keep it to that old style of making it. Sicily is like a different country!

Carolyn: Just ask them!

Francine: Tuscany is like a different country. I mean, they feel like they were just unified a few minutes ago.

Carolyn: Exactly! And it’s not going to stick!

Francine: I can point to so many chocolate companies like Venchi which is a chocolate company in Cuneo, up in Piemonte. They do something called chocolate caviar. That’s like little pearls of wonderfulness in your mouth.

It looks like caviar but it’s these little tumbled pearls of perfect shiny, beautiful chocolate that you could eat plain, you could sprinkle on ice cream. But it’s also perfect in savory dishes. You could just sprinkle a little on pasta that’s made with a little sage and butter. In fact the person who invented it, one of the principals of the company did it as honoring the 175th anniversary of the company, because he wanted to kind of play around with that idea of just a little morsel of chocolate presented in this special way. And there’s nobody else in the world making chocolate caviar.

Anyway, I think every region of Italy that deals with chocolate, everybody treats it in a wonderful and unique and interesting way. It’s another reason to travel to Italy in the damp and dreary cold weather, because that’s when you get more chocolate.

Carolyn: Italy’s chocolate legacy continues today by dominating the awards at world chocolate competitions. A Tuscan company, Amedei, is an artisanal manufacturer of gourmet chocolates. From 2006-2009, Amedei swept the gold medals from the London-based Academy of Chocolate. Amedei won the Academy’s highest award, the Golden Bean, for the best bean-to-bar chocolate, for its creation, Amedei '9' or Amedei Nine.

Francine: Best makers of chocolate, of really taking it from the bean, from the source, getting the best ingredients, then toasting them perfectly, grinding them beautifully and creating the most wonderful chocolate.

When you open it, it’s got all the hallmarks of great chocolate. It really makes you, you open the wrapping paper and right away you see that it’s beautifully glossy which shows that it’s perfectly tempered. Then when you crack it you hear a very crisp crack, which shows again that it’s beautifully tempered. There’s not a little crumbs that fall or a little bendy feel. It’s just very crisp. And then the aroma. It’s very aromatic so that you really can connect back with the fact that this bean is in a fruit, it’s in the tropics. It’s got floral scents and nut scents. And the taste!

They also these single origin which is very popular, mono-origin. Because just like wine from the Bordeaux region tastes a certain way, Barolo is a certain way because it comes from a certain region, where the cocoa beans grow affects how it tastes.

And Amedei does a wonderful line of single origin chocolates, so that you taste, what does Ecuador chocolate taste like if the beans only come from Ecuador, versus San Tomei, Madagascar in Africa?. Each of these tastes different even though the percentage of chocolate is exactly the same, techniques are the same. It’s kind of fun to just explore a food and see how nuanced it can be.

And I think that is what the Italians thru time have consistently done in a wonderful way that’s very satisfying for a foodie. They take an ingredient and you really, they respect it, they treat it well, they don’t over-treat it, and you as the taster get to taste the true ingredient. So many foods you kind of sit there like, “Can I have the menu back? I don’t remember what I ordered. What is in this?” Not with Italian food, not with good Italian food. You know what you’re eating.

So it’s a wonderful full circle of the Italian being the first European to set eyes on coca beans to now an Italian again, bringing the Bean to Bar at such a high level.

If you live in the Westchester County, New York area, you can catch Francine Segan at the WICC in Tuckahoe, NY on April 21, 2009, where she will present a lively talk on Italian Entertaining through the Ages.

To learn more about this event and all of Francine’s upcoming appearances, go to francinesegan.com and click on Events and Appearances.

This is Carolyn Masone for essenceofitaly.net. Thanks for listening!