Welcome to The Weary Ham Hock (Lo Stinco Stanco)

In this blog, we share budget-friendly recipes, traditional Italian plates, stories and humor. We hope you enjoy.

Latest Recipes

Literary Recipe: Calvino’s Floating Bucatini (98 years this month)

The windows of the kitchen are foggy now with the steam that has condensed on them while you were cooking. It’s almost 8:30, time for dinner. You take the big serving dish out into the dining room where everyone is waiting. As you serve out the pasta, you notice that the sauce is slightly watery. It’s supposed to be, making the noodles appear to float just above the reddish pools of sauce beneath. And since the individual bowls are translucent black, the reddish pools themselves also appear to float in the bowls above the blackness as if hovering over a void. You sit down at the head of the table. Then you twirl some of the bucatini onto a fork to taste them. After swallowing you realize ‘Hey, I’ve just eaten some of Calvino’s floating bucatini!’

Bucatini Fluttuanti per una Notte d’Inverno di Calvino (98 anni)

Lettore, alzati e vai in cucina. Guardi fuori dalla finestra. Fa freddo, non ti pare? Meno male che sei qui dentro al caldo. Giri verso l’interno e vai a mettere il tuo grembiule. Sicuramente non vorresti sporcare i vestiti. Stasera ci saranno degli ospiti e un po’ d’eleganza non guasta. Ora rilassati, appoggi questo libro – aperto sulla ricetta di Calvino – accanto al lavandino. Stai per preparare i Bucatini Fluttuanti di Calvino. E ‘una buona ricetta e richiede la tua attenzione. Percio’ spegni il telefonino – non vorresti essere disturbato da eventuali chiamate di lavoro o altro – poi afferri un buon coltello. Si inizia il piatto con la pulizia dei fiori di zucca, e affettando il lardo…

Wednesday Will: Mercutio’s Fois Gras

Before opening his now world-renowned restaurant The Mab, Mercutio worked alongside Romeo and Juliet in Verona. He and Romeo were best friends, so much so that Mercutio decided to work for a short spell at The Globe not long after the young couple emigrated from Italy. There, his brilliant juxtapositions of textures and flavors were quickly noticed, prompting local chef and food critic Dryden to note that Shakespeare’s kitchen “show’d the best of its skill in Mercutio.” However, unable to compromise his inventive nature into The Globe’s more structured kitchen, William was forced to dismiss him.

Stories and Poems

Food Science – Professional palates are terrible at judging wine

Anyone can learn and appreciate but without those conditions…consistency, already nearly impossible in the typical context of wine tasting competitions with a bizzilion wines out of context, is unlikely. I suppose flavor perception might be comparable metaphorically to perfect pitch. Money can’t buy it. But as it seems to be increasingly evident, the notion of removal from context of sensory inputs, of sort of absolute qualia, probably isn’t usually descriptively useful. Maybe ever. Perception, integration and response seem to occur on many levels, use parallel pathways, and therefor per force are contextually influenced. Plus, well, this anglo-saxon notion of absolute point scores and our increasing use of uncouth symbolic representations of wealth…don’t change the fact that a cheap, disdained bottle of acidic, cherry-ish fast-fermented novello is the perfect fermented drinking sauce to accompany a paper roll full of steaming hot roasted chestnuts – and together they make a complex, culinary whiz. You need neither expertise nor wealth to enjoy that. (It might be, of late, better to have neither.)

Roman Flavors – Sushi at Hamasei

Why on earth would you want to have to sushi in Rome? With all the traditional alternatives, trattorie, restaurants, enoteche, osterie, pizzerie, regional take-away joints, delis for fresh sandwiches, etc., is your urge for a sushi fix that uncontainable that you just gotta’ have some hunks of raw fish with vinegared rice, a little ugly mound of green wasabi and another little ugly pinkish mound of sliced ginger root? Well, yes.  

Travel Food

Fresh Fish in Rome

On balance, the Swiss are, well, easier to live with. (Except, perhaps, when they drive. What do you get when 4 Swiss drivers pause at the same stop sign? A traffic jam.) But after 6 months of Swiss food, and a coming home meal of wild sea bass flavored with capers, a little sage and rosemary, potatoes and Roman broccoli on the side and topped off by a good cassata for dessert, God bless Italy.

Roman Flavors – Sushi at Hamasei

Why on earth would you want to have to sushi in Rome? With all the traditional alternatives, trattorie, restaurants, enoteche, osterie, pizzerie, regional take-away joints, delis for fresh sandwiches, etc., is your urge for a sushi fix that uncontainable that you just gotta’ have some hunks of raw fish with vinegared rice, a little ugly mound of green wasabi and another little ugly pinkish mound of sliced ginger root? Well, yes.  

Travel Food – Delis in Rome (Fontana di Trevi) : Kiss My Mozzarella

“Kiss mine,” or a dialogue something like that happened in the 18th century between Nick Salvi – the guy mostly responsible for the above Trevi Fountian – and a barber who didn’t much care for Nicola’s handiwork, and wasn’t shy about saying so. You can still see where said barber’s shop was in the above photo. It’s the shop behind that irregular outcropping in back. That’s of course because Salvi obliged the barber’s reticence with a special deviation – a cup sculpted into a rock large enough to block the loose-tongued Figaro’s view.  

Peach Iced Tea in Rome

Over the past few years the tradition of Italian bars to make their own iced teas has slipped, giving way to the usual cans of Nestea or, if you’re lucky, Twinnings. (New EU regulations have seen to that.) But at the almost legendary ‘Caffeteria’, now called ‘Caffe Napolitano’, that tradition is going strong. They make their own peach granita and lightly sweetened tea and mix the two together. The result is outstanding, maybe number 79 on the list of 101 things to do while you’re alive.

Travel Food – Sion, Switzerland: Angelucci – the best cold cuts. (video)

One day I was wandering about the Friday farmer’s market in a different city not so far away (Sion) a bit hopelessly – in most of Switzerland they have great cheese and great, ah, cheese and then they also have really good, uh, cheese. But God help you if you’re looking for anything else. It’s almost better to head for the nearest kebab joint – when my eyes at first, then nose, spotted this odd oasis in the distance. I sauntered up close presuming that as I did I’d find the usual leather-ish lunch meats and local salami which usually have the color, consistency and flavor of, say, slightly burned marshmallows with little pieces of breakfast cereal in it.

Roman Flavors – Gelato

It’s mentioned in the bible, and even Sicilian ‘sorbetto’ derives from the Arabic ‘scherbet’ (sweet snow) because one of Muhammad’s entourage figured out a way to freeze fruit juice and mix it into containers filled with ice. Which was a very good thing, because after the fall of the Roman empire flavored ices disappeared in the west and were only re-introduced later. Just don’t tell any Sicilian that his or her fantastic ices and ice creams were first invented by a Muslim Arab. Unless you want some melting gelato staining your shirt.

Colazione da Ciampini – quartiere del tridente (Roma)

Anche se ho detto ‘Ciao’ abbastanza ad alta voce il cavallo più vicino a quanto pare non mi ha sentito fino a quando ero a pochi metri da lui. Sorpreso, il cavallo e saltato un po ‘indietro, nitrì, e poi ha fatto qualcosa che non sapevo che i cavalli potessero fare: mi ringhiò. Inoltre mentre mi allontanavo ci siamo guardati negli occhi a vicenda e sono abbastanza sicuro che il suo sguardo verso di me significava ‘stronzo’. Comunque.

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