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

Wednesday Will – A Midsummer Night’s Spaghetti with Saffron and Lamb

Though Shakespeare often, ah, borrowed the basis for his recipes every so often he came up with something completely different. His immensely popular Midsummer Spaghetti is one of those original dishes. It’s been rumored that he got the idea after attending a wedding in Greece at which peculiar homegrown ouzo was served, but Shakespeare’s always been mute on the point.

literary recipe: Dan Brown’s Travel Pasta with Butter, Sage and Ricotta

“That was really, really close,” you adroitly say after you’ve escaped by running through a mysterious antique ruin that just happened to have a store of the special butter made from the milk of cows fed exclusively on a rare flower that grows only on one particular European hillside that you were looking for. Eureka!

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.  

Wednesday Will: Cooking with The Bard

But there’s a whole lot more to the bard’s culinary story – the Shakespearean larder teems with intriguingly named foods. How about chewets, gallimaufries, and fools? (That’s small pies, mixtures and spiced, fruity custard for modern eaters.) And do you know your codlings from your carbonadoes and your umbles from your jumbles?

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.

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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