Soup weather, salad weather
Two fennel recipes for the weeks when winter and spring can’t quite decide — and the cook-alongs are back, finally!
What do you feel like cooking now? Now that mornings are misty and cold, and require a hot coffee to hold tightly and warm your hands and soul. Now that at lunchtime we keep the windows open to let some warm air in, along with the faint smell of hyacinths blooming a few metres down the garden. Now that afternoons are longer, and give you time to enjoy a walk at dusk, when wild greens push through the dry oak leaves and deer graze the new grass far out in the fields, near the woods. Now that evenings are still dark, when you search for the comfort of a soup, a blanket on the sofa, woolen socks as you tuck yourself in with a book.
We are in the in-between season, when I find myself craving warming soups and zesty salads in equal measure. These recipes have fed me over the past few weeks and have become faithful companions through the last stretch of winter.
I am sharing these recipes with you today, and I am also planning to cook them with you as next Sunday, 15th March, we will be back with our Cook-alongs.
We will spend one hour together, each in the comfort of our own kitchen — with our quirky oven, favourite wooden spoon and local ingredients — and cook a couple of recipes to add to your cooking repertoire.
Building and enriching your Italian cooking repertoire will be the theme of this year’s cook-alongs.
I will select recipes that have something to teach you; we will dive deep into ingredients and techniques, all while making easy, accessible dishes to feed your family and friends.
I first encountered the idea of the cooking repertoire in Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte.
When you make a dish again and again, altering it to your liking, it becomes an expression of your aesthetic, of your palate, of who you are. And when you serve that dish to guests, they come to understand you a little better. Elizabeth told me that she thinks of a cooking repertoire as a way to stay connected to all who are important in her life. She uses recipes from friends and family, as well as her own. Without a handful of recipes to start you off, cooking seems overwhelming.
- Amanda Hesser, Cooking for Mr. Latte
Our cooking class attendees are the family who helped me develop a reliable repertoire, a mental list of tested Tuscan recipes that says a lot about who I am and how I like to cook and eat.
This is also when I decided to set aside recipes designed to impress, in favour of those handy dishes you could cook at a moment’s notice, recipes that, in Amanda’s words, express your true sensibility as a cook, not your ambition. When you have guests for dinner, you can rely on your trusted collection and simply enjoy the evening.
If you learn six or eight dishes, things you will want to eat week after week, cooking won’t seem such a labor. And other cuisines will no longer feel so out of reach. You don’t need to learn everything. A few timeless dishes that you love is enough.
On the blog, I have already shared some of the recipes that make up my cooking repertoire: Florentine crespelle, Ricotta and Tuscan kale gnudi, Tuscan ragù, Beef and eggplant meatballs, Stuffed turkey breast, Baked eggplants, Apple olive oil cake, Coffee and vanilla pound cake, Ricotta crumb cake.
In the coming months I will be sharing more recipes — staples of a Tuscan and regional Italian repertoire — exploring the ingredients and the process in plenty of detail, so that you can fold them into your own collection and make Tuscan cooking your signature style. We will meet on a Sunday each month to cook these recipes together, talk about what makes them special, and discover how to make them yours.
Repertoire is also the name of a new series that Sarah Copeland has just launched in her newsletter. Over the next five weeks she will explore the essential recipes, formulas, and shopping guides that help eliminate the what’s for dinner? or what do we need at the store?—or even, a new friend is about to drop by, what can I put together from the pantry?—kinds of questions. Don’t miss it.
If the in-between season has you curious, now is a good moment to join us — 20% off until 20th March.
Let’s meet for the March Cook-along
Sunday, March 15th on Zoom (link behind the paywall)
🕘 9:00 pm CET | 8:00 pm GMT | 4:00 pm EST | 1:00 pm PST
We will be making two fennel recipes together — a velvety fennel and dill soup, and a bright artichoke, fennel and celery salad with bottarga. Two dishes for the in-between season, one to warm you, one to wake you up.
We’ll have a close look to artichokes, and we’ll learn how to clean them and use them in the kitchen, either raw or cooked. And there will be also the chance to have a preview of Vegetables the Italian way (it will finally be available in slightly more than a month!), where you can find lots of inspiration on how to cook artichokes and fennel!
This session is exclusively for paid subscribers. Can’t make it live? Don’t worry, a recording of the class will be available to all paid subscribers afterwards.
Did you know that, as a paid subscriber, you have access to the full archive of recorded sessions? It is like having your very own course in Italian cooking, with nearly 20 hours of recipes, tips and tricks, ingredient insights, and behind-the-scenes stories — all ready and waiting for you.
✨Whether it’s your first time or you’ve been with us since the beginning, I’m so glad you’re here.✨
💬 Let me know in the comments, and if you haven’t yet, subscribe to unlock the full experience: the two detailed recipes, the live Cook-Along link, a printable prep sheet, and the class recording.
What we will be cooking together
Vellutata di finocchio e aneto. Fennel and dill soup
Today’s recipe is a soup, but in Italian we wouldn’t call it simply zuppa, as that would suggest a thicker, chunkier preparation, which should also include bread — a staple in our Tuscan cuisine to make soups more filling and nutritious. It isn’t a minestra either, as that calls for a cereal of sorts, such as pasta, rice, barley or farro. The closest term to describe today’s soup is vellutata, as in the French velouté: a soup made with a small number of ingredients, puréed into a thin, creamy, velvety consistency. It often includes potatoes or cream to add richness and round it out, but I relied on chicken stock and leeks instead. Have you ever noticed how leeks, when coddled on slow heat, turn into a creamy, buttery base for soups?
The take-away.
Making this recipe and calling it yours, you will learn how to build flavour by adding a few carefully selected ingredients, one at a time. Each addition changes the character of the pot.
Artichoke, fennel and celery salad with bottarga
I have been feasting on artichokes all throughout winter, mainly Sardinian varieties, and now, finally, Tuscan artichokes are coming to the market. The artichoke is probably the vegetable that best carries you from winter to spring in the kitchen — a faithful companion as the days grow longer and lighter, and your preferences at the table shift towards fresher, zingier dishes.
Artichokes are at their best when fried (or double fried, as in carciofi alla giudia from Rome), braised with mounds of fresh herbs and garlic, or eaten raw in a pinzimonio (one of the most classic, and satisfying, of Italian appetisers — raw vegetables dipped in extra virgin olive oil and salt), or shaved into a salad, as we are doing today.
As artichokes tend to be expensive, I decided to pair them with other vegetables that share the same clean, crunchy character: fennel and celery.
The take-away.
Making this salad and calling it yours, you will learn how to compose a dish where every ingredient earns its place. Here, fennel, celery and artichoke each bring a different kind of crunch and a subtly different bitterness, the parsley lifts everything with a flash of green freshness, the citronette ties it all together with the lightest of touches, and the bottarga does the work of salt and umami in a single shaving.
You will also notice how fennel behaves in two completely different ways depending on how you treat it: raw, as here, it is crisp and assertive, with that distinctive aniseed edge. Cooked low and slow, as in the soup, it turns sweet, yielding and almost unrecognisable. Same ingredient, two different personalities. Knowing this opens up a whole new way of thinking about the vegetables you already have in your kitchen.
Everything’s waiting for you just behind the paywall, including the link to join the cook-along and the Cook Along Working Sheet.