Fagioli all’uccelletto – Beans as Birds

Check out the latest addition to our online cookbook: Fagioli all’uccelletto – Beans as Birds. An archetypical Tuscan dish, Fagioli all’uccelletto are easy to prepare and absolutely tasty – great comfort food!

We prepare it with cannellini beans, a white variety of beans, a bit elongated and not too big. This dish can be served as a vegetarian secondo, accompanied with slices of toasted rustic bread, or as a side dish for boiled meats or sausages.

We can only guess at the origin of the peculiar name of this dish… As the father of the Italian cuisine, Pellegrino Artusi, hypothesized, the name might derive from the fact that in the old days birds were cooked with the same kind of seasoning – sage, garlic and tomatoes.

Find out more about Pellegrino Artusi on Wikipedia.

In the second part of the XIX century, Pellegrino Artusi was the first to assemble in one book – La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well) – recipes from different regions of Italy. Some might sound a bit strange today, as certain ingredients are no longer in common use, but the stories he tells about some of the recipes and his humorous tone are a real scream! Find his book on Amazon…

 

Where our food comes from

You cannot always believe what is written on the can. Any British shopper browsing Asda’s supermarket shelves for a touch of the Mediterranean culinary lifestyle might have been forgiven for thinking that the labels on the cans of an own-brand tomato puree meant what they said. After all, they read: “Produced in Italy”.

But that was not to be quite the whole story, thanks to the often opaque world of EU consumer law. When police in Angri, southern Italy, raided Asda’s supplier, they found the tomato puree had been imported from China.

Read more….

http://irpi.eu/pulp-fiction-asdas-made-in-italy-tomato-puree-hails-from-china/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/27/asda-italy-tomato-puree-china

The Quality of Our Food

We are lucky enough to be able to buy olive directly from the producers, and this article below on the Investigative Reporting Project Italy site shows that in the face of increasing demand for olive oil in China and the US, there is an increasing tendency for unscrupulous producers to provide sub-standard or even faked oil. We have been struck by how cheaply some olive oil is sold here in France, sometimes half the price of what we pay when buying straight from the producers – this article may point to the reasons for this…

http://irpi.eu/valpesana-procura-di-siena-trova-il-deodorato/