Prosciutto

CHEDDAR CHEESE AND APPLES are a classic American pairing, and a little prosciutto elevates a simple grilled cheese sandwich to a satisfying midday meal. In this sandwich we use nitrate-free prosciutto, which is available in most specialty stores.

I’ve given an American Southern staple an Italian spin with the addition of Parmesan. The cornmeal makes these biscuits sturdy enough to pack on a picnic, and you can stuff them with smoked salmon (my fave), sliced turkey or ham, or even grilled veggies. Hot out of the oven, they are pretty terrific with just a bit of lemon butter.

This salad is a new twist on the classic combo of melon and prosciutto. Grilled asparagus keeps a slight crunch and also has a smoky char to it that pairs with the creaminess and subtle flavor of mozzarella and the fruitiness of melon. To top it off: crumbled prosciutto. I’ve always loved the salty tang of prosciutto, but since I started baking thin slices of it to make brittle, crispy chips, my love has become a full-blown obsession; they just seem to make everything taste better.

Piadini look a lot like pizzas, but because the crust is made without yeast and does not need to rise, they are much quicker and easier to make. Piadini are also cooked on the grill rather than baked in the oven, which gives them a nice, smoky flavor and crunchy crust. While you can top a piadina with anything you like, including tomato sauce and mozzarella, this sauceless combination is very typical of northern Italy, where piadini are especially popular.

Rome is famous for its artichokes, and in the Jewish district you can buy amazing fried whole artichokes on street corners. Back home, I use frozen artichokes for ease and I love combining them with beans in a creamy dip for bruschetta, a favorite snack throughout Italy. The crispy, salty prosciutto highlights the subtle flavor of the artichokes and adds crunch.

The sweetest, best kind of dates are Medjools. They’re large, so they are easy to fill, meaty, and chewy. Stuffed with goat cheese and wrapped in prosciutto, they provide a perfect sweet-salty mouthful in every bite. Serve these with a crisp white wine as the ideal before-dinner tidbit.

Water-based soups are great, but many soups are indisputably better when made with meat stock. Of course you don’t always have stock, and there are short cuts that produce in-between soups. One of the easiest and most effective ways of making a potent soup quickly and without stock is to start with a small piece of prosciutto or other dry-cured ham. The long aging process this meat undergoes—almost always a year or more—ensures an intense flavor that is quickly transferred to anything in which it is cooked, including water. To save time, chop the vegetables and add them one at a time while you’re rendering the ham; by the time you’re done chopping, you’ll have added all the ingredients except water. And if you bring the water to a boil before you begin chopping, you really minimize cooking time, producing a thick, rich soup in less than thirty minutes. Do not omit the final drizzle of olive oil; its freshness really brings this soup to life.

A pasta dish kids love and one that became traditional with mine whenever we left them with a sitter for the evening. It’s best if the ham is prosciutto, the cream thick and fresh, and the peas just shelled, but it’s pretty good with supermarket ham and cream and frozen peas, and I’ve made it that way plenty of times. For variety, add about a cup of sliced button mushrooms to the ham mixture.

A Roman treat and a fine use for leftover rice (especially risotto). Formally called supplì al telefono because the stringy mozzarella center stretches when you bite through the center and is reminiscent of telephone wires, this is a snack, or a very informal starter. If you use packaged bread crumbs, make sure they’re unseasoned.

Potato croquettes are not served much in Italy, except around Rome. When I first began working in Italian American restaurants, potato croquettes were always paired with a vegetable as a side dish. I grew fond of the dish, I guess, because it combines two things Americans love: mashed potatoes and fried things.

I had this dish at Roberto’s on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. The smokiness of the provola is the defining element that graces the dish.

Veal saltimbocca, which literally translates as “jumps in the mouth,” hails from Rome. It is rather simple, but simplicity is hard to achieve. In the late 1960s, when I worked in Italian restaurants to help pay for my college tuition, veal saltimbocca was always on the menu but never tasted like it did in Rome. The important flavor ingredients here are the prosciutto and the fresh sage. The early immigrants were curing hams into prosciutto at home, which eventually developed into formal businesses, such as the Volpi & Co. in St. Louis, now known as Volpi Foods. In those days, fresh herbs were hard to find—unless you were Italian and grew them at home. By the time I opened Felidia in the 1980s, fresh herbs were coming to the supermarkets, and by the 1990s, Prosciutto di Parma began crossing the ocean, so now the saltimbocca has regained its true flavors. So, unless you use fresh sage, skip it.

“Straw and hay,” as the name of this pasta recipe translates, is a common dish in Italy, especially in northern Italy, Emilia-Romagna, the heart of fresh pasta making. It always includes a little prosciutto, the sauce is cream-based, and it needs lots of grated cheese. Here I added some chopped scallions for freshness, although the dish always has peas. It is best if made with fresh pasta, but dry fettuccine will still yield a perfectly delicious dish.

Pork meat, which is nutritional and economical, is used a lot in Italy. Using the tenderloin for this dish guarantees a tender result, but one can use boneless shoulder or leg meat instead, cutting it into thin slices. You can also make this dish with chicken breast or boneless chicken legs. The sun-dried tomatoes bring a lot of flavor to the dish; I use them whole, or sometimes purée them in a processor and spread the paste on the meat, but in this recipe I slice them.

This sandwich was my grandfather’s favorite sandwich for merenda, the midmorning snack. My grandmother would use the prosciutto scraps with bits and pieces of fat, and when there was no prosciutto, she would use pancetta.

With its developed flavor and moist, saucy consistency, risotto is still special the day after—it’s not just cold rice. Riso Sartù is a dish I always enjoy when visiting my cousin Clara Pacelli in Naples. It is one of the most wonderful ways I know to transform cooked risotto into something new. The risotto is blended with meat sauce, green peas, and lots of grated cheese and packed into small molds with morsels of egg, prosciutto, and mozzarella hidden inside. Baked and then unmolded, the cakes are crisp and crunchy outside—as you can see in the photo below—and creamy and chock-full of treats inside. This recipe makes six cakes with 2 1/2 cups of risotto and a cup of Ragù alla Bolognese (page 143) as the meat sauce. It is easy to multiply the formula if you have more risotto and sauce, and ovenproof cups to serve as molds. This dish might be made today with leftovers, but traditionally it was the specialty of the Neapolitan aristocracy, and risotto was made expressly for it.

Salsa arrabbiata—literally, “angry” sauce—is a tomato-based pasta sauce made in countless versions in Italy, sometimes with meat, sometimes without, but always with some kind of hot pepper. I like bits of meat in my sauce, either thick bacon or, even better, prosciutto “end” (see below). The heat here comes from small whole pickled peppers, packed in jars of vinegar, labeled peperoncini or peperoncino (the same term I use for red pepper flakes). Though these are milder than pickled “cherry” peppers, they provide plenty of spice—especially peperoncini Toscano, which I hope you can find. The sauce should have a pleasing play of textures as well as tastes, providing nice and distinctive bites of all the ingredients. Cut the onions, peperoncini, and prosciutto (or bacon) thick enough so that they don’t get lost, or lose their shape in the tomato sauce.

This gratin of fennel wedges and strips of prosciutto drizzled with butter and topped with Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano, then baked until golden, is rich, aromatic, and irresistible. It’s also quite convenient, since you can set up the baking dish hours ahead, keep it refrigerated, then pop it into the oven just before dinner. You can make this without prosciutto or substitute bacon, and it will be delicious, but it’s even better with prosciutto. Keep in mind that the cooking of prosciutto and cheese concentrates the saltiness, but the sweetness of the fennel brings it all into balance. Serve hot for best results.

Although these savory, salty little bundles are a little too fat to truly resemble cigars, rolling the crabs in the prosciutto does employ a technique used by skilled workers in Cuba. It might also seem familiar to you if you’ve ever hand-rolled anything in papers. For directions on cleaning the soft-shell crabs, see page 32. Make sure you go easy on the salt in this dish because the prosciutto already contains plenty.

The fragrant, filling, dripping-with-oil muffuletta is New Orleans’s beloved version of a hero or hoagie. The sandwich originated at Central Grocery in 1906, and people still line up out the door to buy them there. In a traditional muffuletta, a sesame seed-speckled round loaf of crusty Italian bread is stuffed with slices of provolone, salami, mortadella, and a pungent olive salad (which ranks alongside hot sauce and beignet mix as the best souvenirs from the Quarter). A muffuletta is a cousin to one of the great street foods of Nice, the niçoise-salad-on-a-roll known as pan bagnat. The sandwich, which literally translates as “bathed bread,” is so named because the crusty bread is “bathed” in the rich oils from olives and tuna. With this preparation in mind, I created a tuna-driven version of the classic New Orleans sandwich. I think it’s a happy combination.

This recipe is an adaptation of a dish from the Troisgros Brothers, a famous restaurant in Lyon. The “gâteau” is a stack of delicate crêpes layered with creamy béchamel sauce, Gruyère or Comté cheese, ham, and prosciutto. There are countless variations to this elegant dish. You can use plain crêpes or herbed, as I do here. I sometimes make a more “locally flavored” version by folding crayfish and spinach into the béchamel (and omitting the hams). The key is cooking the assembled gâteau until it’s bubbly and brown. I like to serve this with a deeply flavored Smoked-Tomato Butter (p. 63), but this dish is great on its own. For a quick assembly, make the sauce and the crêpes a day or two in advance. Wrap the crêpes in plastic wrap and freeze until needed.

Saltimbocca, a classic Roman dish, provided the inspiration for this recipe. In our variation we replaced the traditional veal cutlets with chicken.