New York Times Italian Recipes

Here’s a menu I can get excited about, featuring some of my favorite foods. Fresh mozzarella! Radicchio! Pasta! Crucifers! Cookies! Sometimes, that’s a very good departure point — indulging your own whims, making what you like. And, this month, I’m leaning in an Italian direction, a wistful cook’s response to the urge to get on a plane.

We start with an easy antipasto. You slice some fresh mozzarella, grill some radicchio and make a green sauce. But, as they say, the devil’s in the details.

Pick up the best mozzarella you can find for this simple antipasto.Credit... David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Creamy Polenta With Parmesan And Sausage Recipe

You want a really good mozzarella. True mozzarella is made from water buffalo milk, and there are some U.S. producers. But, for an American mozzarella that’s excellent and more widely available, look for the cow’s milk type, known as fior di latte in Italy. Whatever you use, there are two caveats for the best experience: The mozzarella must be as fresh as possible, and it must not be served straight from the refrigerator. Allow it to come to cool room temperature, and it will taste a thousand times better. (This is true of most cheeses, by the way.)

In my hemisphere, it is not yet the season to serve mozzarella with tomatoes, so this antipasto pairs it instead with charred radicchio. The contrast is quite pleasurable: Sweet, milky mozzarella meets slightly bitter radicchio, still a bit warm, blackened and smoky from high heat. You cut the radicchio into wedges and cook it in a cast-iron pan, on the grill or under the broiler until well charred and slightly softened.

All that is left to concoct is an easy salsa verde, made with extra-virgin olive oil, hand-chopped fresh green herbs, capers and lemon. Spoon that over the dish to complete it.

Pasta Alla Vodka Recipe

Complete with two sauces, this baked pasta makes for a luxurious main course.Credit... David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

For the main course, it’s a baked pasta with two kinds of cruciferous vegetables, cauliflower and broccoli rabe. For me, that’s a thrill. You may get more oohs-and-ahs if you call it rigatoni al forno. But please humor me, and don’t call it a “pasta bake.”

The vegetables may be humble, but the resulting dish is a luxurious affair, with two sauces. First, a creamy white béchamel sauce is employed to toss with the pasta and vegetables. The dish gets a generous showering of grated cheese before it heads to the oven. It emerges, bubbly and bronzed and crisp on top, and, finally, a bright, light tomato sauce adorns each serving.

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Putting it together is somewhat like committing to building a lasagna — a little fussy, a lot of components — but once assembled, your labor is well worth the reward. No, it’s not a 30-minute kitchen session. But you can, and should, assemble it all in advance, then pop it in the oven when you please. Consider it a clever way to prepare dinner during daylight hours, so all the work is out of the way when you’d normally be in the kitchen.

These Sicilian Almond Cookies require minimal ingredients and are equal parts crisp and chewy.Credit... David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

And, though I always say I’m not big on dessert, I’m an utter fool for a good cookie, apt to devour at least two or three right off the bat. Chocolate chip doesn’t tempt me, but any cookie with nuts, especially almonds, does. The most delectable Sicilian almond cookies I know are made with just a few ingredients: blanched almonds, sugar and egg whites.

Everyday Italian: 125 Simple And Delicious Recipes: Giada De Laurentiis: 9781400052585: Amazon.com: Books

Similar to macaroons, they are crisp on the outside, with a perfumed chewy interior. They can be baked plain, or decorated with candied fruit or whole almonds. Or they can be made into thumbprint cookies, filled with a spoonful of good jam. Another good project to accomplish in advance, these cookies keep well in an airtight tin for several days, ready to serve at a moment’s notice. To be on the safe side, however, I’d advise hiding the tin.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described an antipasto. The word implies that a greater meal, and not necessarily a pasta course, will follow.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: If Wishes Were Dishes, I’d Be in Italy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeMy father was an Englishman who left Liverpool, his rainy hometown, and settled in sunny Honolulu, where he nevertheless complained that his feet were always cold. In the kitchen, he kept a reminder of his birthright: a dark, skinny-necked bottle of Worcestershire sauce. For years, I knew it only as Lea & Perrins, the name of its maker. (The company, founded in 1837, is now a subsidiary of Kraft Heinz, the fifth-largest food and beverage company in the world.)

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As the cook in the family, my father massaged drops of that thin brown sauce into hamburgers and meatballs, giving them a faint, briny funk. In 1908, the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda isolated the source of this taste as L-glutamate, an amino acid, and called the flavor umami. The rest of the world ignored this discovery until, in 2002, scientists identified specially dedicated glutamate receptors in the mouth, confirming umami as one of the primary tastes.

My father was an exacting eater and suspicious of certain ingredients. (Cilantro above all he despised.) But I don’t think he ever inspected the label on that Lea & Perrins bottle, which would have revealed to him the presence of fermented glutamate-rich anchovies, a food that in no other form was allowed to cross the threshold of our house. My mother, having grown up in the Philippines, was more at ease with the concept of tiny, oily fish packed in salt and left to slowly decompose (the high concentration of salt inhibits the growth of harmful bacteria) until they yield their liquid essence, which is used both in cooking and as a condiment, lending a note thrillingly close to rot, of dank earth and the deepest sea.

In Tagalog, this is patis, cousin to nuoc mam in Vietnam and nam pla in Thailand. In the West, it is simply “fish sauce, ” and often regarded as an Eastern tradition. But the ancient Romans had their own versions, garum and liquamen (which may have been synonyms or distinct types or one a subclass of the other; scholars differ). Liquamen appears in almost every recipe of Apicius’ “De Re Coquinaria, ” attributed to the first century A.D. and the only extant cookbook from that era. To Pliny the Elder, garum was a liquid “of a very exquisite nature, ” whose cost rivaled that of perfume. To the Stoic philosopher Seneca, it was a dangerous indulgence that could corrupt one’s insides, both physical and spiritual — but then again, he frowned on oysters too.

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No one knows quite why garum fell out of favor. Maybe it was the high taxes on salt to fund Roman wars toward the end of the empire, or the increasing brazenness of pirates, disrupting the lives of fishermen. Maybe the Visigoths and the Vandals just didn’t like the scent, which the poet Martial described as “putrid.” A gap opens in history. Then, sometime in the Middle Ages (or so legend has it), monks near the village of Cetara on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, tasked with preserving the local catch of anchovies, discovered the pleasures of the amber liquid exuded by the fish as it aged.

For centuries, this remained something of a regional secret. The villagers made colatura di alici (literally “anchovy drippings”) in old wine barrels in their cellars and gave small bottles to their neighbors for Christmas. Only in recent decades has colatura reached a broader audience. I tasted it for the first time in Milan last summer. I was in the city for less than 24 hours and for my one dinner chose Trippa, a trattoria at once unassuming and wildly acclaimed. (When I told the haughty manager at our hotel that we had a reservation there, he looked at me differently, as if I had risen in his esteem.)

I ordered a plate of spaghettini with colatura and bottarga di muggine (cured gray mullet roe) — a marriage of two traditional dishes. “You can’t stop at classical tradition, ” Diego Rossi, the chef, told me. “You have to invent new dishes, to make a new tradition.” The taste was insistent yet oddly delicate, and powerfully marine. The waiter said that the recipe was simple: “Boil the pasta. Not too much. Season it with olive oil, bottarga — grate it fine, like cheese — and colatura.”

Italian Recipes: Scicolone, Michele: 9780764566769: Books

Later, when I consulted Rossi, it turned out to be slightly more complicated. You begin with the bottarga, grating it into a bowl, then add a little yellow tomato, “just enough to dirty the sauce, ” Rossi said, along with colatura, garlic, basil, chile and a touch of lemon. The sweetness