by Lucy Gordan | Oct 18, 2024 | Travel, Travel blog
In 1300 Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the first ordinary Jubilee or Holy Year, with the Papal Bull, “Antiquorum Habet Fida Relatio.” Since then, they have taken place either every 50 or every 25 years. 2025’s Holy Year is the 27th. It will begin on Christmas...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 2, 2024 | Travel, Travel blog
THE APPIAN WAY: DIRECTIONS, SIGHTS, and GASTRONOMYOn July 31 UNESCO proclaimed the Via Appia or Appian Way Italy’s 60th World Heritage Site. Running about 300 miles south to Brindisi, originally paved with large lozenge-shaped basalt cobblestones, and lined with...
by Lucy Gordan | Jul 6, 2024 | Travel, Travel blog
Today, Rome’s Jewish population counts some 15,000 people and a dozen Orthodox synagogues. The liturgy of the largest and ornate Il Tempio Maggiore follows the Orthodox Italki rite as practiced by Italian Jews since early Roman times. In fact, Jews have lived in...
by Lucy Gordan | Apr 18, 2024 | Travel, Travel blog
On March 19 Sergio Mattarella, The President of Italy, inaugurated the new headquarters of the Foreign Press Association in what had been the Roman residence of former Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi. Some three weeks later the key speaker at the Foreign...
by Lucy Gordan | Mar 3, 2024 | Food, Food blog
From the ancient Romans we’ve inherited the basis for modern civil law and city planning, a standard coinage, a system of weights and measures, plumbing, aqueducts, bridges, …and delicious food, represented best by pasta especially spaghetti alla carbonara or cacio...
by Lucy Gordan | Jun 12, 2023 | Food, Food blog
On January 27, 2007 the genial and indefatigable Piemontese entrepreneur Oscar Farinetti opened his first mega food store of exclusively Italian food products, Eataly, in Torino; now they are in 46 locations in 15 countries with several more in the planning stages. In...
by Lucy Gordan | Apr 17, 2023 | Travel, Travel blog
On April 14th, in the late afternoon, the press office of the Vatican Museums sent out notice to Vatican-accredited journalists stating that again this year, for the tenth season, the Museums would be extending their hours on Friday and Saturday evenings until October...
by Lucy Gordan | Mar 10, 2023 | Wine & Spirits, Wine & Spirits blog
Vermouth is an aromatized fortified wine, flavored with various roots, barks, flowers, seeds, herbs and spices. The most usual herbs are yarrow, chamomile, hyssop, marjoram, sage, and thyme; the spices: cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, coriander, nutmeg, juniper, ginger,...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 27, 2022 | Food, Food blog
When and where was torrone first created? No one knows for certain. Some connoisseurs say Persia; others Arabia; and still others China. A clue lies in its list of ingredients, which is short and sweet: almonds, honey, sugar, and egg white, although other nuts...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 11, 2022 | Food, Food blog
THE HISTORY OF PUMPKIN PIE Pumpkin pie, an international symbol of harvest time, is a favorite dessert, especially in the United States and Canada, but also in Northern Italy, between Halloween and Christmas. Its custardy filling flavored with nutmeg, cinnamon,...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 6, 2022 | Wine & Spirits, Wine & Spirits blog
In almost all family-run trattorias in Rome and in southern Italy, when the restaurateur presents the bill at the end of the meal, he or she offers the guests a choice of digestivi. These are after dinner drinks meant to help digestion. Many, like grappa from...
by Lucy Gordan | Aug 18, 2022 | Food, Food blog
The International Slowfood Movement was founded in 1986 by Carlo Petrini, political activist, journalist, author, and publisher, as a protest against the newly-opened McDonald’s near Rome’s elegant Piazza di Spagna, the first fastfood restaurant in Italy. Today the...
by Lucy Gordan | Jun 3, 2022 | Food, Food blog
Born in Chioggia in 1956, the second of chef/hotelier Bruno Boscolo’s five sons, Rossano is a chef, pastry chef, hotelier, professor, and collector of kitchenware and cookbooks, as well as the founder/owner of “Garum”: The Library/Museum of Food, inaugurated on May...
by Lucy Gordan | Mar 13, 2022 | Food, Food blog
“Baci” Perugina chocolates, a genuine Made-In-Italy icon, are celebrating their 100th birthday this year. “Baci” means “kisses” and their birth and history is the product of a secret love story between their creator Luisa Spagnoli and businessman and politician...
by Lucy Gordan | Jan 24, 2022 | Food, Food blog
During the past five years The Sophia Institute Press has published three cookbooks, The Vatican Cookbook (2016, $34.95), Cooking with the Saints (April 2019, $34.95), and The Vatican Christmas Cookbook (September, 2020, $34.95). I’ve reviewed all three for...
by Lucy Gordan | Dec 27, 2021 | Travel, Travel blog
You are a “nose”; what exactly does that mean? “Nose” is a nickname for a perfume maker; a person gifted with a particularly developed sense of smell, who is capable of combining mentally different smells to create unique essences and...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 1, 2021 | Travel, Travel blog
Naples is world famous for pizza, coffee, crèche artisans and music, both operatic at its magnificent 18th-century Teatro San Carlo and popular songs with lyrics in Neapolitan dialect sadly without a venue. That changed on October 15th when La Fondazione Trianon...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 26, 2021 | Travel, Travel blog
Tucked away in a narrow inlet since ancient times, the small coastal town of Minori is located directly below Ravello, the more famous hill-top town beloved by Wagner, who wrote “Parsifal” there, and by many writers: Gide, E.M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 17, 2021 | Food, Food blog
I first interviewed you in September 2010 at your bakery in Tramonti during the cultural festival “Scala Meets New York”. It’s still organized every September in the nearby town of Scala by native-son Padre Enzo Fortunato, a prolific author and the Press...
by Lucy Gordan | Aug 7, 2021 | Contents, Food
Last fall, when Sarah Lemieux, the Associate Director of Publicity at the Sophia Institute Press, sent me a review copy of the Vatican Christmas Cookbook (see my article 11/23/2020) in the package she also included a copy of Cooking with the Saints (2019) (Hardcover:...
by Lucy Gordan | Jul 3, 2021 | Travel, Travel blog
Off-the-tourists’-beaten-track, the Aventine, one of Rome’s seven hills, is one of the Eternal City’s most peaceful, least commercial, and elegant residential neighborhoods, but nonetheless with several sights worth a visit. Last year 15 members of the Foreign Press...
by Lucy Gordan | Jun 5, 2021 | Food, Food blog
In the late spring little pots of the culinary herb basil (basilico in Italian) go on sale at flower stands and market stalls all over Italy. Placed on terraces and balconies chefs and housewives add hand-picked leaves to their summer dishes for color, fragrance, and...
by Lucy Gordan | Feb 27, 2021 | Food, Food blog
Sadly Co-Vid is still blocking travel for pleasure from the United States to Italy (down 90% in 2020), but I recommend three new books in English about Italian cuisine to whet your appetite and help you plan your next trip. In the meantime console yourself by...
by Lucy Gordan | Feb 6, 2021 | Travel, Travel blog
Two years ago and again last year the Director Eike Schmidt “invited” married couples from all over Italy to celebrate the wedding anniversary of Agnolo Doni and Maddelena Strozzi, “La Festa dei Doni”, on January 31 by visiting the Uffizi at half price. Last...
by Lucy Gordan | Jan 29, 2021 | Food, Food blog
Two days after Italy declared total lockdown, starting on March 10, the Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens changed from being a conventional museum conglomerate to a virtual one by setting up free video virtual tours of its collections on its Facebook...
by Lucy Gordan | Jan 21, 2021 | Travel, Travel blog
On January 17th Massimo Osanna, the former and still the interim Director General of Pompeii’s excavations until a new one is appointed, as well as the soon-to-be Director of all of Italy’s State Museums, was a guest on Sunday evening’s popular TV talk show “Che...
by Lucy Gordan | Jan 11, 2021 | Food, Food blog
In late September I needed photographs to illustrate my story “Top Chef Vissani Finally Opens in Rome”. Instead of the usual small selection the PR agent sent my over two hundred all by the same photographer Alberto Blasetti. I looked him up on Google and his website...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 23, 2020 | Food, Food blog
THE VATICAN CHRISTMAS COOKBOOKLast week I received a press release from Sarah Lemieux, the Publicity Coordinator of Sophia Institute Press about its recent publication, The Vatican Christmas Cookbook. It’s the sequel to the Institute’s best-seller The Vatican...
by Lucy Gordan | Oct 14, 2020 | Travel, Travel blog
Born on September24, 1954 at Alba, the small city in Piemonte famous for wine and truffles, Oscar Farinetti is THE maverick entrepreneur of Italian food and cuisine. In January 2007 he founded “EATALY” opening in an abandoned Carpano Vermouth factory in Turin’s...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 12, 2020 | Food, Food blog
Eccentric, extrovert, and bombastic Gianfranco Vissani with a love for scarlet leather shoes was to the kitchen-born on November 22, 1951.Beginning in 1963 his father Mario was the chef/owner of a simple country-style restaurant, first named “Da Mario”, then “Il...
by Lucy Gordan | Jul 28, 2020 | Travel, Travel blog
For several years now I’ve received the annual online guide from the non-profit Association Ospitalità Religiosa Italiana (Italian Religious Hospitality) (www.ospitalitareligiosa.it), headquartered at Via Molina 10 in Varese, a city in Lombardy northwest of Milan,...
by Lucy Gordan | Mar 12, 2020 | Food, Food blog
Romans, the world’s first recorded gourmets, today called buone forchette here in caput mundi, owe their obsession with food, at least in part, to fellow citizen Marcus Gabius. Better-known as “Apicius”, he was a wealthy and decadent epicure who in the...
by Lucy Gordan | Mar 6, 2020 | Travel, Travel blog
This year the world is celebrating the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death with exhibitions in London at both the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, in Paris at the Louvre, and in Washington D.C. at the National Gallery. However, the mega-show, to...
by Lucy Gordan | Feb 12, 2020 | Travel, Travel blog
Italy’s major cities count at least one world-famous piazza. From south to north: Naples: Piazza del Plebiscito; Rome: Piazza Navona, Piazza Barberini, and Piazza di Spagna; Florence: Piazza della Signoria; Bologna: Piazza Maggiore; Genoa: Piazza de Ferrari; Turin:...
by Lucy Gordan | Dec 31, 2019 | Travel, Travel blog
There seems to be differences of opinion about when and to whom the well-traveled American journalist/humorist Robert Benchley sent his telegram on his first visit to Venice: “Streets full of water. Please Advise.” The most credible attribution is that it was a gag...
by Lucy Gordan | Dec 8, 2019 | Travel, Travel blog
In July 2018 I published “The Best of Bari”. Six months later a new museum, known by its acronym “Munbam” which stands for the Children’s (Bambini) Museum of St. Nicholas, opened in the Norman Swabian Castle. Much to the joy of all three generations of my family on a...
by Lucy Gordan | Dec 1, 2019 | Food, Food blog
While gelato, panettone, cannoli, torrone, and tiramisù are beloved worldwide, other Italian sweets are less well-known and even regional. Some examples are bônet in Piemonte, sbrisolona in Lombardy, torta Barozzi in Emilia-Romagna, tozzetti in Tuscany and Umbria,...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 18, 2019 | Food, Food blog
Two years ago, just after its first championship, businessman/tourism promoter Francesco Redi, the creator and organizer of the Tiramisù World Cup, came to the headquarters of the Associazione della Stampa Estera (Foreign Press Association) in Rome to promote his...
by Lucy Gordan | Jul 26, 2019 | Wine & Spirits, Wine & Spirits blog
Italy is world famous for its varied regional landscapes, history, food and accompanying wines. However, if you go straight out to dinner, you’ll be missing out on a quintessential tradition of la bella vita, because, when they have time, self-respecting...
by Lucy Gordan | Jul 3, 2019 | Travel, Travel blog
Most readers of Epicurean-Traveler.com will know that in the food world CIA does not stand for “Central Intelligence Agency”, but rather The Culinary Institute of America. Founded in 1946 in Hyde Park, the birthplace of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 70 miles up...
by Lucy Gordan | Jun 1, 2019 | Food, Food blog
Born in suburban New Jersey, Scott Wiener has no Italian blood. His ancestry is Jewish Russian and Polish. Yet from an early age pizza became Scott’s favorite food. And now, for the past eleven years, since April 27, 2008 to be exact, this Neapolitan specialty has...
by Lucy Gordan | Mar 28, 2019 | Food, Food blog
The Margherita family built the Palazzo Margherita in Bernalda (Matera) during 1892. This small town in Basilicata was the birthplace of Agostino Coppola (1883-1964), the grandfather of the American movie-director, Francis Ford Coppola. Agostino always referred to...
by Lucy Gordan | Mar 4, 2019 | Food, Food blog
“Because of its history of regional political division,” Wikipedia tells us, “Italy specializes in many different kinds of bread, reflecting its great regional variation and widely different bread-making recipes and traditions. In general rolls are typical of the...
by Lucy Gordan | Feb 10, 2019 | Travel, Travel blog
Basilicata, also known by its ancient name Lucania, is a region of southern Italy, bordering on Campania to the west, Apulia (Puglia) to the north and east, and Calabria to the south. The region can be thought of as the “instep” of boot-shaped Italy, with Calabria...
by Lucy Gordan | Dec 7, 2018 | Food, Food blog
Everyone would almost certainly agree that Italy’s cuisine is regional not national. The origins of its various dishes depend on who the regions’ rulers were before the Unification of Italy in 1870 and on their “KM. 0” ingredients. For examples, Austria in Friuli...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 23, 2018 | Travel, Travel blog
If you still play “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”, an educational video game first released in 1985, I bet you won’t be able to locate “Hora e Arbëreshëvet” on the world map. I can now, but only because I visited there in mid-July. Upon arrival and during a...
by Lucy Gordan | Aug 17, 2018 | Food, Food blog
Flynn McGarry, a long-limbed slim strawberry blond with freckles and Elvis Presley-haircut without the grease, was born in Malibu, California, on November 25, 1999. He knew from age ten that he wanted to be a chef. Two years later he launched “Eureka!”, a...
by Lucy Gordan | Jul 8, 2018 | Travel, Travel blog
During the past few years Puglia has become one of Italy’s touristic hotspots thanks to its delicious food, wines, and olive oil, multi-culture history (Greek, Roman, and Swabian), folk traditions like the pizzica (a frenzied local dance), beautiful white sandy...
by Lucy Gordan | Jun 15, 2018 | Food, Food blog
Due to all the clamor and ink spilt soon after Pope Francis’ election because of his pre-papacy simple lifestyle and taste in food while Archbishop of Buenos Aires, which he continued to prefer as Pope, I became curious about what the popes before him ate. I was...
by Lucy Gordan | May 6, 2018 | Travel, Travel blog
Kenny Dunn grew up in Upper Dublin, Pennsylvania, a suburb north of Philadelphia. With a Bachelor’s degree in marketing and finance from Penn State University and a Master’s in development management from American University in Washington D.C. in 1997 Kenny founded...
by Lucy Gordan | Apr 1, 2018 | Travel, Travel blog
In keeping with the saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, Rome is like a layer cake with monuments and art works dating from every period of history from 753 BC, when according to more than legend the Eternal City was founded by King Romulus, to the present. After...
by Lucy Gordan | Mar 18, 2018 | Food, Food blog
Since the 1700s for Northern Europeans on the “Grand Tour” all roads have led to Rome. They entered the Eternal City through the Porta del Popolo, a gate in the ancient Aurelian Walls built by Pope Sixtus IV for the Jubilee Year 1475, and took lodgings in and around...
by Lucy Gordan | Mar 13, 2018 | Travel, Travel blog
Italy’s national newspaper, La Repubblica, has published guidebooks about Italy’s many regions since 2003. Its first and only guidebook in English is Roma Maxima: Stories, Places, and Secrets, Guidebook to an Eternal City. The first guidebooks to Rome, written for the...
by Lucy Gordan | Feb 18, 2018 | Travel, Travel blog
I’ve lived in Rome for almost half a century but my connection to Italy goes back another ten years to 1957, when I boarded the SS Saturnia to travel to Naples, Pompei, Paestum, Rome, Turin, the Val Pellice, and Venice. My close friend Marjorie Shaw’s connection goes...
by Lucy Gordan | Oct 19, 2017 | Travel, Travel blog
The United States and Italy have always shared only three holidays: New Year’s Day, Easter Sunday, and Christmas, and one festivity Mardi Gras, not-to-be-missed in New Orleans and in Venice. Then, about two decades ago, for no apparent reason, but maybe because...
by Lucy Gordan | Oct 15, 2017 | Food, Food blog
I’ve always loved to travel, but still dread each departure when it involves an airport. Even before all the necessary security, airports already meant endless lines at check-in and passport control, crowds pushing in all directions, noise, confusion, and above all...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 27, 2017 | Travel, Travel blog
That’s a good and still unanswered question. Most people think that cappuccino is an Italian drink, but few know that, yes, it may have been invented by an Italian, but definitely not in Italy, where it wasn’t even mentioned until the 1930s. Its birthplace was Vienna,...
by Lucy Gordan | Jul 18, 2017 | Food, Food blog
I always begin my chef interviews with the question: Our tastes in food are closely connected to our childhood; what are your first memories of food? I completely agree with that. As I think back – we lived in a forest and the nearest store was something like...
by Lucy Gordan | Jun 16, 2017 | Food, Food blog
Amsterdam is known as “Venice of the North” because of its canals and Riga is known as “Paris of the North” because of its post-Communist culinary Renaissance. The pioneer of this Renaissance is Mārtīņš Rītiņš, who through his show on national...
by Lucy Gordan | Jun 12, 2017 | Food, Food blog
Riga, the capital of Latvia, and the surrounding Riga-Gauja Region are the European Capital of Gastronomy for the year 2017. From April 20-23 “Live Riga”, the city’s Tourist Board, invited me and five Finnish journalists for a full-immersion tour of the cultural and...
by Lucy Gordan | May 13, 2017 | Food, Food blog
The 2017 red Michelin guide for Italy includes 74 restaurants in Rome. The top one, as mentioned in my last month’s article is Heinz Beck’s “La Pergola” with 3 stars; another is Anthony Genovese’s “Il Pagliacco” with 2 stars at Via dei Banchi Vecchi 129a, just across...
by Lucy Gordan | Apr 25, 2017 | Food, Food blog
Most cities around the world count numerous skyscrapers and many of these hugely tall buildings house restaurants with panoramic views on their top floors. Rome, because of its underground rivers, has no skyscrapers, but nonetheless counts numerous rooftop...
by Lucy Gordan | Mar 7, 2017 | Travel, Travel blog
Born in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci on April 15, 1472, the oldest illegitimate son of a promiscuous wealthy notary and a peasant, Leonard was a polymath. His interests included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music (both performing and...
by Lucy Gordan | Jan 22, 2017 | Food, Food blog
Just over two weeks after the controversial opening of a McDonald’s in a Vatican-owned building just outside St. Peter’s Square, on January 16th the popular fast food chain started to distribute some 1,000 free meals to the homeless from here. Ironically, this “act of...
by Lucy Gordan | Jan 11, 2017 | Food, Food blog
I’m culture editor of the monthly print magazine Inside the Vatican. In the May 2015 issue I published an interview with Monsignor Pasquale Iacobone, the Holy See’s Special Delegate for “Expo”, the World’s Fair with a food theme hosted in Milan from May 1 to October...
by Lucy Gordan | Oct 2, 2016 | Food, Food blog
STÉPHAN BERNHARD: An Alsatian, French, and European Chef In mid-July thanks to the Tourist Board of Baden-Baden I spent three days in this charming spa town in Baden-Württemberg. I visited several museums: Frieder Burda devoted to contemporary art, another to the...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 16, 2016 | Food, Food blog
I first met and interviewed Rodelio Aglibot at the opening of “Me Geisha”, his restaurant in Rome, in early December 2015. Although he divides his time between Chicago and Los Angeles, he is a globetrotter so we have seen each other several other times in Rome....
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 2, 2016 | Food, Food blog
During my three-day stay in Baden-Baden I was a guest of the super-elegant, long-family-run (1872-1969), luxurious Brenners-Park Hotel & Spa. “For almost 150 years it has been pampering the world’s VIPs be they European royalty, business brains: John Jacob Astor...
by Lucy Gordan | Aug 27, 2016 | Food, Food blog
August 24, 2016 3:36 AM: Aglioni, Borgo of Capitignano (L’Aquila): I felt a heavy dull thud. Then I heard my husband Luciano calling me: “Lucy, hurry, wake up, this is an earthquake. Quick.” When I opened my eyes I saw that he was nervously pulling up his blue jeans,...
by Lucy Gordan | Jul 10, 2016 | Travel, Travel blog
Thanks to the generosity of the Belgian Tourist Office for Brussels and Wallonia in New York, I spent four wonderful days in the city of Mons, the capital of the Belgian province of Hainaut near the French border, and of European Culture in 2015. I had assignments...
by Lucy Gordan | Jun 3, 2016 | Wine & Spirits, Wine & Spirits blog
On a family vacation in c. 1990 to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s 5,000-acre plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia, I visited his house, his vegetable garden and his vineyards, the first ones in the United States, although his repeated attempts to plant various...
by Lucy Gordan | May 27, 2016 | Food, Food blog
On May 26th the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), headquartered in Rome, Italy, named Carlo (better known as “Carlin”) Petrini, one of the founders of Slow Food and today its President, FAO Special Ambassador Zero Hunger for Europe. With over...
by Lucy Gordan | Jan 22, 2016 | Food, Food blog
When I first arrived in Rome in 1972 as a young bride, I could count the number of “foreign” restaurants on one hand. Now I only remember three: French “Charly’s Saucerie” between the Colosseum and St. John Lateran, Japanese “Hamasei” downtown near Piazza di Spagna,...
by Lucy Gordan | Dec 22, 2015 | Food, Food blog
Panettone translates as “a large loaf of bread”. Actually, it’s a large sweet bready cake with various creamy fillings, raisins and candied fruits; its dome’s covered with toppings of different flavors. Panettone’s origins probably date to the Roman Empire:...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 23, 2015 | Food, Food blog
New Year’s Eve is Saint Sylvester’s Night. If an east wind is blowing, it promises a calamitous next twelve months. Roman-born Pope Sylvester I was pope from January 31, 314 to his death on December 31,,335. He is buried in Rome’s Catacombs of Priscilla. During his...
by Lucy Gordan | Oct 21, 2015 | Food, Food blog
In the last scene of Billy Wilder’s 1959 American comedy film, “Some Like it Hot”, starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis, Jerry played by Jack Lemmon gives a long list of reasons to Osgood played by Joe E. Brown why they can’t marry. Osgood dismisses...
by Lucy Gordan | Oct 7, 2015 | Travel, Travel blog
It is impossible to feel lukewarm about Venice. The historian Edward Gibbon, author of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, complained about “its stinking ditches dignified with the pompous denomination of canals, while novelist D.H. Lawrence called her an...
by Lucy Gordan | Oct 4, 2015 | Travel, Travel blog
Born in Castelrotto on December 27, 1914, Zenzi Glatt came to live in Merano when she was 10 years old because of its better schools and has lived here ever since. She is a pioneer of hospitality. In 1948 she opened Pension Mignon and soon opened up a beauty...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 24, 2015 | Travel, Travel blog
By now everyone knows that Pope Francis lives simply in the Casa Marta guesthouse and not in the elegant Papal Apartments overlooking St. Peter’s Square where he does, however, receive important guests and bless the crowd below during the Angelus on Sundays at noon....
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 11, 2015 | Food, Food blog
Like pizza, pasta, espresso coffee, and gelato parmigiano reggiano, produced in the approved areas of the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, and Mantua is a quintessential Italian food product. Recent statistics recount that c. 240,000 cows, mostly...
by Lucy Gordan | Sep 6, 2015 | Food, Food blog
To celebrate 2015’s “World Environment Day” on June 3 the Rome-headquartered International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) partnered with Italian celebrity chef, Carlo Cracco, to bring attention to the negative impact of climate change on many traditional...
by Lucy Gordan | Jun 7, 2015 | Food, Food blog
Like pizza (January 2015), pasta, espresso coffee, and gelato are quintessential Italian foods. Gelato is the Italian word for ice cream, derived from the Latin word gelatus meaning frozen. Gelato can be made with milk, cream, various sugars and...
by Lucy Gordan | May 28, 2015 | Food, Food blog
Katz’s Delicatessen, located at 205 Houston Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and founded in 1888 by the Iceland Brothers, is the oldest Jewish, but not Kosher delicatessen in New York City. Upon the arrival of Willy Katz in 1903, the establishment’s name was...
by Lucy Gordan | Apr 19, 2015 | Travel, Travel blog
The refrain of the Morcheeba, a British trip hop Band, tells us repeatedly in the most famous hit of their 2000 album, “Fragments of Freedom,” “Don’t you know that Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Indeed so, Rome, a layer-cake of history built on seven hills, is...
by Lucy Gordan | Feb 5, 2015 | Wine & Spirits, Wine & Spirits blog
So Pope Francis doesn’t enjoy only sweets, especially, ice cream. He drank Italian wines with his meals in the Philippines and only two days after his return on January 21 he received a delegation of some 180 Italian wine producers, vintners, sommeliers, and...
by Lucy Gordan | Feb 5, 2015 | Food, Food blog
Since newly-elected Pope Francis chose to live in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the guest house adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica, and not in the official papal apartments overlooking the Square, a lot of ink has been spilled about his austere living and eating habits...
by Lucy Gordan | Dec 8, 2014 | Travel, Travel blog
FutureBrand, the international business evaluation company, surveyed thousands of people to describe countries worldwide in a few words. The three most frequent for Italy were culture, beauty, and food. Without a doubt food is a “driver” when it comes to...
by Lucy Gordan | Dec 6, 2014 | Food, Food blog
Worldwide Ambassador of Peruvian Cuisine Our tastes in food are closely connected to our childhood; what are your first memories of food? Memories are the most important ingredients in cooking. We exist as chefs because of them. My first memory of food is ceviche,...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 28, 2014 | Food, Food blog
NIKO ROMITO: ITALY’S ONLY CHEF SOUTH OF ROME WITH THREE MICHELIN STARS On November 5, 2013, Niko Romito, the timid, taciturn and modest, 39-year-old chef of the restaurant “Reale” in Castel di Sangro in the province of L’Aquila, was awarded his third Michelin star for...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 17, 2014 | Food, Food blog
Text © 2014 by Lucy Gordan Two years ago at a market stall near Vatican City I bought three illustrated cookbooks published only in Italian as supplements of the Italian magazine Famiglia Cristiana: La Cucina dei Pellegrini, La Cucina dei Papi, and La Cucina dei Santi...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 17, 2014 | Food, Food blog
In early September 2013 Tourisme Alsace and Office de Tourisme de Strasbourg et Sa Région invited me to Colmar, Sélestat, and Strasbourg. On my second evening in Strasbourg I had supper at the elegant, intimate boudoir “1741,” the city’s only restaurant with a...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 15, 2014 | Recipes
From Chef Nick Anderer Serves 4 1 (3-pound) chicken, boned, butterflied, and halved 1 tablespoon coarsely ground black pepper Coarse salt 1 1/2 teaspoons crushed red pepper flakes 4 sprigs fresh marjoram 6 sprigs fresh thyme 3 tablespoons olive oil Pickled Hot Cherry...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 14, 2014 | Food, Food blog
From Chef Marek Fichtner Ingredients for 2 servings: 6 oz Barley large 2 tsp Beetroot juice 1.5 oz Gervais goat cheese 1 oz Butter 2 oz White wine 2 tsp Olive oil 2 oz Pecorino cheese Salt Pepper 1.5 oz Arugula Preparation time 40 min. Preparation...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 14, 2014 | Food, Food blog
From Richard Fuchs Ingredients 4 portions 2.25 lb Beef cheek, cleaned and ready to cook 2 oz fresh Butter 2/3 c Olive oil 5 oz Carrots 3.5 oz Celeriac 3.5 oz Celery 3.5 oz Onion 2 Garlic cloves 3 Bay leaves Fresh rosemary Flour “00” 13 oz Barbera wine...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 9, 2014 | Food, Food blog
THE YOUNGEST GERMAN CHEF AWARDED A MICHELIN STAR Interview ©2014 Born in Siegen on December 8, 1985, from the age of three Sören Anders dreamed of becoming a chef. His dream not only came true, but in 2010, at age 24, while he was the chef at Oberländer Weinstube in...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 9, 2014 | Food, Food blog, Recipes
Lightly salt chicken breasts and sprinkle with sunflower oil. Wrap in kohlrabi leaves and slowly cook. The leaves may begin to burn, but the chicken slowly stews and acquires taste from the leaves. Boil the semolina in fresh milk with a little butter and salt....
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 9, 2014 | Food, Food blog, Recipes
Thoroughly coat the farm fresh rabbit with butter, salt and pepper it and wrap it in waxed paper. Bake at 120 °C for 40 minutes; lower temperature to 70 °C and bake for another 30 minutes. Debone the rabbit and cut into portions. Before serving, sauté each portion in...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 9, 2014 | Food, Food blog, Recipes
Excerpted from 300 Best Potato Recipes: A Complete Cook’s Guide by Kathleen Sloan-McIntosh © 2011 Robert Rose Inc. www.robertrose.ca Reprinted with permission. Photo credits: Colin Erricson/www.robertrose.ca Classic Twice-Baked Jacket Potato Makes 4...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 9, 2014 | Food, Food blog, Recipes
SHANGHAI GUOTIE POT STICKERS The word for “pot stickers” in Chinese is guotie, literally “pot-stick,” a name they have earned from their cooking method. Chinese cooks first steam guotie in giant flat-bottomed iron pans. When all the water is absorbed by the dumplings,...
by Lucy Gordan | Nov 9, 2014 | Food, Food blog, Recipes
from Chef Nick Anderer Serves 4-6 For the suckling pig braise: 1 suckling pig ham (#5 total) 1.5 quarts chicken stock (or enough to almost cover the two hams) 1 white onion, cut into large pieces 2 stalks celery, cut into large pieces 1 bulb...
