Food writer reveals unusual side of Italian desserts

By Richard Leong

NEW YORK |
Tue Mar 6, 2012 7:54am EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Italian delicacies like tiramisu and cannolis are familiar to people around the globe and the list may grow as veteran food writer Francine Segan shares unusual Italian desserts in her newest book.

“Dolci: Italy’s Sweets,” is the result of her extensive research looking for recipes. Segan met Italian home cooks and professional chefs who make usual pairings like sugar, honey and chocolate with pasta, chickpeas, eggplant and even meat.

The New York native spoke to Reuters about the wide range of Italian desserts, her motivation for doing the book and the surprises she encountered.

Q: Why did you decide to focus on desserts with this book?

A: “I felt I traveled a lot through Italy. While my first loves are pizzas, pasta and prosciutto, I realized that there are so many desserts we don’t know about here in the States. I was shocked. As I travel more and more, I realize not only don’t we know about them in the states. But from one region (in Italy) to the next, they don’t even know them.”

Q: How do you think that happened?

A: “Italy was so divided. It was more like 20 different countries. Now it’s definitely like 10 major regions. They are really competitive with each other. It became a treasure hunt for me to discover authentic recipes, not just from a restaurant, but a restaurant that’s been around and is really entrenched … Then I was fascinated by some of the bizarre ones.”

Q: What is the biggest shock you discover during your research for the book?

A: “The biggest surprise is that they eat pasta for dessert. That was a shock. I thought it was a joke. I thought it was just one place. And then I was doing an article on chocolate in Piedmont. That’s where I learned about it two years ago … More and more people started looking at me like ‘You don’t know we have pasta for dessert?’ There are dessert raviolis. Then I was shocked by how many recipes there were in the different regions. Some of these recipes you could find them in books going back to the 1700s. They are not new at all.”

Q: Did you manage to convince anyone here to taste those unusual desserts?

A: “There is this mini meat-and-chocolate turnover pie from Sicily. When I tell people that it has meat and chocolate, people don’t want to taste it. I have to lie to them. I have to say there is a surprise in there and ask whether you are vegetarian.”

Q; This book is a collection of other people’s recipes, not original ones you created for your other books? Why?

A: “I personally feel I want to preserve the integrity of regional food. Sometimes I feel there is almost a little too much tweaking going on. I personally don’t love going to an Italian restaurant here in the States and find dishes you have never even seen in Italy, that would appal Italians, the combination of flavors.

“There is too much sauce. I feel like they really do a good job over there. Most of all, I feel like I want to give you a little travel trip about what is real in Italy, so I wanted them to be 100 percent authentic.

“When I wanted panna cotta, I went to the region where it was created. I went to a cooking school where the person is known to make the best panna cotta. I went to establishments which have been around for dozens and dozens of years. There are recipes handwritten in books going back to the 1800s and made the same way. There are also bloggers who are doing what I am hoping to do, which is to preserve some of the classic recipes before we nouveau cuisine, gastro, micro ourselves crazy.”

Q: What is a common mistake of making Italian desserts?

A: “People put too much butter and sugar (in the dessert). You don’t drown butter and sugar in Italian desserts. You don’t want too many ingredients.”

Q: Since writing this book, what Italian desserts you make at home for yourself?

A: “The thing I want to go back to a lot because they are so amazingly flexible … are these little peach-shaped cookies (pesche dolci). They could sit inside a sealed bag for months. You could fill them with lemon curd, Nutella or pastry cream. There are also the pasta crisps. You use leftover pasta, twirl it with fork and fry it in olive oil and drizzle them with honey and pistachio nuts. It sounds so simple but it really holds together. It’s not greasy. It’s crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside.”

Hazelnut Chocolate Pasta (Pasta al Gianduiotti)

Serves 4

1/2 pound angel hair or other thin long pasta

12 gianduiotti, hazelnut chocolate candies, or 12 tablespoons quality hazelnut chocolate spread

Whipped cream or mascarpone cheese

Chopped hazelnuts

Hazelnut liqueur such as Frangelico (optional)

Cook the pasta according to package directions. Drain.

Put 1 gianduiotti in each of 4 wine glasses or dessert bowls. Divide the hot pasta among them and top each with 2 more gianduiotti.

Serve immediately, topped with a dollop of whipped cream or mascarpone cheese, a splash of hazelnut liqueur and sprinkle of hazelnuts, if you like.

(Reporting by Richard Leong; editing by Patricia Reaney)

Dessert Recipes with Bill & Sheila

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Life sweet for blogger with upcoming publication of cookbook on Italian desserts

“Grace’s Sweet Life” by Grace Massa-Langlois. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ho

LONDON, Ont. – A few years ago, Grace Massa-Langlois’ life was in a shambles.

In 2003, the Londoner had to abandon a career she loved as a financial services manager in the automotive industry because of a debilitating medical condition. In 2004, her husband died suddenly, leaving her with two young children. She says she spent years in a “fog.” There was no light at the end of the tunnel.

But now the word Massa-Langlois uses to describe her life is “exciting,” and with good reason. She is soon to become the published author of a cookbook on Italian desserts called “Grace’s Sweet Life,” which is to be distributed worldwide.

In effect, she says, food saved her life.

It all began innocuously when, with unaccustomed time on her hands, she started watching television food programs. Soon she was buying all the cookbooks and gourmet magazines she could afford, and outfitting her kitchen with all the latest gadgets.

She comes from a big Italian family and was particularly intrigued by Italian desserts.

“I’ve always loved cooking, and being Italian, you’re always surrounded by food,” she says. “But Italians, we just don’t have a ton of sweets.” Her mother would bake cookies or an occasional cake for special events, but “We didn’t have desserts every night. Our dessert was fruit.”

The highlight of the week was an outing to a local Italian bakery every Sunday after church, where they would satisfy their taste for traditional cakes and pastries.

Massa-Langlois started quizzing her mother, doing research online and cooking at home, some things “my mom has been making since she was a little girl and a lot of things my mom didn’t make that I wanted to learn how to make.”

Soon her sisters were calling her for advice and her kids were urging her to find a way to expand her hobby.

So in April 2010 she started blogging (“Before that I didn’t even know what a blog was.”) about her Italian cooking adventures on a website she first called La Mia Vita Dolce, now Grace’s Sweet Life — gracessweetlife.com. The response was overwhelming, with more than two million visitors the first year.

Then in February 2011, Massa-Langlois received an email that just floored her. It was from Ulysses Press, a publisher in Berkeley, Calif., asking if she would be interested in writing a cookbook on Italian desserts.

“I thought it was a joke,” she says. “I had never thought about doing a cookbook. It had never entered my mind. Why would it?”

But it was a legitimate company and a legitimate offer and in short order she signed a contract and was assigned to work with the company’s cookbook editor. She spent the next 10 months choosing recipes, honing and testing them, learning how to write them properly and working through the editing process. The anticipated publication date is in March.

It was a lot of hard work, complicated by a couple of major setbacks caused by computer problems, but it was an incredible education, she says.

Keith Riegert, acquisitions editor at Ulysses Press, says it was the strong content of Massa-Langlois’ blog that caught his attention.

He describes Ulysses Press as a “niche publisher.” Employees do a lot of research to identify the latest and emerging trends on subjects they think are “underpublished” and will be “strong in the marketplace.” Then they look for someone to write about those topics.

But in this case, he says, he wasn’t specifically looking for someone to write about Italian desserts. He came across Massa-Langlois’ blog and was impressed by “what she was doing. I loved her photographs and her recipes and the way she was presenting them … her ability to produce great recipes and to develop recipes.”

When Riegert researched the subject, he found there was room for another cookbook on Italian desserts, so he made her the offer. Massa-Langlois’ daughter, Liana Langlois, 20, shot all the photos for the book, as she does for the blog.

Some of the selections in “Grace’s Sweet Life” are family recipes, some classic Italian desserts with Massa-Langlois’ twist on them and many of them are not recipes she has featured on her blog. They sound decadently delicious, with names such as tartellette al cioccolato e caramello (chocolate caramel tarts), bomboloni alla crema krapfen (Italian cream-filled doughnuts) and torta de fragile e crema soffice di yogurt (yogurt mousse cake with strawberries).

Technical issues aside, Massa-Langlois says the biggest challenge of working on the book was physical. “My mind is still working at full force, but the body isn’t,” she says of her ongoing health problems, adding this is especially worrisome to her son Matthew, 18.

But the rewards have been far greater than the challenges, and given the opportunity, she says, she would definitely do it again.

“There’s so many good things. It’s just been exciting.”

Besides giving her own life a purpose and focus that had been missing for quite a while, she says the blog and the cookbook have allowed her to explore her heritage, the traditions of the region in Italy where her mother grew up and of other regions and to preserve those traditions in black and white for her children.

She started to realize the importance of family traditions back in the dark days.

“We just don’t know when something is going to happen.”

To contact Susan Greer, email her at susan.greer(at)rogers.com.

Desserts with Bill & Sheila

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