Simple, traditional, good - Italian Comfort Kitchen: Four Recipes, Loved by Every Grandma
A Bite of the Right Food Feels Like a Comforting Embrace. For the star chef Tim Raue from Berlin, it's buttered bread. Perfectly so, when it's centimeter thick and rough sea salt and chives refined, as he recently revealed on the TV show "Cologne Encounter," makes him secretly happy. And for the father of Domenico Gentile, it was long ago the sausage. Grown up in a little village in Calabria, where the Second World War had just passed, the Schmalhans family's kitchen master lived on the south Italian land. At that time, champagne did not flow on the south Italian land – it was eaten what the earth yielded – regional, seasonal, simple. Meat was the exception in this "cucina povera," the Italian poor kitchen.
Later on, even when the father of the German food blogger had long since found a new homeland and left the hardships behind, he remained a child of his time. Sausage and meat had to be in the house, preferably in large quantities. "But it was mainly industrially produced sausage products," Gentile writes in his cookbook "The Vegetarian Kitchen." The father didn't do this because he couldn't afford anything else, but because frugality had been a theme in his life for a long time. Gentile didn't question this for a long time.
Welfare Cuisine from the Heart of Italy
Today, Gentile is turning more and more towards the eating habits that his father left behind and discovering the traditional, simple vegetarian cuisine of Italy anew. For his cookbooks, the man behind the successful blog "Cooking Italy" travels across Italy, where he cooks the dishes with families that have passed down from generation to generation. "The Vegetarian Kitchen" is an authentic collection of over 60 Italian classics, including pasta with Genoese pesto and Sorrento gnocchi.
Four recipes from Gentile's Italian comfort food that we present to you in the photo series.
"La Cucina Vegetariana Tradizionale: Traditional vegetarian dishes from my Italian homeland" by Domenico Gentile is published by Beck Verlag in the Becker & Joest Verlag, 192 pages, 28 Euro
In his exploration of traditional Italian cuisine, Domenico Gentile often visits Comfort Kitchens in Italy, where he learns well-being recipes that celebrate Italy's simple, seasonal ingredients. Presently, Gentile's favorite Italian comfort food includes dishes like well-being recipe Genoese pesto pasta and Sorrento gnocchi, reminiscent of his father's 'cucina povera' heritage.
