All About Italian Food interview
Mary Ann Esposito
Mary Ann Esposito, www.ciaoitalia.com, is the creator and host of the nationally televised PBS series, Ciao Italia with Mary Ann Esposito™. This year, the series celebrates its milestone 20th season, making it the longeset running cooking series on television.
She has a unique and valuable recipe: just put together authenticity, history and tradition!
Italian cuisine is basically simple, but relies on good-quality ingredients. Mary Ann knows the “the man in the street”, the ordinary people, and knows how difficult it is nowadays to find time to prepare particular dishes. So she did a great thing: she wrote a book
full of wonderful recipes that only require 5 ingredients each!
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1) Hi Mary Ann, thanks for sharing your time with us. You are an Italian food expert living outside Italy, which allows you a wide vision of this reality, maybe less evident for an insider. How would you summarize the success of Italian food around the world? Do you believe that it is because it encompasses only simple dishes, or because it has flavors that really please different cultures?
The answer to your question is both and more: Italian food is so varied because of regional differences and their approachability food. By that I mean it is simply prepared with the freshest in season ingredients.
There is no need for complication as the integrity of the food speaks for itself. In terms of cross cultural flavors, that places a role too, especially when you consider the cuisines of Spain, Greece, France and Mexico that carry components of Italian ingredients such as peppers, tomatoes, fish, etc.
2) Considering all your experience with the public and your TV program - what is it that people search for in Italian food dishes? Do they just enjoy the flavor of a well-prepared and authentic Italian dish, the taste of a lasagna, for example? Or are they interested in following, and feeling, all the history and culture that comes with preparing a traditional recipe?
In my experience, people want something beyond what they are used to, as pizza, pasta, that sort of thing. They want to learn for instance about lentils, farro, or how to make a good leg of lamb, Roman style.
A recipe is just a hollow shadow of executing flavor if you do not understand the origin of the recipe or the cultural folklore behind it.
LIke the word ziti; everyone knows that as a short cut of pasta, but what they don't know is that the word means bridegrooms. That is why it is often served at southern Italian country weddings.
3) Regarding gourmet products: most of the time people don't know the differences between marine salt and mineral salts. Some salt producers aim to promote its quality, expecting to reach the levels that olive oil has reached, with people being qualified to taste and classify the different qualities, so that we will be able to choose a salt quality, as we choose an extra-virgin olive oil today. Do you believe this kind of selective market will grow, with people becoming more and more aware of what to eat, or do you think people will always have too little time, and go for quick solutions?
I think there is more interest in what to eat but at the same time people want quickly made foods. You can save yourself a lot of confusion by having basic staples in your pantry that are the basis for your everyday cooking: good olive oil, sea salt, dried staples like lentils, pasta and jarred ingredients like anchovies and capers.
People have convinced themselves that they have no time to cook but if they added up the amount of leisure time they expended, there probably is room to cook some very simple things.
Not to do too much self promotion but several books that I have written can help including Ciao Italia Five-Ingredient Favorites: Quick and Delicious Recipes from an Italian Kitchen
4) There's a phrase that states that the mind is like a parachute; it
cannot be closed after being opened. Personally, I believe taste is
the same. When we begin to taste good quality food, we become more selective and it's difficult to go back and eat junk food again. Do you agree with this idea?Yes, I am a food snob in that respect. If you cook and know ingredients, you know intuitively what something should taste like. The more you are involved with your craft, the more critical you become and that's as it should be.
5) You visit Italy often: from the origins of the Mediterranean diet, to the present time, Italians have increased their meat intake, and
"fast food" has arrived in Italy. How do you see these changes? Are they just answers to social development, with different cultures living together (a pretty new thing in Italy), or do you believe there are also real changes in the Italian food culture? As an expert, how do you "see" Italian food "in Italy" nowadays?
I am really worried about what is happening to Italy's food culture, especially in the large cities, not so much in small towns where traditions tend to stay alive.
Fast food is a fact in large cities in Italy and the younger generation has embraced it.
There is also the mix of cultures as Italy absorbs many other immigrant cultures from Africa, Albania and other places.
6) You wrote two books regarding specific Italian regions, Tuscany and Umbria. Why did you choose those specific regions? Do you plan to write about another region (maybe Piedmont, after your last trip)?
I wrote the Tuscany book as a companion to a series Ciao Italia where we focused on the foods of Tuscany outside the usual places like Florence and Siena.
I wanted to showcase the smaller towns and villages and their cooking. I wrote the Umbria book to introduce people to a little know region of Italy that has super food and great cultural history. I have no plans at present to write a book on the Piedmont as I am writing a family classics book that will publish in the fall of 2011.
7) The recipes you demonstrate on your show are just fantastic! You make it look so easy and it makes people really feel like cooking Italian dishes. Your books are so inviting, and this last one is simply perfect because you present traditional and tasty recipes needing only 5 ingredients each, so that anyone can prepare them! What a wonderful idea! Can you discuss some of the recipes in the book, so that readers will find their mouths watering and will go straight to Amazon to buy it?
All the recipes from antipasto to desserts use only 5 ingredients, excluding salt and pepper. For instance pistachio dusted pork chops (the nuts replace brad crumbs and the chops infused with rosemary).
In the fish chapter there is a wonderful stuffed flounder with spinach, grated carrot and ginger; in the pasta chapter a dreamy, creamy farfalle and gorgonzola cheese dish, and in the dessert chapter, hazelnut tartlets with banana.
8) Can we ask you this, probably familiar, question? Which is your favorite recipe in this book?
Classic Spaghetti alla carbonara, just like it's prepared in Rome.
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We want to thank Mary Ann Esposito again for taking the time out to speak with us at All About Italian Food. We hope she has showed you some new aspects of Italian food and culture.
Be sure to check out Mary Ann Esposito's website Ciao Italia
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