The Neapolitan Graffe, a Carnival Sweet

The Graffe are a typical neapolitan sweet dish typical of the Carnival, a sort of southern italian version of the german recipe of the Krapfen or Berliner, as it is known in English. The Graffe are shaped like doughnuts, while the Krapfen does not shows the typical hole at the center. According to a legend, the Krapfen would have been invented by a pastry chef from Vienna, called Cecilia Krapf, at the end of the 1600s. They are actually one of the most enjoyed sweet streetfood in the central Europe, from Germany to Austria, from Hungary to Northern Italy (where they are called Bomboloni). A different hypotesis about their name suggest that their name derivates from the ancient germanic language, where the word Krafo means finger or claw, maybe because their shape at that time wasn't spherical but stretched.

That may explain the evolution of their name: in the Gothic language this sweet dish would have eventually trasformed and inflated becoming the today's Berliner, while in Southern Italy the original stretched, open shaped sweet would eventually have been closed into a sort of a knot, creating a dounghtnut-shaped sweet called Graffe.

The Austrians, while dominating in northern Italy, introduced the Krapfen there. For instance, in the German-speaking regions of Italy like Sudtirol-Alto Adige these sweets are called Faschingkrapfen, or Carnival Krapfen. Yes, they are related with Carnival too, just like the Graffe.

The Austrian regime, we dare to say, it is responsible of the introdution of the krapfen to Naples too, since the Austrian Habsburg gained the Crown of Naples with the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 and remained there until 1734. At that time, the Krapfen was still stretched, and we have to wait until the 1830s to see it closed like a donut and made with a potato dough. They surely have been created after the Zeppole of San Giuseppe, another Neapolitan sweet dish typical of the festivity of Saint Joseph that have been mentioned for the first time in the Bible of the history of Neapolitan cuisine: the "Cucina Teorico-Pratica" of Ippolito Cavalcanti.

Today the Graffe are frequently eaten in Sicily too, but they're filled with goat ricotta cheese and chocolate dips instead of the cream patissiere. But let's talk about the Graffe's recipe! Ready? Let's go! We usually serve them as they are, with no filling, but the day after you may need a filling, so in that case we use creme patissiere or gianduja cream to fill them or even to dip the Graffe!

RECIPE:

Ingredients for some 20 Graffas:

- 500 grams of flour

- 250 grams of potatoes

- 50 grams of sugar

-50 grams of unsalted butter

- 3 eggs

- a pinch of salt

- lemon zest to taste

- 25 grams of fresh yeast

- 70 grams of mild milk

- frying oil

Preparation:

1- Peel the potatoes and boil them until you notice that they're soft when you pick them with a fork. Put them aside.

2- Beat the eggs in a bowl, then add the warm butter, the sugar, the salt, the lemon zest, and the milk, where we previously have poured the yeast to activate. Beat it all with a fork or with a whisk and add the mashed or the shredded mashed potatoes to the bowl, and at the end we add the flour too. Mix it all well until you obtain a beautiful ball of dough (usually very fluffy), and we let it rest for about 30 minutes covered with a kitchen cloth. 

3- After that, we start shaping out our Graffe, cut pieces of the dough and roll them into a sort of "churros", or fingers, and then close them just as you would do to create a donut. You can also create a little ball, push your finger through it to create in it a hole of the dimension that you want. After that they're shaped, we let them rest above some parchment paper or above the worktop (always covered with flour in order to prevent the doughs to stick to the surface). We cover the Graffe and we let them rest for about an hour.

4- We prepare a frying pan with enough oil in it. Please remember that you want the Graffe to float in the oil, not to touch the bottom of the pan. Once that the oil is boiling, with the help of a spatula we introduce the Graffe into the oil little by little. They only need to fry for few minutes for each side, until we see them golden brown. We take them out of the frying pan and we let them dry above some kitchen towel, then we sprinkle above them some sugar above them. 

You can eat them even the day after, but they will loose something of their unique fluffy texture given by the potatoes. We would advice you to eat them as soon as you've cooked them, or at least we love them that way because the just made Graffe are sooo rich and tasty that they really do not need no filling at all!

We hope that you all will enjoy a great Carnival with lots and lots of Graffe! Buon appetito!

Eggplant Parmigiana

The Eggplant Parmigiana is a most famous southern italian dish, and we're sure that once you've tried it, it'll become a classic in your kitchen too!

Many are the places that claims to have created this simple yet delicious dish, as always happens with the great things, everyone's interested in demonstrating his "paternity" to it. The Eggplant Parmigiana is typical in many Italian regional cuisines, and even if many thinks that this kid was born in the Campania region, the only region that actually obtained an official title to demonstrate it is Sicily.

Two are the main ingredients of the Parmigiana (no, neither of the two is the Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, curiously). We're talking of the Tomato and the Eggplant or Aubergine if you're London-based. These two ingredients are just marvellous together, they are a match made in food heaven, they always seems to have been around together since forever. Today, they are two of the most representative ingredients of the Mediterranean cuisine, but they're really not mediterranean at all. Shocked? Keep reading!


Mr. Tomato and miss Aubergine agreed to have a blind date that they decided to occur in Sicily, somewhat halfway between America (Tomato) and Asia (Eggplant-aubergine).
The first one to reach the meeting point was miss Aubergine, around year 827, brought there by the hands of the Moors. The poor pretty lady had to wait a long long time for her pretender, but miss Aubergine in Sicily found a second house, and she even called her friends to reach her in that beautiful island. In a little while, Sicily was filled, packed of miss Aubergines, all of these waiting for the "Caravan of love" to come from America with many, many Mr. Tomatoes.

miss Aubergine went to Sicily for tourism but decided to remain there.

They say that in that year Cristopher Columbus discovered America, but we all know that it was just an excuse: come on, let's be realistic, Columbus went there just to pick up the Tomato that were horribly late for their blind date! (knowing Mr. Tomato pretty well, we dare to say that he was too much nervous because he wanted to give an excellent first impression). What would it be of Italian gastronomy without the tomato!? It would be really unthinkable! The variety of dishes made with tomatoes is just countless: pasta, salads, meals, pizza...and a million of other dishes useless without that gorgeous fruit dressed up like it was a veggie. One may be allowed to think that if it were not for the discover of the tomato, many dishes wouldn't even exist nowadays! But shush! Let's not say this aloud, we don't want the tomato to talk big.


Finally, it was Hernan Cortes who brought tomatoes to Europe, around year 1500 (men seems to be never in a hurry!). Before reaching Sicily, actually, they call at Madrid, Spain (if we close our eyes we can imagine the tomatoes running from a Terminal to another in Madrid's labyrintic Barajas Intercontinental Airport!). Mr. Tomato, just arrived in the Old World, was considered to be just a non edible ornamental plant: we guess that he spent way too much time getting himself all dolled up! Shall we agree that this is one of the World's first examples of Metrosexuality in the history of mankind, shall we?

The meeting of Mr. Tomato and miss Aubergine

When he finally managed to reach Sicily and he met miss Aubergine, it was more than just love at first sight: it was a premeditated love, a love written in the skies by destiny. A love that is very strong still today, if we judge by the number of dishes where they appears to be gloriously married together. It's like an artistic duo: when they appears together, magical things happens! We had to wait many centuries to see them shining together, but they definitely worth all the time spent! To be completely sincere with you, there are also other dishes that came before the Parmigiana and had miss Aubergine as a starring actress: we're talking about the Sicilian "Caponata", but don't worry, we'll talk about it in another occasion!


We can find the Eggplant Parmigiana (Parmigiana di Melanzane in Italian) recipe for the first time in a cookbook published in Naples in year 1778, titled "Il cuoco elegante" (the elegant cook) and written by Vincenzo Corrado. In the 1839 book "Cucina teorico-pratica" ("practical-theoretical cuisine") by Ippolito Cavalcanti (from Naples too) we can read the Parmigiana recipe almost as we know it today.

Parmigiana di Melanzane, or in english Eggplant Parmigiana

Pretty as much as it happens with its birth, even the origin of the name of the Parmigiana is surrounded by many hypotesis and uncertainities. We can think the Parmigiana to be somewhat linked with the Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, or in the beautiful city of Parma, in north of Italy. Actually, in Parma, a very high end gastronomical city, there was a tradition in cutting veggies into slices and presenting them cooked one above the other, just like Parmigiana. We tend not to agree much with this option, since there are no immediate links between Parma and Sicily at the time of the supposed birth of the Parmigiana, even if many excellent food historians and food scholars like Luciano Pignataro do support this hypotesis and think that the Eggplant Parmigiana means "eggplant cooked as they do in Parma".


The other hypotesis comes straight from the Sicily itself, where the vernacular word "parmiciana" means louver, therefore indicating a structure composed of different slats one above the other, just like what happens with the Parmigiana. We are more convinced by this option, since we know that the Moors had windows similar to our jealousie windows and they brought them wherever they went, as it happened with the eggplant. It mustn't surprise then that there might have been a Moorish dish with sliced fried eggplants in the Arab Sicily that was the grandma of our Parmigiana recipe.

What it seems to be sure is that the Parmigiana less or nothing have to share with the "King of Cheeses", the unique and only Parmigiano Reggiano, even if in modern-days Parmigiana that marvellous northern Italian cheese is used gratinated above the dish. On the other hand, what dish does not enjoy some gratinated Parmigiano? In different regional version of this recipe we can see that are used Pecorino or Caciocavallo cheeses.

But now it's time to put something under our teeth! Let's go with the very simple and delicious recipe!

Recipe:

Ingredients: (As always, the quantities written above are just an indication: with three middle sized eggplant you can obtain four portions of Parmigiana, and according to this ratio, modify the quantity of eggplant needed)

- 3 middle sized eggplant
- 500 - 800 g aprox. of tomato sauce (preferably home made)
- Breadcrumbs
- Flour
- 2 or 3 eggs
- 100 g. of authentic Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (only the original!)
- Olive oil
- Basil
- 2 fresh Mozzarella (better if it's "fior di latte")

Preparation:

1- We start peeling our eggplants (the skin of the eggplant may result bitter in our palates), we wash them into slices somewhat less than half an inch wides, we put them in a colander and the sprinkle some salt above them. We let the eggplants to "sweat" to let them lose their water, for about an hour. After this, we wash the slices, we dry them and we bread them.

2- To bread our eggplants, we'll pass the slices through flour, then through beaten egg and last through breadcrumbs. We'll fry them in boiling oil until they become golden brown in both sides and we dry them using a kitchen paper to get rid of the excess of oil.

Flour, eggs and breadcrumbs

3- In a platter fit for the oven, we put the eggplant slices in the bottom of the dish, then we cover it with tomato sauce (ours is made with pepper and garlic), then add sliced or little pieces of mozzarella fresh cheese to taste, basil leaves and then we add another layer of eggplants, following the order, just like you would do cooking a lasagna.

  4- The last layer will end with tomato sauce, mozzarella and gratinated Parmigiano Reggiano. We'll pop it into the preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes at 180ºC. They say that the Parmigiana is to be left into the oven "finchè si asciuga", that in italian means  "until the sauce gets dry" and we can appreciate a golden brown crust above it.

It is a delicious dish that you can enjoy both warm or cold.


Last but not least, you can cook a light version of the Parmigiana using grilled eggplant instead of fried ones. You can also fry them only passing them through the beaten eggs or breading them only with flour and not with breadcrumbs...you choose how! Just try it, you'll fall in love with it in a matter of seconds!

Buon Appetito!