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Perhaps best known for her James Beard award-winning book, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove (W.W. Norton & Co.), Schenone traveled to Genoa in search of her grandmother's - and ultimately her own - culinary roots and writes about the journey in her memoir, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken (W.W. Norton).
Now Schenone, 45, and painter/writer/pastry chef Nancy Gail Ring, 51, are launching Jellypress.com, a Web site devoted to lost recipes - with a special feature called the Not-to-Be-Forgotten recipe club.
The site explores the ancestral pantries all women share, looking for precise recipes as well as broader life lessons.
"We explore the past because it is a foreign culture we can learn from," Schenone says. "But it is likely the recipes we find will have to be tailored for today's tastes."
And frankly, some of their findings fall into a Better-to-Be-Forgotten category. Schenone has come across recipes for Feet and Ears (of pigs, that is) and Cod's Head, for example. She does not recommend either.
She and Ring met and became pals when Ring, then a food columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, reviewed Schenone's first book. In addition to both being food historians and home cooks, they discovered they lived in neighboring towns (Montclair and West Orange).
They also share an abiding appreciation for the power of food in family life - past and present. In Schenone's kitchen recently, the women spoke about food and how it roots us, as they casually sliced and sauteed their way through three recipes.
On one hand, when you get right down to it, we're mothers and we do have to decide what to make for dinner most, if not every, night, Schenone says. "And in every generation, that has meant learning anew the roots of our sustenance and our role in providing sustenance.
"This has given us, as women, a privileged relationship with food over the centuries."
They made hand-rolled ravioli stuffed with ricotta and goat cheese, dabbed (not drowned) in a tomato sauce. They made cacciucco, a fish stew circa 1891, which is featured on Jellypress.com; and Grandma Roe's Rugelach (her spelling), a Ring family specialty. (See accompanying recipes.)
Like Schenone, Ring turned her search for her grandmother's lost recipe into a mouthwatering memoir, Walking on Walnuts (Bantam Books).
A watercolorist who learned to bake early and often, Ring wanted to re-create her grandmother's rugelach (a pastry stuffed with raisins and walnuts). Her journey of self-discovery through the ancestral cupboard also recounts Ring's experiences in the pastry kitchens of well-known Manhattan restaurants. It was fun, she says, until she suffered a herniated disk carrying a 50-pound sack of flour.
And how's this for an obscure connection: The two women found that the recipes they were looking for each called for cream cheese. Philadelphia brand cream cheese.
The product was listed in the ingredients for Schenone's family ravioli, so she figured a recipe that old had to have used a different cheese initially. In her travels, Schenone found a European Neufchatel with a high fat content and a similar taste to Philadelphia Cream Cheese. But after continued investigation, she found that the cheese in her family ravioli was an obscure local Genoese cheese called prescinseua.
Ring learned that Philadelphia cream cheese was the secret ingredient in the dough for her grandmother's rugelach.
"When we met we were amazed at how much we had in common," says Ring.
Rugelach (sometimes called a "little twist") and ravioli ("little package") also have more in common than is immediately apparent, Schenone says.
Both use dough that is rolled and stuffed. And neither is a quick and easy dish, Schenone says. So they were likely made on holidays, and that would have enhanced their cultural significance.
Both women collect vintage kitchen gadgets, and they especially prize family hand-me-downs. Schenone still uses her grandmother's cone-shaped sieve, wooden pestle, and a set of fabulous fish platters and plates.
Schenone says many home cooks tend to see the past as a paradise where kerchiefed women held culinary magic in their stalwart hands.
"There's a sense that they had something essential that we've lost," she says, "And to an extent that's true." Certainly, Schenone wanted to learn what ravioli dough should feel like.
But lost can be a good thing. Some recipes, ingredients and techniques are best left in the past, Schenone says.
"Nostalgia can lead us to think the good old days were always happy ones, that Mother Nature is always benevolent, and that technology has ruined our food. I don't believe all that is true."
She would rather not return to a time when women had to snare a hare and clean it themselves before making stew.
But Schenone would encourage people to eat dandelion greens more often. She'd bring back Rosewater and Orange Blossom Water, and encourage home cooks to know more about saucing dishes and making pie dough.
That's part of the tactile memory she's trying to recover.
Lemon verbena and lavender are already being brought back by creative chefs. Quince, beets - these are all good things, Ring adds.
But for a variety of reasons ranging from taste to time and trouble, Schenone says, she would not put entrails, beef cheeks or lamprey (an eel-shaped fish with extremely fatty flesh) back on the family dinner table.
Neither is she likely to make terrapin, fricasseed pigeon, or anything involving duck's blood.
"When you encounter an old recipe," Schenone says, "you have to make judgment calls."
Makes 3 or 4 dinner-size servings
11/2 cups whole-milk ricotta cheese
6 tablespoons goat cheese, softened
Salt and pepper to taste
A sprinkle of freshly grated nutmeg (optional)
1 egg, lightly scrambled
1. Using a wooden spoon, mix the cheeses, salt and pepper, and nutmeg (if using). Taste and add salt or pepper as needed. Add the egg and stir to a smooth paste.
2. Using a pasta making machine, roll your pasta to 1/16 inch or thinner. Fill and press the ravioli. Cut into squares. Dry at least a half hour on a clean tablecloth or sheet, or a cookie sprinkled with flour or cornmeal.
3. To freeze for later use, place cookie sheet in freezer. When ravioli are frozen, scrape them off into an airtight freezer bag.
4. Put ravioli into a large pot of abundantly salted boiling water and cook about 3 minutes if fresh, about 5 minutes if frozen. Take one out and taste for doneness before draining. Serve with sauce of your choice.
by Laura Schenone (W.W.Norton & Co. 2008)
Makes 1 pound of pasta (3 to 4 dinner servings)
1 cup OO flour (sold in specialty shops; if unavailable use all-purpose)
1 cup all-purpose flour, plus extra for dusting work surface
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 egg
4 to 7 tablespoons tepid water, adding more a little at a time as needed
Dough can be made by hand or using a stand mixer and a pasta machine. For this method, use an inexpensive manual pasta machine (or an electric one) and a checkered ravioli rolling pin, which scores the dough into square pillows.
1. For the dough, combine the flours and salt in the bowl of your mixer, fitted with a dough hook..
2. At low speed, turn on the motor. Add the oil, egg and a little water to create a ball. Gradually increase the speed and work the dough. Sprinkle in water (try using a spray bottle), adding only what is necessary for consistency.
3. When the dough becomes soft and elastic, take it out of the mixer and knead it a few more minutes until it is satiny. Cover it with plastic wrap and let it rest for at least a half hour before rolling it out.
4. For the ravioli, divide the dough into three portions; cover two with plastic wrap. By hand, press the last piece into an oval-shaped disk and sprinkle liberally with flour.
5. With the pasta machine on the first setting (the widest space between the rollers), feed the dough disk through the rollers and retrieve it. Fold it in thirds, like a letter and feed it through again, short end first. Repeat this step. If the dough starts to tear, sprinkle it with more flour.
6. Without refolding, put the dough through increasingly higher settings, making it longer, thinner, more translucent with each pass. The goal is thin pasta, no more than 1/16-inch thick, 4 to 5 inches wide and 2 to 3 feet long.
7. Dust the work surface with flour. Lay down the pasta sheet. Gently fold it from one tip to the other to crease the dough at the halfway mark. Open it up again.
8. Put some spoonfuls of filling on half of the dough, spreading it evenly, about 1/8-inch thick, with a butter knife. Each spoonful must be level. Leave a 1/2-inch clear border at the edges. Fold the clean half of the dough over top.
9. Sprinkle flour over the dough. With a ravioli rolling pin in line with filled spaces, firmly roll across the dough, imprinting the squares and sealing the ravioli. Press firmly on the grooves to cut the ravioli. Lift and transfer ravioli to a tablecloth or sheet to dry. Repeat with remaining dough.
10. Let the ravioli dry at least 30 minutes before cooking or freezing for later use.
by Laura Schenone (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008)
Makes 60 pieces
For the pastry:
1/2 pound unsalted butter, softened
1/2 pound cream cheese, softened
2 cups flour
Pinch of salt
1 egg white, beaten, for brushing the dough before baking.
For the filling:
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 tablespoon cinnamon
2 cups chopped dried figs
1/2 cup sun-dried cranberries
Grated zest of 1 lemon
21/2 tablespoons lemon juice
Pinch of salt
11/2 cups walnuts, toasted and chopped
1. For the pastry: Beat the butter and cream cheese until smooth. Gently stir in the flour and salt. Do not overwork dough. Divide dough into five pieces. Chill until firm.
2. For the filling: In a pan on medium heat, cook filling ingredients except walnuts until sugar dissolves. Let cool.
3. For the rugelach: Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or grease it and set aside. Working one piece at a time, roll the dough in equal parts of sugar and flour. Roll dough to a circle 8 inches in diameter. Sprinkle evenly with some filling and walnuts.
4. Cut the circle into quarters, then cut each quarter into three triangles. Roll each rugelach up from the large end of each triangle to the pointed end. Place rugelach, with the points tucked under, on the prepared sheet. Repeat to roll all the cookies. Let them rest, refrigerated, until firm.
5. When ready to bake, heat oven to 350 degrees. Brush each cookie with egg white and sprinkle with sugar. Bake until the cookies are golden, 10 to 20 minutes.
by Nancy Gail Ring (Bantam Books, 1996)
Makes 4 servings
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion chopped fine (1 cup)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup minced flatleaf parsley
1 cup chopped ripe tomatoes (or 14-ounce can plum tomatoes, drained, roughly chopped or crushed
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons good vinegar
3/4 cup water or white wine
1 1/2 pounds good white fish, cut into portions, or a mix of white fish and shellfish
Salt and pepper to taste
1 half loaf warm crusty bread, cut in 1-inch chunks
1. In a large saute pan, heat oil. Saute onion, garlic and parsley, stirring to avoid burning, until onion is soft and translucent, just starting to brown, add the tomatoes and salt. Combine and add the vinegar and water (or wine).
2. Let the sauce simmer a few minutes. Place the fish on top and spoon some sauce over it. Cover pan. Bring heat to medium. Let cook until fish flakes with a fork. The timing will vary, based on thickness of the fish. If using shrimp or shellfish, add them for the last 2 to 3 minutes of cooking.
3. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed. Serve in a bowl with warm bread and plenty of sauce.
the Art of Eating Well by Pellegrino Artusi, 1891.
Contact staff writer Dianna Marder at 215-854-4211 or dmarder@phillynews.com. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/diannamarder.
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