Laredo native Gilda Valdez Carbonaro has just published a cookbook, A Tiny Kitchen in Florence: Coping By Cooking During the 2020 Pandemic on the Kindle platform.
I recommend it to you with a hearty appetite.
In three words: Buy. Gilda’s. Book.
A Tiny Kitchen in Florence is a 93-page introduction to classic Italian cooking informed by the years Gilda has lived in Italy where she learned from her husband Fulvio’s family of master cooks, as a guest at local friends’ tables, and from every restaurant meal they’ve enjoyed. The beautiful photos of each finished recipe are mouthwatering.
Before this pandemic cookbook, Gilda and Fulvio wrote the English translation of Yvonne Carbonaro’s cuisine history, Food Tells the Story of Naples: Neapolitan Food Traditions Through the Centuries, also available in a Kindle edition. Gilda also founded a gastronomic tourism business, Culinarian Expeditions, that has put adventurous cooks into working kitchens in both Italy and Mexico. When Gilda goes to a mercato or mercado to gather food for her kitchen, she knows what is in season and what will taste best when she prepares it to serve at her convivial table.
A Tiny Kitchen is not the work of an inexperienced hobby chef. This short, easy-to-use Italian cookbook speaks to us with the voice of authority.
Sorry about beginning with a spoiler, but “Buy Gilda’s book” is all I have to say.
You may stop reading now and miss nothing essential, …if you get your electronic copy, that is.
Oh, I almost forgot. There is also the crucial warning never to mispronounce her name as “HEEL-dah.” Stay safe on her good side with “GILL-dah.” (As in the 1946 Rita Hayworth movie.)
If you heedlessly insist and continue reading, you’ll find praises for parts of the book I found particularly excellent. Be patient with the unpalatable pedantry I’ve let spill into the simmering saucepan of my enthusiasm.
You can give A Tiny Kitchen in Florence as a gift to the cooks in your life, whether they are complete novices, experienced cooks, or master chefs. There is delicious food to be prepared from all its recipes. They will guide an aspiring cook through essential basic approaches and techniques for preparing classic Italian dishes, basics that will apply to cooking anything.
Other loved ones may be initiates in other culinary traditions, but who are open to adding Italian cooking to their dinner menus.
More experienced cooks who have elaborated –or more accurately, over-elaborated– their kitchen specialties over the years into baroque complexities will get a salutary reminder of what joy there is in simpler pleasures. Indeed, these recipes are a welcome antidote to the decadent, indigestible bizarreries of bouillabaisse curry, okra bratwurst, pasta palak paneer, donut burgers, kimchi duck tacos, barbecued tofu, and sushi burritos.
Take, for instance, the first recipe in the Antipasti section, fettunta. Its simplicity is the foundation of its appeal. Just three ingredients: sliced bread, a cut garlic clove, and olive oil. Three verbs: grill on an open wood fire, rub, and drizzle.
Of course, for anything brought back to such essentials to be good, each of the ingredients must be of the highest quality. This recipe cannot be made with Wonder Bread, two-year-old garlic salt, or hot-pressed, dyed, chemically processed, street-walker olive oil.
No way, Giuseppe.
Fettunta is only going to be as good as its three components. Delicious food always starts outside the kitchen and before the stirring.
Even so, there is complexity enough supporting the simplicity. Fettunta is a Florentine specialty associated with the fall olive harvest in the Tuscan countryside and the first pressing of the year’s olive oil. Italians with olive grower connections like the Carbonaros have their favored groves and know to savor the unique flavor of different terroirs.
Read the brief section in A Tiny Kitchen on the importance of extra virgin olive oil. A cheap industrial olive oil that is best used to silence a squeaky hinge belongs in the workshop, not the pantry.
Appropriate food for each season matters, too. Along with the new oil from freshly-harvested olives, fall brings cooler evenings and make having an open fire in the hearth for fettunta a nice touch, something that would have been oppressive in the sweltering summer months. To grill artisanal bread with garlic and fresh olive oil is a perfect seasonal treat that takes the chill off your fingers and the edge off your appetite.
Ideally, the bread for grilling over the wood fire would come from a Florentine bakery whose traditions of bread-making are measured in millennia rather than centuries. For us Americans, banned from Italy because our disgracefully inept public health system has made us sicker with COVID-19 than many Third World countries, we’ll have to make do with the best artisanal bread available locally.
Next time I’m at a party (masked and socially distanced, of course) and someone says, “Here, try some of this amazing creamcheese-miso-caper-habanero spread with zatar on the kale-buckwheat tortillas,” I’ll have this one-word response, “Fettunta.” Then I’ll check to see if the wine they are serving comes from a box of vintage Franzia.
The cookbook genre is impossible to define, but everybody recognizes a cookbook when you see one. Or maybe not.
Cookbooks as encyclopedias: The Joy of Cooking or La Varenne Practique.
Foreign language textbooks: Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking or Marcella Hazan’s Italian Kitchen take you through the food equivalents of the sounds, grammar, and meanings of a foreign cuisine.
Pin-up girl cookbooks: Giada de Laurentiis and Mimi Thorissen suggest that it’s not just the food that’s cooking.
Environmentalist cookbooks: in 1971 Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet was about Earth Day as much as cooking.
Social Justice cookbooks: in the time of BLM, we are finally paying attention to cookbook writers exploring the foodways of the African diaspora, Edna Lewis, Matthew Twitty, and Toni Tipton-Martin, for example, just to prime the pump tapping the deep aquifer of soul food running hidden under what we think of as All-American food.
Nutrition fad cookbooks:, you can be sure cookbooks based on a new mania won’t be far behind. I remember eating magnesium-rich food because of Adelle Davis’ Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit in the early 70s.
Food as medicine cookbooks: we have the quackery of the supplement gurus and Doc Weil’s True Food: Seasonal, Sustainable, Simple, Pure cookbook, or How to Cook with Supplements. They may not sell quite as well as kiss-and-tell blockbusters by opportunists who ‘worked’ in the Trump White House, but they are cash cows. Look for them in health-food and supplement outlets. Here we are in a mostly secular Twenty-first century and still have unbreakable dietary laws as strict as anything in the kashrut of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
Diet cookbooks: from vegan to paleo to gluten-free. Someone may be working on The Fake News Media Diet as you read this.
Restaurant cookbooks: Momofuku and Ottolenghi celebrate and not unintentionally monetize the signature dishes of their namesake restaurants.
Billionaire cookbooks: Nathan Myhrvold’s $800 Modernist Cuisine is about kitchen gadgets that cost as much as a new car and food photography, the ultimate one-percenter’s vanity press.
Cookbook novels: Heck, while we’re at this long listing, how could I omitLaura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate?
Cookbooks as literary essays: M.F.K. Fisher wrote elegant essays that happened to be about food …and sometimes even included recipes.
Funny cookbooks: another triple-initialed author, W.M.W. Fowler, entertained me with his Countryman’s Cooking, with its LOL recipe for cormorant cooked in gasoline, a hilarious stew of kitchen lore and jokes for rogues written as a distraction during the lean years of postwar food rationing in England.
Impossible to cook recipe cookbooks: Elizabeth David published A Book of Mediterranean Cooking in 1950, as nostalgia for pre-war food on the Continent. Her original English readers couldn’t cook any of the recipes, since none of the ingredients were for sale in England until the late 50s. Like many other cookbooks, it was a cookbook for the imagination rather than the kitchen.
You get the idea.
Cookbooks are a protean genre that is always changing and going in new directions.
Gilda Valdez Carbonaro’s cookbook is a cookbook.
But it’s more than that.
Obiter dictum alert. If you thought you could live without an ebook reader, now you know: you do need one. Sure, you can read A Tiny Kitchen in Florence on a computer with the Kindle app, but what about the precious counter space you lose to the open laptop? And what about spilling extra virgin olive oil or anchovies on the keyboard? A tablet is so much friendlier when you are setting out the recipe’s ingredients and kitchen equipment, arranging your personal mise en place.
Besides its digital format, here’s some of what is special about Coping By Cooking During the 2020 Pandemic.
In the first place, and although this is not a food issue at all, there is the pride we feel in our Nixon High Class of ‘67 classmate’s accomplishments.
[Full disclosure: I was a member of the 1962 Lamar Jr. High Spelling Club with Gilda Valdez. The yearbook photo shows that we were the two shortest orthographers on the team.]
But back to the sheep as the French cliché goes, I mean, to the food. The recipes are for classic Italian dishes that (it is redundant to say) have stood the test of time. Novelty in food is a brief fling while the surprise lasts, but one that generally loses its appeal as the surprise fades and repetition dulls the first-time thrill.
As has been said, the recipes in A Tiny Kitchen for pasta, meat, vegetables, and desserts are based on traditional Italian home cooking. It is no surprise that they continue to please, having been slowly but continuously refined by cooks and palates over centuries. Every ingredient and each cooking method is used because it has been proven to work.
Don’t get the wrong idea. Gilda is not a finger-wagging nag enforcing culinary orthodoxy.
Referring to no less an authority than her Neapolitan mother-in-law, she sets us free to innovate – but within a tradition.
“Once you get the basic idea, use what my mother-in-law always called fantasia (imagination). She would prepare something and say she had done it a modo mio; that is, she had adapted a recipe to the way she liked it best.”
This philosophy makes A Tiny Kitchen in Florence greater than the sum of the individual recipes. By teaching us how to prepare traditional food in recipes that have been in continuous preparation through the hard times and good times of Italian history, Gilda accomplishes something that is often missing from cookbooks I’ve used.
The saying “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime,” applies.
Feed a guest at your table Pasta all’aglio, olio, e peperoncino, and you’ll feed him a memorable meal. Teach him how to make that simply delicious dish – or Pasta al pomodoro – and you’ll feed him for a lifetime, and he, too, can say he’s done it a modo mio.
They’re that good.
Another feature of A Tiny Kitchen is the variety of regional Italian dishes included. Although Tuscan cuisine is most prominent, there are also recipes from Lazio, Sicily, and southern Italy. This eclectic selection makes for a pleasing variety of styles and flavors and keeps the cookbook from being limited to narrow regional perspectives. It’s about food and local culture, but with emphasis on the former.
To establish my bona fides, I tested the recipes. First on my list was acquacotta, the ancient peasant bread-based soup on pages 45-46. It has one of the longer lists of directions, seven in all. What a plus that this cookbook offers no recipes that span three pages of processing details and take two days to make!
We had a leftover rustic baguette from the Grand Central Bakery’s wood oven in Seattle, and it was the perfect basis for ‘cooked water,’ or acquacotta. This wonderfully uncomplicated recipe took less than an hour to prepare, from chopping the onion and celery to ladling the soup into bowls. With fresh eggs laid that morning by our neighbor’s hens and poached for three minutes in the broth just before serving, it was a poor man’s soup fit for a king.
Italian wines are muscled off the shelves here by humorously priced California vintages at both the high and low ends, so I couldn’t find the Morellino di Scansano recommended by Aldo Guglielmi. I improvised and opened a $17 bottle of 2016 Chateau Ste. Michelle Indian Wells Cabernet Sauvignon. It was almost as good as the easily made and deeply satisfying acquacotta.
Next on the tryout list? Another dish I’ve never made before, Panna cotta, the last recipe in the book, pages 91-92. I’ve had a hankering for it ever since Gilda posted photos of it on the Culinarian Expeditions Instagram account (which you should be following, BTW.) The raspberries here are done, but local strawberries are still available, so I’ll try those in one of the loveliest desserts you’ll ever see. If it tastes half as good as it looks…!
But there is more in Gilda’s tiny kitchen than excellent cooking.
She teaches us a wise way of living that integrates the gathering, the cooking, and the eating of her recipes. To call it a lifestyle would be to insult that wisdom as if it were something from a magazine at the dentist’s office.
The cook’s attentiveness to the seasons of the year with their cycling bounty and her respect for long-view agriculture guide the choice of quality ingredients and the beauty of the presentation.
And the serious joy Gilda brings to preparing food in her tiny kitchen is leavened with a nice sense of fun. We picture her cooking, singing, and dancing with Fulvio to the music of Agustín Lara, Peppino di Capri, Delbert McClinton, salsa, and merengue. If you follow Culinarian Expeditions on Instagram or Facebook, you’ll have seen what the cook’s professional uniform is and what kitchen shoes are in the tiny kitchen.
In the Introduction we read, “Cooking is what we do every day to nourish not only our body but the soul as well. Cooking is connection, and it is love, quite simply.”
This is where the pandemic of 2020 comes in. Staying indoors except for essentials and wearing gloves and masks when we go out among other people have been annoying restrictions on that previous way of doing things that has come to be called normal life. But like everyone who recognizes our responsibility to others, especially vulnerable neighbors who are older or already weak from pre-existing conditions, Gilda and Fulvio coped with the vexing quarantine rules in their Florence apartment with its tiny kitchen.
They practiced the communal virtue of “sticking together by staying apart.”
Cooking in the tiny kitchen with simple equipment and creating this book of recipes was about cooking, yes. But A Tiny Kitchen in Florence: Coping by Cooking During the 2020 Pandemic is about something deeper, something we can reach via cooking.
These recipes nourish our souls, and they are about connection.
As simple as the Minestrone recipe on pages 49-50 is, it’s really about love. Good food prepared Gilda’s way brings back memories of joyous meals of our individual pasts. Remembering our own happily shared minestrone, we see with her the hungry toddler eating his first solid food and the soldier returning from the battlefield to enjoy his favorite dish again.
We have all experienced the old-fashioned pleasure named by an old-fashioned word conviviality, life together with the nourishment of body and soul at dinner tables where we loved the food AND the people.
Cooking is one of our most important ways to connect with other people.
This is a perfect pandemic cookbook, connecting us from our quarantined spaces through food and love.
The promises of A Tiny Kitchen in Florence will be fulfilled when we can all sit close together at the same table again, say “Pass the wine, please,” “Oh, this is so delicious, thank you,” and “Remember the time…?” as we enjoy together delicious food from the same kitchen.
Until that happy day, thank you, Gilda Valdez Carbonaro, for bringing us together in this pandemic to cook these recipes in our own socially distanced, tiny kitchens.
