In November the Embassy of Italy’s Istituto Italiano di Cultura – Washington celebrated the Week of Italian Food in America. That week also, coincidentally, saw the opening of the Carpaccio exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. To both events I say, Buon Appetito!
Lovely Baking
On behalf of the Istituto, I was invited to attend a Baking Masterclass taught by an Italian chef, Rita Monastero. Chef Rita has appeared on Italian television, written 11 cookbooks (alas, none in English, although one has been translated into Turkish), and has taught in-person classes throughout Italy and in Bangkok. She is known as LovelyCheffa, which might lose something in translation.
Most of the students in the class were the lucky winners of a lottery conducted on social media, so I was not the only one taking many pictures, intending to post a record online! But we did have to put down the camera (me) and phones (everybody else) because the class was hands-on with the dough.
Chef Rita started by demonstrating how to mix dough by making a well for the wet ingredients in the pile of flour on the table and attacking it with your hands until something forms that can be kneaded and left to rise. Although I understand that this is a traditional European technique, I usually opt for a bowl and sometimes even a dough hook when I bake. Chef didn’t disagree. “I usually use a machine at home,” she admitted. But she was good at it!
The first project was a loaf of Semi-sweet Plaited Bread, filled with deli meat and cheese. Chef made one, with help from some of the students, but since it has two rises and bakes for one hour, the finished product was produced by the magic oven just before class was over. No one minded.
We also made Pumpkin Roman Buns, and got to practice a roll-up-and-tuck technique which promised to counteract the density of adding in mashed pumpkin. Since the class buns didn’t have time to rise, we once again had to take it on trust that ours would have turned out as perfect as Chef Rita’s precooked ones did.
The last lesson was one we all enjoyed, not least because we all got to take home the finished product: Grissini, or Italian Breadsticks. We mixed a very simple dough and practiced fashioning sticks of varying thicknesses and lengths. Names on the baking paper ensured that the batches were not mixed up. Mine were delicious, if I say so myself.
At the end of the lesson, we indulged in a final round of recording the photogenic products. Then we ate those products for lunch.
And Lovely But Disappointing
The National Gallery of Art opened a new exhibit: Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice. Now I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression; I didn’t expect the pictures to be all about food, even though, when I hear “carpaccio” (and I think I’m not alone in this), what comes to mind is the dish of shaved raw meat dressed with vinaigrette.
This exhibit is rather a collection of the paintings of the appetizer’s namesake. The legend holds that Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Harry’s Bar in Venice, Italy, invented the dish in 1963 to honor a patron who was ordered by her doctor to eat uncooked meat. The name came from the red pigments of the dresses in an exhibition of Carpaccio paintings near the restaurant.
Why was I disappointed? Because search though I might, I could find nary a reference to food or cooking in any of these fabulously sumptuous pictures. Full of detail as they were (and they were! Many of them reward the prolonged gaze), they were sadly bereft of pictures including my particular obsession. In only the very first example of Carpaccio’s work, at the entrance to the exhibit, did I notice any activity related to food gathering. Admittedly, that one was terrific – a group of gentlemen in boats on the lagoon, fishing with egrets.
I had to be satisfied for the rest of the exhibit with marveling at the paintings for themselves: St. George spearing the dragon, St Augustine in his study, a portrait of a fine young knight in armor half German and half Italian, according to our tour guide, Gretchen Hirschauer, curator of Italian and Spanish painting.
This exhibit of work by a Renaissance master not very well-known outside of Venice will be on view until February, 2023. Go see it, and don’t ask, “Where’s the beef?”
