The red gravy was the starting point- sauce 'tomate' to her mom, the mother sauce. She grabbed a big yellow onion, two ribs of celery, a fat carrot, and a handful of parsley, the 'quattro evangelistas,' the "four saints," of Italian cooking.
She diced the onion, celery, and carrot first, then cut a sweet red pepper and parsley even finer, like grains of wet sand, running the knife through them again and again. She picked off five cloves of garlic, smashed, peeled, and gave them a rough dice, so that they'd flavor the sauce but not overwhelm it.
Three big glugs of olive oil went into the heated pot, followed by the 'evangelistas,' salt and pepper, and only then by the garlic, so it wouldn't burn. She folded in a dollop of tomato paste. While they simmered, she stripped a handful of dried herbs from the collection she kept hanging- rosemary, basil, thyme, oregano- then rubbed her hands together over the pot and watched the flecks drift down like tiny green snowflakes.

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When she'd come down to the kitchen after her shower, she'd deliberately left the lights off. She liked the way the cake looked in the bright light of the full moon that was streaming in through the windows. On the kitchen table a wooden spoon sat in a small saucepot, which held crushed hazelnuts that had been soaked and heated in Frangelico, next to the bowl of thick, velvety pastry cream she had prepared earlier. She released one of the layers from its baking pan and settled it onto the cake plate. She had sprinkled them while they were still warm with the same infused brandy, so they were now redolent with a harmonious perfume of filberts and chocolate. She deftly spread some of the pastry cream on the first layer and sprinkled a tablespoon of the crushed nuts on top of it. She added the second layer of cake, more buttery cream, and a dusting of nuts.
Angelina always aimed for an extra shading of flavor when she created a recipe, something to complement and embrace the most prominent flavor in a dish, something that tickled the palate and the imagination. Here, she had chosen aromatic, earthy hazelnuts to add an extra dimension of texture and taste. She'd heard someplace that some musical composers said that it was the spaces between the notes that made all the difference; when you were cooking, it was the little details, too.
Each layer of the dense cake covered the one beneath it as she laid them on, like dark disks of chocolate eclipsing moons made of creme anglaise instead of green cheese. In short order, the sixth and final layer had efficiently been fixed into place. She took a half step back to check for symmetry and balance, then moved on to the frosting.
She poured the mixture of butter, milk, and chocolate that had been resting on the stove top into a mixing bowl, added a pinch of salt, a dash of real vanilla extract, and began whisking it all together with powdered sugar, which she shifted in stages to make sure that it combined thoroughly.
Brian O'Reilly
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As he talked, Pepino roughly diced a concasse into a stainless steel bowl, deftly peeling and deseeding three small, vine-ripened tomatoes in a blink of an eye, leaving them to marinate in extra-virgin olive oil with some brunoised carrot, parsley, and garlic. He heated butter and oil in a pan and let it come up to a foam while he quickly rinsed a dozen shrimp. He dropped the vegetables into the pan and let them cook down with a beaker of white wine while he delicately deveined the backs and bellies of the shrimp, leaving the heads undisturbed. He set a second pan on low heat, poured a light coating of olive oil and rubbed the pan with a large clove of garlic; he browned four large, bias-cut slices from a baguette and left them to gently brown in the oil. He added a whisper of salt to his sauce, a generous grind of black pepper, saffron, a pinch of cayenne, and a dash of brown sugar. He laid the shrimp into the sauce, turned them and let them finish, then quickly pulled them out to a side plate at the precisely pink moment of doneness. He mounted his improvised beurre blanc with a knob of butter, plated the fried bread, laid on the shrimp and fragrant sauce, which he left unsieved and rustic, and sprinkled chopped scallions and parsley over everything.
Angelina poured two glasses from the remainder of the wine he'd used in the sauce, an acidic, wonderfully dry 'Gavi di Gavi' from Piedmont, and they touched glasses before diving in. The shrimp were fresh and perfectly cooked. They ate them shells and all, sucked the sweet meat of the heads with relish, then wiped every last drop of the sauce from their plates with the crostini, which were beautifully crisp on the outside and moist and lacy on the inside.
Brian O'Reilly
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