Pistachio Pesto: A Sauce Fit for a Prince

 Posted by at 1:44 am  4 Responses »
Apr 082013
 
Pistachio Pesto: A Sauce Fit for a Prince

Last year nearly to the day, I wrote a post about A Day Cooking with the Duchess at the ancestral Lampedusa palace in Palermo, where I spent a weekend that was spectacular indeed. With so many photos to post there was no room for a recipe. Here, you’ll find a version of the Duchess’s pistachio pesto that I adapted for American kitchens. (And by the way, if you live anywhere near Westchester County, New York, the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville will be showing Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation of Il Gattopardo, The Leopard, in this year’s Italian Film Festival on May 19, […more…]

Feasting with Leopards: An Unordinary Cooking Lesson

 Posted by at 11:51 am  23 Responses »
Apr 062012
 
Feasting with Leopards: An Unordinary Cooking Lesson

On a recent morning in Palermo, I found myself a guest at the historic Lanza Tomasi palazzo, where Nicoletta Polo, the Duchess of Palma, was planning a cooking lesson for American students who would arrive after breakfast. I first met Nicoletta some twenty years ago when she was living in New York City. Originally from Venice and an excellent cook, she versed me on the food of the Veneto for research on a book I was writing then, which includes some of her recipes. Today the Duchess lives in the ancestral palace that her husband, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, has restored. […more…]

The Trail to Trapani

 Posted by at 6:09 pm  2 Responses »
Sep 302011
 
The Trail to Trapani

Day 1: Under the Sicilian Sun Probably there is no better guidebook to the real and the mythical Sicily than Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, the powerful historical novel about Sicilian life at the time of the Risorgimento [Review of the book from THE GUARDIAN]. I took it with me on a flight to Palermo last week and as we drove on the coastal road toward Trapani and our hotel, past dark-skinned children playing along the roadside and men with the bluest of eyes, yellow hair and ruddy complexions, I remembered his image of Sicily as the “America of […more…]