People start asking me in November if I'm going to be doing the fish dinner for Christmas Eve, so I can always fill the table...they'd better be polite if they do get invited! Just kidding, of course. :)
Anywhere in America that has a decent sized Italian-American population is going to have stores that sell imported Italian food products, usually along with fresh baked breads, prepared egg pasta and even whole prepared dishes or complete meals. I have five within five miles of my house, not to mention the huge Eatitaly in Manhattan. They always carry both salted cod (baccala) and stoccafisso (dried cod). We also have a small Portuguese community nearby and their markets also carry baccala. In both cases you have to reconstitute the cod by soaking it in water for a couple of days. It's both to soften it and desalinate it in the case of the baccala. This is what the stoccafisso looks like when I see it in the store. They're like blocks of wood. In Italy they used to say they were as good as a mattarello for clobbering delinguent husbands! :)
This is what our type of stoccafisso salad looks like. You boil it, peel and debone it, break it into pieces, add boiled potatoes (best if boiled in the skin and then peeled), crushed garlic cloves, either an onion or a finely chopped leek, salt and pepper and good quality olive oil. Sometimes we add olives and capers. The latter is the Ligurian influence.
This is how we do our baccala in umido:
My son would eat the whole pan full of it if he could.
As for the savory vegetable torte or pies, they're a year round dish, and the vegetables just change with the seasons. At other times you might have swiss chard or spinach or artichokes or asparagus or zucchini or some combination thereof. First you make a sfoglia or torta dough. In Italy you can buy it already prepared. I tell my friends here if they run out of time to use phyllo dough, although it's not the same; all that butter makes it greasy in my opinion. My mother was really old school so she did four layers, two for the bottom and two for the top. You brush a thin film of oil between the layers. It's sort of the same principle as how you would do multiple very thin layers of dough for an apple strudel. While that rests you make the filling. Basically, you par boil the vegetables if they're tough, squeeze all the water out of them, chop them, saute some chopped onions in olive oil and garlic, add the chopped vegetables, salt and pepper and grated nutmeg, and continue to saute for two minutes or so. When it's cool, add grated cheese (I like half parmigiano and half pecorino), maybe some ricotta if you want it creamy, and some beaten eggs, assemble the pie and bake.
I can't find a picture of one stuffed with cabbage, but it looks pretty similar to this one made with swiss chard.
Maybe my favorite version though is filled with mashed potato and sauteed leeks.
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Originally Posted by epoch
This is also a favorite of mine. It's a sort of gratinee of polenta slices and sauteed cabbage.
I don't know why you think we don't eat kale? Unless it's a different kind of kale? We call it cavolo nero, and the Tuscans in particular eat a ton of it, either sauteed, in stews, or often in a soup with beans as the Tuscans are known as the "bean eaters" in Italy. :)
and beer nuts
