ENTERTAINING in Food & Entertaining
"Leave the gun. Take the cannolis."
Pasta E Ceci
(Pasta and Chickpeas)
Makes 4 servings
- 2 oz (60 g) pancetta, chopped
- 1/4 cup (60 mL) olive oil
- 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
- Pinch of crushed red pepper
- 16-oz (473-mL) cans chickpeas, drained
- 2 cups (500 mL) chopped canned tomatoes
- 1/4 cup (60 mL) chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
- 8 oz (236 g) spaghetti, broken into bite-sized pieces
- Salt
- Coarsely ground black pepper
In a large pot, cook the pancetta in the oil over medium heat until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Add the garlic and crushed red pepper and cook until the garlic is golden. Add the chickpeas, tomatoes and parsley and bring to a simmer and cook 15 minutes. Crush some of the chickpeas with the back of a spoon. Add 4 cups (1 L) water to the pot and bring to a simmer. Add the pasta and salt to taste.
Cook, stirring frequently until the pasta is al dente, tender yet firm to the bite. Add more water if necessary to prevent the pasta from sticking to the bottom of the pot; it should be just loose enough to require eating with a spoon.
Let cool slightly before serving. Serve with coarsely ground black pepper.
You can’t have a good mobster film — or TV show — without good food.
Where would the Corleone family have ended up in The Godfather saga without it?
The whole series started with a wedding feast and food kept popping up at key times throughout all the movies.
Much of the Corleone family business was done around the dining room table, andClemenza gave us his spaghetti tips while cooking for the family soldiers when they had to take to the mattresses.
Don Corleone is gunned down after buying oranges at the sidewalk fruit stand, and that scene set up the first film’s key
moment when Michael Corleone killed rival mobster Sollozzo and the crooked cop
McCluskey in the restaurant.
McCluskey: Is the Italian food good here?
Sollozzo: Yeah, try the veal. It’s the best in the city.
That meal may have been McCluskey and Sollozzo’s last, but the food just keeps on coming in the world of organized crime entertainment.
The Sopranos, which returned to The Movie Network last Sunday, has always beenequally at home in the kitchens and restaurants of its New Jersey locations. Heck, Tony Soprano ran his crew out of Satriale’s Any Size Suckling Pigs store before moving shop to the fleshier confines of the Bada Bing Club.
And A.J. Soprano’s comment, “What, no (expletive deleted) ziti?” helped show North America that The Sopranos was going to be a little different than TV shows seen previously.
The Sopranos is entering its sixth and what was to be final season. But after airing 11 more new episodes, it will return in January with eight more. At this point, they will be the final ones. But who knows? Like the food at an Italian wedding, the shows just could keep on coming.
One can hope we won’t see the end of The Sopranos as it truly has been one of the best programs ever made for U.S. television, and is miles ahead of the vast majority of shows on today. And the food? Hey, fuggedaboudit.
The Sopranos spend a lot of time eating, either in Tony’s own kitchen, where leftover pasta has proved to be almost as popular a meal as freshly made, or at his old friend Artie Bucco’s restaurant, which, unfortunately, Tony had torched in one episode.
Sopranos food has proved so popular it has spun off a few cookbooks, the latest being Entertaining With The Sopranos (Warner Books, $39.95), as compiled by Carmela Soprano, played to perfection on the program by Edie Falco.
We’re not sure how much the cast members were involved in the book. Writing credit is given to Allen Rucker, who also penned The Sopranos Family Cookbook (Warner Books, $29.95), and recipes are by his Family Cookbook co-author Michele Scicolone, who has also written for Gourmet and Bon Appétit.
The book covers a wide range of meals and 75 dishes for all occasions that have been marked in the show —baptisms, communions and confirmations, graduations, showers and weddings, open houses and family reunions, dinners for 12, holidays, for-women-only events, men-only fetes, and adult birthday parties. And, lest we forget, funerals, a staple of all mobster programming.
Here the book pays homage to the sage advice of Tony’s Uncle Junior — “A lot of food, no crap.”
Organized crime, of course, is not the sole property of people of Italian heritage. But no Mob dinner can compare to an Italian one. An Irish Mob meal of corned beef and cabbage can’t hold a candle to a groaning board featuring shrimp scampi, veal piccata or Milanese, prosciutto wrapped melon, cannelloni, calamari, polpettone, gnocchi, lasagna, pizza rustica or googootz giambotta.
Now that’s Italian!