Pugliese savory cracker-rings, made with flour, white wine, olive oil, and fennel seeds (or chili, or pepper). Boiled briefly, then baked. Eaten with wine — they're THE evening snack across southern Italy.
Tuscan, Roman, and Pugliese kitchens all make a version. Slowly stewed chickpeas with rosemary, garlic, and tomato — eaten as a main with bread, or thinned into pasta e ceci.
Italian-Italian meatballs, not Italian-American spaghetti and meatballs. Smaller, tenderer, simmered in tomato, eaten as a course of their own with bread — never piled on pasta.
Thin slices of beef rolled around breadcrumbs, raisins, pine nuts, cheese, and herbs, then simmered in tomato sauce. A Sunday dish from Naples and Sicily. The sauce becomes a meal with pasta; the braciole are the second course.
Slow-cooked beef stew with potatoes, peas, and carrots — Italian comfort food on a cold day. Different in every region; this is a Tuscan-leaning version. Rich, simple, made for crusty bread.
"Hunter's chicken" — what you'd cook over an open fire after a day in the woods. Tomatoes, olives, rosemary, white wine. Simple, peasant, deeply satisfying.
Salt cod, soaked back to life over 2-3 days, then simmered with tomatoes, olives, capers, pine nuts. A traditional Christmas Eve dish in Naples (Cenone della Vigilia). Briny, deep, almost sweet from slow cooking.
Fresh anchovies cured in vinegar, then bathed in olive oil with garlic and parsley. A light, briny antipasto from Naples, Sicily, Puglia. Nothing like the salty packed kind. Eat with bread.
Octopus from Borgo Santa Lucia in Naples — slow-simmered in its own juices with tomatoes, olives, and capers. The trick is no liquid added; the octopus releases its own water. Tender, briny, deeply flavorful.
Despite the name, this isn't actual wedding soup — "maritata" means the meat and bitter greens are "married" in the broth. A Christmas Eve and Easter staple in Campania. Long-simmered meat broth, escarole, sausages, salami.