Cooking Without Money

I was delighted to find out that there's an Italian dish called "potatoes with escaped lamb" (patati con agnello scappato). The dish contains no lamb, thus the "escaped lamb"! I got all this in Amanda Hesser's NYT article "1971: Mrs. Sebastiani's Malfatti". "Mrs. Sebastiani's" features an Italian peasant dish made with bread, spinach and Parmesan. Hesser explains, "It’s a more direct descendent of the cucina povera from which the dish originates, when cooks would make a meal of bread and what few ingredients they had."

Hesser's article reminded me that I wanted to blog about cooking on the cheap. At the moment, there's a real worry about "recession obesity", the fear that with less money available for fresh fruits and vegetables, people will eat a diet of Spam and empty carbs, thus becoming even more obese than they already are. The thing is, in many parts of the world, the poor eat nutritionally, and oftentimes, well. It's just that in the US and Britain, people have forgotten how to cook well on a budget (they also don't know how to cook). And they've forgotten about cheap vegetables like kale, cheap cuts of meat like pork legs, and complex carbs like beans. I frequently advise people to buy a good Italian cook book because so many of Italy's great dishes are based on cucina povera. I don't know of any cuisine that makes beans taste so good. And the recipes are so simple that you don't really need to know anything more than how to boil water. And if you can't get filled up on pasta e fagioli (pasta and bean soup), you need to see a doctor.

For a simple pasta e fagioli recipe, click here. The recipe is from Epicurious and directed at Americans so all the ingredients are easy to find.

One last thing, most Italian recipes will call for expensive Parmesan (and don't use the thing in the can because that is not Parmesan). I can't afford Parmesan. So I'll buy a small piece of Pecorino or Piave. Also, for cooking, most Italians use the cheaper Grana Padano, saving Parmesan for grating on top of dishes right before serving. I've heard that Grana is creamier and that's why it's preferred for cooking.