What We're Cooking This Week: Peperonata

Judith and I went to Italy for the first time almost 30 years ago. She’s Italian American, and she’d always dreamed of seeing the country that shaped her childhood. My only connection to Italy was food. I’d been writing about food for more than a decade by then, and in those days, books and magazines were my primary sources about cultures and cuisines I hadn’t been able to experience first hand. So I was eager to check out Italian food in person.

It was a revelation for both of us. Judith realized that the “Italian” food she’d grown up eating had been adapted from the old country, filtered through the first generation of American-born Italians, and tweaked to use the locally available ingredients. What she ate on that trip was familiar but different, usually simpler and less meaty.

For me, the food in Italy affirmed my own approach to cooking, one heavily influenced by what I understood to be the Italians’ basic approach: Cook with the best ingredients you can find, and don’t fuck around with them too much. Instead of complex, long-simmered sauces, pasta was topped with tomatoes cooked with a little garlic and lots of olive oil. Vegetables were almost always served by themselves, usually after being boiled and then sautéed in olive oil.

When we got back home, my friend Cathy Whims, in those days the chef at Genoa, the Portland restaurant that served food most like what you might find in Italy, told me about Faith Willinger. I immediately bought her cookbook Red, White, and Greens: The Italian Way with Vegetables.

Willinger’s book, recently reprinted, showed me how Italians made vegetables taste so good using simple techniques and good olive oil. (Back then, true extra virgin olive oil was harder to find, and I started importing the stuff so I could cook the same way.) The approach isn’t unique to Italy; cooks all around the Mediterranean do the same thing with vegetables, with minor cultural differences.

Peperonata provides a great example, and this time of year, the best versions of the ingredients are easy to find at farmers markets and better produce departments. Look for long, pointed sweet peppers, freshly dug potatoes, red onions that haven’t been cured for storage, and vine-ripened tomatoes. But if you can’t find those, even supermarket produce will taste great cooked in good olive oil.

Recipe

4-5 sweet red peppers

(more if they’re small)

1 red onion

2 tomatoes

2 potatoes

½ cup extra virgin olive oil

Kosher-style sea salt to taste

1 tablespoon wine vinegar, optional

Cut the vegetables into bite-sized pieces (I like to peel the potatoes, too). Cut the tomatoes in half and rub the cut sides on a box grater over a bowl, discarding the skins.

Combine everything in a large pot with a good lid, add the olive oil and a good pinch of salt, and cook covered over medium-low heat until the potatoes are done and the other vegetables are very soft, about an hour. Sometimes the tomatoes add enough acid, but I usually add the vinegar at the very end to brighten the flavor. The final dish is fairly brothy, so serve with plenty of good bread to sop up the juices. Good warm or at room temperature.