Travels in Umbria

It has been thirty years since I’ve been in Umbria, and I have been talking about two meals that I had in Assisi ever since. I want to go back, yet at the same time I am afraid that nothing will ever live up to my food memories.

Those two meals were both at a place called “La Stalla” that was mentioned in the budget “Let’s Go” travel guide in the early 1990s. La Stalla is still an operating restaurant (http://www.fontemaggio.it/ristorante-la-stalla/). There is an enormous open hearth, and there was a roaring fire on those two March days. At the time, there were communal tables, and my friend and I were seated with a group of priests and nuns one night. They would ask us questions, then if one of us would pause eating to answer, they would chorus “mangia, mangia!” I still have my travel journal, with my notes about the meal including margin notes about how to try to recreate the dishes.

The most memorable dish from those meals was the gnocchi. Those gnocchi have been the standard against which I have judged all others, and most have come up lacking. Perfect gnocchi, in my opinion, are light, fluffy “pillows of love.” I’m not going to include a recipe for gnocchi because even after decades of trying, I have only about a 50% success rate in getting close to what I want. If you want to work on your own gnocchi technique, I recommend Christine Hickman’s “Gnocchi Solo Gnocchi”

That trip also resulted in one of my signature dishes, a dish that is apparently known as “Anastasia’s Onions” among my college friends. La Stalla was cooking all sorts of vegetables on that hearth, including dark, sweet onions. I was still in college when I returned from that trip, and I would try to recreate the onions in an electric wok in our dorm room. Cooking in the dorms wasn’t exactly permitted, and when I made the onions, the entire dorm would smell of them. We would make a meal of onions on crusty bread. In the years since, the onions have been a regular part of my mixed vegetable antipasti. The two secrets to getting these almost right, without the benefit of a giant hearth in which you can just tuck your pan into the embers all day, are (1) don’t use too much olive oil, and (2) get the onions nice and brown without getting the bitter taste you get if you burn them.

Anastasia’s Onions

Course: Sides

Ingredients

• 8 small red onions peeled or 4 medium red onions peeled and quartered

• Extra virgin olive oil

• Salt

• Optional – a generous splash of one of white wine, white wine vinegar, sherry, or sherry vinegar (not the flavored/salted kind)

Directions

• Heat olive oil over medium to medium high in saucepan that is large enough for onions to fit tightly in single layer. Cover the bottom of the pan with oil, but do not use too much. You do not want the onions to be too oily at the end. Add onions and cook uncovered until onions start to brown. Be careful to not burn them.
• Cover. Reduce heat to medium/medium low. Cook covered for 1-2 hours, checking and stirring periodically. If your pan’s cover fits well, the liquid from the onions will supply sufficient liquid and keep them from burning, but keep an eye on them. They will reduce a lot during this process.
• Finish with a splash of wine or vinegar if you would like. If using wine, be sure to cook off the alcohol.
• Salt to taste. Serve warm or at room temperature as an appetizer or side dish.

If you are still reading after the recipe, here’s your bonus story about Umbria. We also spent a night in Orvieto, primarily because my friend’s mother liked Orvieto Classico. The Let’s Go guide had a note about a room for rent above a little store that went for about $5 per night. We picked up a bottle of Orvieto Classico, checked into that wonderfully cheap room, and realized that $5 per night rooms didn’t run to amenities like having glasses in the room. So, I drank my first Orvieto Classico from the bottle in a cheap room in Orvieto. I highly recommend the overall experience. And Orvieto Classico would go well with a mixed vegetable antipasti that includes the onions.

Mangia! Mangia!

Additional random note, whenever we weren’t sure what we should do, we would ask what my friend’s mom would do, always followed by “she is not a dumb woman.”