Anna will be teaching a snack-focused online class on March 27, but in the meantime, she was nice enough to hop on a call to chat about her perfect antipasti plate, the working class roots of olive all'Ascolana, and why Italians don't eat “on-the-go.”
What are the main differences between how Americans approach snacking and how Italians approach snacking?
I don't want to speak for all Americans, or all Italians, but what I've observed is Americans can sometimes use snacks as a meal replacement. I think Americans are very accustomed to always being on-the-go. And there are times that we treat food as an afterthought. I think a lot of our snacks are prepackaged, they're not things that we prepare—when we think of a snack, it's something that we buy, not always the healthiest thing. And it's just kind of caloric and quick, it's all about fast, because we don't have the time. I think for Italians it is the complete opposite. Snacks are very thoughtful. They are planned. And there's categories—it's that specified.
“Italians eat lots of cookies in the morning.”
Italians don't sit down to eggs and bacon in the morning; it's something very small to just kind of open up the appetite. A cookie—Italians eat lots of cookies in the morning. But it's not the kind of cookies we have here that are laden with frosting and this and that. It's this simple, kind of nut-filled, protein-filled little bite that they have with their coffee. And it's always about the pairing with the coffee. You'll also see a lot of cakes in the morning. But again, not like the cakes we eat here that are frosted, and three layers and all that—it’s a lot of nut-filled, fruit-filled things that kind of feel like breakfast.
And then there's your lunch, which Italians call pranzo, but then we stop again, because after school, the kids come home. And there's merenda, which is every little kid's favorite meal, because it's usually something that was prepared the night before, like a torta della nonna, a nice butter cake or olive oil cake with a little cream in the middle, or a little bit of nuts—things like that—a little chocolate.
And then of course, we move into—which all Americans have embraced—the aperitivi hour. That's when you're having your crunchy, your salty, your savory snacks—of course paired with a cocktail. And then street food, which is available all the time, especially if you're in Sicily, but very region-specific, holiday- and custom-specific. And I just found that fascinating that it's such a thought-out process.
It almost seems like American snacks are an emergency, and in Italy, they’re a strategy.
A hundred percent. And I think when we sit down as Americans for dinner, it's a huge meal because we're famished. The last meal we had was lunch, if we were lucky. We might have worked through lunch. Whereas for Italians dinner can be a little bowl of soup. Because they have had these little snacks throughout the day. And they usually eat lighter at dinner time.
And maybe they met some friends out after work and they had a little bit of antipasti. So yeah, it's a different strategy completely. Portions in Italy are so much smaller, and I think it's funny because sometimes people will go “Oh, I ordered this plate of pasta and it was tiny—it was four or five bites.” Yes, because you're not meant to eat a kilo of pasta.
For an Italian, honestly, a snack will be an espresso. Believe it or not, coffee is an appetite suppressant. So just by drinking that espresso or cappuccino, which has the milk—you're having two or three cookies, max. Sometimes you'll even just have a cappuccino with a biscotti. And the other thing that you'll notice about my cookbook when you dig into the recipes is nothing has a lot of sugar.
One thing I noticed about American baking books is every cake has 3 cups of sugar in the batter, sometimes more. And then you're putting that frosting on top. You're not finding that with Italian desserts. They find other sources for their flavor. So you're going to see a lot of citrus zest, a lot of extracts. They're pulling flavors from more natural sources rather than just amping up that sugar. And this is no judgement, this is just how things are done.
But it's funny. I'm not a dessert person. And my kids laugh when we go to Italy. They're like “Mom, oh, my god! You get dessert every meal.” Because it's not that sweet. Because I'm a salty person. I love anything with salt. I'm not drawn to sweet, but if I have something that's chocolate-based in Italy, and it's a high-quality dark chocolate with just a touch of sugar, I can have more than a couple bites because I'm like, “This is so good.”
And even with street food, you're not eating that every day, right? I think the street food category of Italian food, that actually is their version of fast food. It's not McDonald's. It would be the unhealthiest of all of the categories, because you're dealing with fried foods; you're dealing with different types of bacon and pork products. But what's nice about those products is they're still bakery-made. You're getting a hot dog that's wrapped in brioche dough that's been baked. I mean, it's to die for. And when we were making rizzoula on set for the cookbook, they were like, “This is a deep fried doughnut with meat Ragu inside. How have we not thought about this here?” So at least if you're gonna go for that calorie binge, it's worth it.
You even have an Italian-style Hot Pocket kind of thing. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Yeah, it's so funny. I had that in Sardinia and it's a mid-morning snack. You'll stop by the cafe, you'll have a little espresso, they're nice and hot. And what I love about that is you're using puff pastry, so super simple, and as you know there are some pretty high-quality puff pastries, sheets that you can buy in the store. I love Dufour, but whatever you can find. I mean even Pepperidge Farm is still a nice, flaky product. You're just making these homemade pizza pockets.
In my book, I have a recipe for sauce, which is my mom's, but look: If you just want a really quick snack and you don't want to be in the kitchen for three hours, you buy your puff pastry, you get a high-quality jarred tomato sauce and your mozzarella and it's three ingredients. And you have an amazing snack for the kids when they get home. And all you're doing is putting one sheet out, cutting it into squares and making yourself these little pockets.
It seems like there are a few variations on that theme.
That’s another thing that’s great about Italy. Every region does their own thing. So the rustico leccese is from the
area of Luca, which has got the bechamel in it, too. But in Sardinia, it's just your sauce and cheese. So you can go as busy or not as busy as you like.
A few recipes have a savory version and a sweet version, like the fried bread, or pane fritto. How is that different from what we think of as French toast?
When I found this recipe, I thought it was really interesting. Again, being more of a salty type person. I'm not really a big fan of French toast. And it's called pane fritto, which is just fried bread. And this is really peasant food. You have leftover bread that's starting to harden—how do we zhuzh it up?
What I loved about the Italian version was the milk that you use—instead of just putting it in, the milk is reduced down first. So it becomes like a sweetened condensed milk of sorts. When you batter the bread with it, it's a very thick, just unctuous—I just love how it really soaked into the bread, but also created this amazing crust when it was fried. So to me, it's kind of like French toast 2.0.
“We all know prosciutto and melone, but the apple and prosciutto was something I really wanted to make people aware of.”
And what I love about the savory version—again, a total “aha” moment, why did I never think of this?—it’s making French toast but adding a whole bunch of grated cheese. And I wouldn't even be mad at you if you did drizzle a little maple on it to have a sweet-savory thing going on. But Italians don't. It becomes more of this herbaceous, cheesy bite of bread.
You mentioned the salty-sweet. In the book there’s a fried apple with a little bit of prosciutto on it.
Yes. Italians are very, very good with the sweet and savory, or the sweet and sour—the agrodolce as they call it. And for example, when you're making caponata—it’s an eggplant dish, it's tomato-based and it's from Sicily—you're getting bites of raisin, there's a splash of vinegar, but then you're also getting the sweetness that's coming through from the raisin. I love that. Then when I went to the North, they do these apple fritters, because apple groves are very, very widespread throughout the North of Italy. A lot of people don't know that. There's a lot of apple-based products up there. They brought it out as an antipasto, but of course, you're having liqueur or you're having wine—you want to have that salty bite to pair with your wine.
And they had laid these pieces of prosciutto on top. I mean, it was just heaven. And then they drizzle the honey and it was just like—an eyes rolling back in my head type of moment, like, oh my god, I have to recreate this. I love that kind of play and how you can use things that you might have never done before. Of course, we all know prosciutto and melone, but the apple and prosciutto was something I really wanted to make people aware of.
And it’s so fun. The fall comes, you have all these apples, you’ve made your apple pie. And a traditional apple fritter as we know it, is very doughy with little studs of apple, deep-fried; whereas this, the apple really comes through because it just has that very thin batter on it. So you're getting the delicate apple, it gets soft in the quick fry, and then you're laying that salty prosciutto on top. Very good.
Another one of my favorite things that you incorporate is the affogato, but you turned it into a mug cake. Can you tell me a little bit about that process?
This is kind of just a cheeky nod, because one of the great things about social media is we've really been able to connect with the entire globe, right? I follow a lot of Italian Instagramers. And I love it because I get to see what they're up to, but also how they're borrowing from us, and we're borrowing from other parts of the world. As you know, mug cakes were all the rage here. So I was on Instagram, and I saw this woman, and she's talking about tazza di torta, and I'm like “Mug cake? What are we doing in Italy?” It was so cute, and I love how it translated. And everybody loves an affogato. All Americans know all about it, from traveling, and all the sexy social media videos of it. And so I was like, “What if I put the two together?” And it's such a winner. I mean, it's so good. And it comes together real quick. You wouldn't really want to frost a mug cake because how are you going to get in there with the frosting? But that little scoop of gelato goes right on top.
I was reading about merenda, and how it's an after-school snack, but also it can be an after-work snack. But the derivation of the word is “what one deserves.”
It's from the Latin “merere,“ which I just thought was so cool. I love the Italian language. I studied both Italian and Latin. And 100% exactly what you said: You walk in the door, you put your backpack down, you wipe your brow, it's been a day and Nonna's there with a little piece of cake or her torta from last night that she had served after dinner, and there it is for you because you came home and you did a good deed and you worked hard in school.
If you're a grown-up, does that concept translate to apertivo? Or are they two separate things?
They're two separate things. Merenda is something like around four o'clock, and I always say there's no food police. No one's coming to your house and checking the time and what you're eating. This is more kind of how the flow of the day in Italy goes. But if you don't get off from work until seven, you're not having merenda. But with children they are getting off the bus at the same time every day. There's a nice big lag between when you get home from school and when dinner is served, especially in Italy because you're not having dinner in Italy until eight or nine o'clock. Italians do not eat dinner early.
So this is that little supplemental meal so you're not famished by the time dinner comes. And yeah, the adults might be going out for aperitivi, but you're at home having your merenda. Do adults eat merenda? Yes, especially on a weekend, but it really is more like the after-school snack for kids. Sometimes it's even a little bowl of gelato on the way home from school. Mom could even give their kid a little bit of money and say, “On your way home from school grab a merenda; I'm not going to be home.” We think of ice cream as a dessert but very rarely do you go to an Italian restaurant and they're giving you ice cream at the end of the meal. Ice cream is an on-the-go snack, if you think about it. All the gelateria, they're open all day long. They're open till very late at night. Ice cream is a snack in Italy.
“There's only a couple of things in Italy that are considered OK for on-the-go, and gelato is one of them.”
It's actually one of the only on-the-go treats that's acceptable. I lived in Manhattan for years, and my cousin from Italy came to visit me. And we were walking down the street and she's looking around, and I'm like, “What? What are you looking at?” And she's like, “Why is everyone eating and drinking and walking at the same time?” And right as she said it, a guy walked by eating a piece of pizza and she was like, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” But we eat everything walking around in this country. Nothing is off-limits. You can be in traffic and look over and someone's eating a salad in their car. Italians, you might as well just shoot them. They would never. So there's only a couple of things in Italy that are considered OK for on-the-go, and gelato is one of them. They sit down, or they'll eat it standing up at a high top. They won't be walking around with that slice.
It’s almost disrespectful to the food.
It is. And I explained this in the book: There’s always this thing “Oh, Italians, the La Dolce Vita...” And it's like, no. Italians work. They do have commerce. They go to work, it's very important to them. But it's not more important. At 10 o'clock, I'm going to stop, I'm going to close my window at the store, and I'm going to have a little coffee and a couple of cookies. And it's only going to be 15 minutes, but I'm going to talk to my mom and talk to my son, we're going to relax and then we're going to get back up and we're going to resume. But they just make sure to take that time. It's not guilty for them. It's not wrong. It's folded into the day. And it's important. And as we all know, when we place importance on things, we get them done. We make it happen.
When your kids come home from school and you're giving them that merenda, and you're asking them about their day, they're asking you about yours—it's a moment in time that is surrounded with food, but the main focus is togetherness, and taking a beat to relax, and then starting back up. And I wish things were more like that here. My husband will say, “I've got back-to-back calls all day. I don't even know when I'm going to eat.” And it's just how it is, but I don't think it's necessarily the right way.
One last question: What is your ideal antipasti plate?
So 100% I'm going to go back to that savory and sweet, because when you're having people over for antipasti, you're going to have some people that want a glass of wine, somebody might want a cocktail. You might have someone that's just having tonic, or something fizzy. You want to make sure that there's something on the table for everybody, because different things pair differently in different ways.
I'm going to have some sharp cheeses, both hard and soft. I'm going to do something where there's a little bit of honey with a little honeycomb, a little fig jam, to add in that sweet. I'm always going to have a little bit of fruit, and I'm going to have some crunch; I want some nuts. Then if I want to really upgrade, then I'll start throwing in some salumi, some prosciutto, salami, maybe a little bit of mortadella, which now Americans have realized how amazing it is. And then of course, you're going to have your taralli, your little bread. And many times we'll even put out a little bowl of potato chips. Because again, it's the crunch. It's the salt.
“It was created by workers—cooks in the kitchens of the rich...“
Whenever I'm doing some sort of antipasti, I want to hit all the notes—the salty, the sweet, the soft, the crunch, because it should be fun. It should be exciting for the palate. And you know, it's convivial, we're all together. And I think that the food should bring that out.
And whether it's a unique cheese or a different kind of fruit—maybe you get starfruit or something different—a little conversation starter, like, “Oh my god, what is this? What is this that you put out?” Something that maybe people haven't had before. Like even the olive all'Ascolana, which is the fried olives with pork stuffed inside. Florence Fabricant from the New York Times said that is one food that you have to have before you die, and I completely agree. It is everything. And it was created by workers—cooks in the kitchens of the rich, because after a party there was all this food, and they were like, “What if we take the olives that we have leftover and put a little pork in it and fry them up?” And that's how that was created.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
All photos reprinted with permission from Italian Snacking: Sweet and Savory Recipes for Every Hour of the Day © 2024 Anna Francese Gass. Published by Union Square & Co. Photography by Linda Xiao.
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