Venetian Hours

Venetian Hours: Looking for a Home

Published by Jonell Galloway + Wednesday, May 3, 2017 Permalink 0

I’ve come home. No, I should state that differently. I’ve had to redefine home.

Bacino Grand Canal San Giorgio Maggiore Venice

We have decided to spend winters in Venice and summers in France and Switzerland. I have been absent from The Rambling Epicure over the last year and a half only in body, not in spirit. I continue living like a nomad, often not taking time to unpack my suitcase, hopping from Venice to Chartres and occasionally landing in Switzerland, which is still officially my home.

I am alive and I even kick from time to time just to make sure I still can. During this long absence, I fought an unnamed virus. Italian, French and Swiss doctors agreed that it would pass and it finally has. It was, in principle, an entirely physical ailment, yet became trying to the spirit.

Venetian Hours: Torcello

Published by Jonell Galloway + Friday, March 24, 2017 Permalink 0

by Jonell Galloway

A sunny day in Torcello, the birthplace of Venice, the island to which the Veneti fled from the barbarians.

Torcello, Venice, Italy Torcello Cathedral, Venice, Italy

Venetian Hours: Looking for a Nonna

Published by Jonell Galloway + Thursday, March 3, 2016 Permalink 0

Nonna Violante in Bellaria-Igea Marina, Italy, cooking school, making passatelli pasta, Hotel Eliseo, #lovingromagna

Venetian Hours: Lost in Italy and Looking for a Nonna

by Jonell Galloway

If you live in Italy, you have to have a nonna. Having just lost my “adopted” Italian grandmother, Nonna Margherita, in Switzerland, the time was right, and it happened in the most unlikely place: Bellaria-Igea, a seaside town in Romagna, known as the Italian region of land-and-sea because of its plentiful bounty of both fish and meat. As a result, the cuisine is varied and copious, playing on unending themes of the two. The hillsides beyond the shores are verdant and rolling, producing excellent wine, meat and cheese, while traditionally, the inhabitants by the seaside are fishermen.

Fishing net of a batana fishing boat in Adriatic Sea, Igea-Bellaria Marina, Nonna Violante, #lovingromagna

Originally, Bellaria-Igea was a village of solely fishermen and their families. Their wives supplemented the family income by renting out rooms in their seaside cottages. While the men were fishing, the wives tended to the guests by cooking, cleaning and generally making them feel at home. Over the years, they added extra rooms and their homes became locande, or “inns,” and eventually pensioni, or “small hotels,” and this became a seaside resort. This is the story of the family of my new nonna, Nonna Violante.

Venetian Hours: French Venice

Published by Jonell Galloway + Thursday, February 25, 2016 Permalink 1

Fondaco-dei-Tedeschi--Canaletto-LVMH-Benetton-Rialto Bridge-Venice-Venezia

Venetian Hours: Franco-Venice and French Cuisine

French Food in Venice

The Venetians might have ruled much of the refined sugar trade in Europe, but by the eighteenth century, they were importing French pastry techniques. “Count Cavour, the first prime minister of a united Italy,” sent his personal chef to be trained in France, while the Italian royal family was eating macaroni à la Parisienne.

Today, the French influence is best seen at the Tonolo pasticceria in the San Polo neighborhood, which won a gold medal in Paris for its sweet focaccia in 1909 and has some of the best coffee in Venice. To say this is a Venetian establishment would be grossly understating it. And it wasn’t the Paris-Brest that hooked me on Tonolo so many years ago: it was the quality of absolutely everything they make, from their coffee to their Venetian pastries to their cream-filled pastries. It was the extreme care taken with the presentation and visual aspects — something many Venetian pastry chefs lack, despite the good taste. After living in France for so long, I immediately felt right at home in Tonolo, so familiar, reminding of my youth when I discovered mille-feuilles and éclairs and tried new pastries every day.

Venetian Hours

Published by Jonell Galloway + Monday, February 1, 2016 Permalink 1

San Marco and Doge's Palace in Venice, Italy

Lost in Venice

by Jonell Galloway

I was looking for a new home. Home used to be Kentucky, with its hot hot sun, heady smell of horse sweat, and burly bouquet of drying tobacco; then it was France where I wolfed down tons of good food and fine wine, and Switzerland, with its snow-capped mountains, always there, hugging me and making me feel secure like a mother’s embrace.

After my mother died last year, I no longer knew where to call home. Home became an abstraction, because without Mama’s heart beating in Kentucky, it no longer fit the description. Even with the horse sweat and Burley tobacco.

Kentucky tobacco drying barn, near Hardinsburg, Kentucky

I used to say I’d call my imaginary memoir From Biscuits to Baguettes, so much did I feel like France was my second home, even though the first time I set foot in Venice over 30 years ago, I felt I’d come home. How that could be I still don’t know, since I don’t have an ounce of Italian or Venetian blood in my veins. I’ve visited it many times for both short and long periods, and every time, I’ve felt the same, so after my mother’s death, it was a natural enough decision to spend six months here and try it out.

About

Published by Jonell Galloway + Monday, July 28, 2014 Permalink 0

The Rambling Epicure was founded by Jonell Galloway in 2009. From its inception, it has showcased professional and high quality food writing and photography.

Jonell grew up on Wendell Berry and food straight from a backyard Kentucky garden. She attended Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools in Paris as well as the Academie du Vin. She ran a cooking school in France, and owned a farm-to-table restaurant, The Three Sisters’ Café, with her two sisters in the U.S. Jonell is a freelance writer who has worked for the GaultMillau guides The Best of France and The Best of Paris and for CityGuides, amongst others. She has collaborated on many projects including Le tour du monde en 80 pains with Jean-Philippe de Tonnac in France, At the Table: Food and Family around the World with Ken Albala, Ma Cuisine Méditerranéenne with Christophe Certain, André Raboud: Sculptures 2002-2008, and the biography of Pierre Gagnaire.