Is This the World's Strangest Breakfast?

What do you eat for breakfast? In Episode 8 of “Three Ingredients” we introduce you to what might be the strangest way to start the day. It’s also the most delicious. Then we talk about our favorite condiments with odes to great balsamic vinegar, truffles and vanilla in its many forms. And then, because we just can’t help ourselves, we rag on one that none of us can stand. Laurie shares a funny memory of her first foie gras, Ruth speaks wistfully of a great bourbon she can no longer afford and Nancy goes hunting. This conversation is definitely going to make you hungry. So pull up a chair and join us.

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SHOW NOTES

Oops, I dropped …

If you listened to Episode 2 of “Three Ingredients,” you heard us talking a bit about Michelin three-star chef Massimo Bottura, whose Modena restaurant Osteria Francescana was twice named the No. 1 restaurant on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Ruth was about to interview Massimo and his wife, Lara Gilmore, about their new book “Slow Food Fast Cars,” with recipes, stories and gorgeous photos about the food, art, design and people behind their playful and luxurious guest house Casa Maria Luigia outside of Modena. In this episode, Ruth tells us about the talk and the three of us exchange notes about our visits to Casa Maria Luigia.

One of the delights of visiting Casa Maria Luigia is wandering around the property and viewing the art collected by Lara and Massimo, who finds inspiration for his cooking in the works of artists. Consider what he told Ruth about a dish of oysters and potatoes served beneath sheets of gold leaf as she tells it in this story of her first Osteria Francescana meal: “My mind is mixing Piero della Francesca — beautiful gold leaves — and Pistoletto seven hundred years later. But I’m also thinking of stainless steel in the sixties, and how people use tin foil.”

A key piece we discuss in the episode is the triptych by Ai Weiwei called “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (Lego).” It dominates the living room of the guest house and, as Laurie wrote in the L.A. Times last summer, it’s a kind of statement of purpose for Massimo. He is, after all, a chef who loves to break things and put them back together in his own way.

Massimo’s most famous reconstructed “broken” dish is the dessert Oops, I Dropped the Lemon Tart.

As Nancy shares in this episode, the dessert inspired a brilliant save when she and her partner Michael Krikorian were bringing a vintage model Ferrari Formula 1 to Massimo as a gift. Before they could give the model car to Massimo the bag dropped, breaking the Ferrari into pieces. Rather than throw out the pieces, Nancy had another idea. Michael, who tells the full story on his website Krikorian Writes, enlisted the help of a Casa Maria Luigia server and hid the broken car under a cloche on a dinner plate. When Massimo lifted the cloche, Michael said, “Oops, I dropped the Ferrari!”

Massimo’s break-it-and-put-it-back-together philosophy appeared again when Nancy and Laurie had lunch at Osteria Francescana this past summer and experienced his latest menu called “We Are Here,” “reinterpreting,” as the restaurant puts it, “a selection of iconoclastic dishes of Osteria Francescana, bringing the best of the past into the future.”

One example we discuss: “Tortellini or Dumplings,” Massimo’s update to his now-classic “Tortellini Walking Into Broth,” which the chef told us was “the most scandalous, outrageous dish we did in the ’90s.” That’s because instead of a bowlful of tortellini this dish had just six perfect tortellini. (Most Italians are used to ten tortellini to the spoonful, our friend and writer Faith Willinger said in the Massimo episode of “Chef’s Table.”) In his newest incarnation, five tortellini, looking a bit like cloves of garlic, might be mistaken at first for Asian dumplings. But when you take a bite, you taste the pure essence of tortellini.

Now, about that breakfast …

Sausage on a cookie with zabaglione? Sounds improbable. But Ruth and Nancy both have had and loved the Massimo Bottura dish — as dessert in New York when the chef was in town for his talk with Ruth at the 92nd Street Y and as breakfast at Casa Maria Luigia.

The sausage is cotechino, which you can buy from most good Italian food shops (like Eataly). Should you be ambitious enough to want to make your own, here’s a recipe from Lidia Bastianich. The cookie is sbrisolona, which means crumble cake. We have two sbrisolona recipes for our paying subscribers in a separate post, one from Massimo and Lara’s book and one from Nancy.

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