The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Taste Buds By Mary-Liz Shaw of the Journal Sentinel
Full article can be found @ The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Intended as a guide to fixing multicourse, but relatively simple, Sunday dinners, this book also would be suitable as a go-to manual for any casual dinner party.

Menus and recipes are designed to feed eight to 10 people with hearty appetites.

Caponigri gained her knowledge of Italy as a child when she traveled throughout the country with her father, a noted philosophy professor. She also picked up expert tips from her Sicilian grandmother.

Her recipes are very much in the traditional Italian manner, simple and using the best possible ingredients, and her menus provide a balance of flavors. She also follows the Italian tradition of including pasta and meat in multicourse meals – pasta is almost always the second course; meat is the third. Any pasta that is boiled or lightly cooked with a fresh sauce is usually made from scratch When pasta is baked, such as her recipe for traditional Sicilian Pasta Alla Norma (Pasta with Eggplant), Caponigri uses store-bought noodles.

Caponigri has traditional recipes handed down to her from both sides of her family. In addition to her father’s mother in Sicily, Caponigri’s maternal grandmother, Grandma Franco, who lived just outside Naples, left her handwritten recipes for such treats as Torta di Frutta Secca Della Nonna (Grandma Franco’s Fedora), which is a luscious fruitcake.