The Recipe Sits There

The recipe sits there, with no preamble, in Elizabeth David’s Italian Food, published in 1954. It is a very simple and eloquent recipe, and the dish is a favourite of many cooks of my generation. It is called ‘Peperoni alla Piedmontese’, a solecism, as the ‘d’ dropped out of the Italian some centuries before. The ‘d’ had a perfectly sound reason for being there: the area was the pedemonte, the foot of the mountains, a name well deserved, as anyone who has stood in a Piedmontese vineyard and stared up at the snow-covered peaks of the Alps will happily attest.