Never before opening Marie Brandolini’s worn-out Livre de Cuisine had I seen so many egg recipes in one place. Eggs (or oeufs) mimosa; the mysterious Oeufs à la culsat; Uova alla trippa—literally “tripe eggs”; and eggs cocotte—a delicacy especially difficult to make: “Délice des délices,” she writes. But “leave them 30 seconds too long, and they’re ruined; if [they’re not cooked] long enough, the white escapes and runs out.” All of our founder’s egg recipes have one trait in common: the yolk must remain semi-runny and glistening. She would have appreciated Do Farai’s uovo barzotto appetizer, a celebration of the beloved not-so-cooked egg that’s always been a staple at the Brandolini’s table and is now a mainstay of our office lunches.
Marie had assembled her collection in a multitude of notebooks and binders which sat on a shelf of her kitchen, in Palazzo Brandolini’s attico. Some recipes were typed and printed or cut out from mainstream magazines; others were passed over by friends, acquaintances, or the chef of a favorite bistro, jotted down in her pointy handwriting. Flipping through the Livre, yet another weird egg recipe appear: Oeufs pochées Moissonnier—poached eggs on a bed of artichokes, topped with a watercress and vinegar mayonnaise—from the Parisian restaurant of the same name; she considered it “perfect for a buffet.”
However, Marie rarely cooked. “As children, we always ate the same things,” Marcantonio says. “Fusilli with tomato sauce for lunch and sole and zucchini for dinner.”
Marie’s Livre de Cuisine offers intimate insights into the taste and cooking style of her family, simple and sophisticated yet not so easy to pin down.
She wrote her cookbook more like a diary than a functional set of instructions—with comments, memories, and suggestions to her future self. By transcribing the ingredients of Yael Dayan’s Orange salad, Madame Yvonne’s Poireaux à l’orientale, or Marc Rudkin’s Sauce crème, she kept track of her personal history, the recipes a record of her experiences and encounters. There’s a recipe for Cream biscuits by Marie Laure de Noailles’ personal chef and that for a “very quick to make” scallop salad by Brigitte Baer, a renowned collector of Picasso prints and aunt to her best friend, David Leclerc. A number of preparations included in the Livre de Cuisine were shared by Ernesto Ballarin, the 85-year-old founder of Vini da Arturo, Marie’s favorite restaurant in Venice. Even though she never actually replicated them at home, she faithfully transcribed them; who knows when they might have come in handy?
Ernesto’s Tiramisu—to which we dedicated a new installment of our series Ode da Arturo, coming up next month—appears alongside Boeuf Stroganoff and Funghi alla russa (Russian-style mushrooms), one of the restaurant’s most iconic appetizers.
“We wouldn’t dare to serve raw tomatoes with their skin on.”
Marie’s gourmet journal also offers intimate insights into the taste and cooking style of her family, simple and sophisticated yet not so easy to pin down. Not fully French nor Italian, despite mentions of Escoffier and the recurrent presence of Italian staples like vitello tonnato and gnocchi alla romana—two dishes that recently entered Do Farai’s menu. Other recipes look as if they had been invented (or come from a past too distant and fairy-tale-esque to trace.) Like the glorious Uova Brandolini, which Filippa Brandolini—Marcantonio’s cousin who’s a chef in New York—describes as “soft-boiled eggs, shell removed, sitting on a delicious and decadent mayonnaise with beef gelée.” She worked on a version of it for Do Farai. “I decided to use it as a recipe within the oeuf mayonnaise framework. I boiled an egg for about eight minutes, cut it in half, and then piped in a mayonnaise that is very much inspired by the Uova Brandolini I grew up eating at my grandmother’s house.”
In fact, most of the food served at Marie’s table came from her acquired family and especially from its matriarch, Cristiana Brandolini d’Adda. Her taste has influenced that of her children, grandchildren, and anyone who’s spent enough time eating at their table. Food chez Mamie—how Cristiana has been dubbed by her loved ones—is simple yet extremely detail-oriented. “We can criticize an eggplant because of the way it was cut, creating a more rigid and dry eggplant versus the creamy soft and delicious one you would hope for. We wouldn’t dare to serve raw tomatoes with their skin on,” Filippa explains. Because of Cristiana’s allergy to garlic and onions, raw and fresh ingredients are favored over complex and long-cooked dishes like stews and braises. Roasted potatoes, boiled zucchini, or a “simply cooked whole fish, filleted with a light sauce of olive oil, capers, and parsley” are the Brandolini’s go-to meals.
At Mamie’s house, “the idea is to eat quickly,” Marcantonio adds. All courses are laid on the table at the same time. Sauces are served separately, allowing the guests to compose their own plate according to their personal preferences. Salads of sorts are always “perfectly chopped” so that you never have to cut your leaves—which Filippa calls “a big faux pas.” The veal Milanese is almost mandatory. “Coco [Brandolini] only eats Milanese and pasta,” Filippa says—strictly presented “in tiny portions” and called piccatine: yet another dish that happily made it to Do Farai’s menu.
Marie’s cookbooks are now safely stored in our archive, wrapped in thin white paper and protected inside plastic boxes. They bear witness to how taste and culinary habits can be passed down through generations and persist in time despite members of a family living scattered in different parts of the world. In this case, the homely but extremely sophisticated cuisine her notes and recipes describe has, at least partially, transferred to Do Farai. And while not every part of her Livre de Cuisine is fitting for a restaurant, nothing will stop us from testing one or two of its most audacious dishes for a lunch at the office. Uova alla trippa anyone?