Here is a recipe for a frittata as taught to me by Gianni Scappin.
Frittata
— SERVES 2 —
5 or 6 large eggs
3 to 4 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt
A good pinch of chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley （optional）
A good pinch of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
Freshly ground black pepper
Crack the eggs into a bowl and beat them gently with a fork for a minute or so, making sure you angle the bowl so that you really blend them well. You could use a whisk instead of a fork, if you prefer, but you will end up with a puffier-textured frittata.
In a 10-inch sauté pan with sloping sides, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. You want to get it pretty hot and tilt the pan to make sure the sides are well coated. When the oil is hot, season the eggs with salt and add the parsley, if using, then pour the mixture into the pan. Scramble the eggs vigorously with a silicone spatula, tipping and moving the pan continuously and drawing the eggs from the sides into the middle. Keep the pan moving to make sure the eggs don’t stick. Add the Parmigiano and a good grinding of pepper. Then flip or turn the frittata and cook for a minute or so more, until golden and cooked through. Serve immediately.
* * *
A couple of years later the same company that produced Big Night brought me to Rome for about five weeks to act in a film. My only friend in Rome at the time, Claudia Della Frattina, was working for a producer in a small office not far from where I was staying, and we got together for lunch the day after I arrived. I walked to her office thinking we would take a stroll and grab a bite, but we were in a slightly more residential area of the city, and when I arrived she said that she usually just ate in. I imagined she would have brought sandwiches like many people the world over, but there was no lunch box or takeaway bag on her desk. Instead I saw a small kitchen at one end of the office, to which a moment later Claudia was headed.
“I thought I might just cook for us,” she said in her beautifully accented English.
Let it be known that Claudia is very smart, very kind, and very pretty. She is half German, half Italian, with fair skin and large light blue eyes, and speaks English perfectly with a delicate Italian accent. She somehow eats pasta every day yet remains slender, is chic without spending absurd amounts on clothing, smokes hand-rolled cigarettes but never to excess, and loves to drink wine. Wisely, she no longer works in the film business; instead she designs hats and lives in Rome with her husband, a photographer who is even nicer than she is. In short, I want to be her. Or him. Or both of them.
Anyway, in response to her offer to cook for us, I said, “Oh, don’t go to any trouble.”
“It’s no trouble. I make lunch most days anyway,” said she.
I first met Claudia during my first press junket for a Hollywood comedy that was great fun to make but, like many I’ve done, was a bomb at the box office. I was sent to do press in Italy and Spain in advance of the film’s foreign release. Claudia was working freelance then and had been assigned to look after Kate and me during our stay in Rome, and we have remained friends ever since.
As we chatted about this and that, she filled a large pot with water and put it on the stove to boil. She then took two small zucchine and sliced them into thin rounds, and a clove of garlic, which she cut in half lengthwise. Pouring a glug of very dark green extra-virgin olive oil into a pan, she dropped in the garlic along with a few pepperoncini. After they had simmered for a few minutes, she removed them, placed two handfuls of spaghetti into the now-boiling water, and began to sauté the zucchine. When the pasta was cooked, she strained it and mixed it together in the pan with some of the starchy pasta water.
With the exception of my father’s Friday night specialty, pasta con aglio e olio, this might have been the simplest dish of pasta I’d ever eaten. The deeply flavorsome olive oil coated the sweet zucchine, helping it cling to the pasta, while just a suggestion of garlic emerged as the pepperoncini gave subtle heat to it all. Following my family’s tradition, I had never really cooked with extra-virgin olive oil—we used “regular olive oil” （oil from olives that have been through many pressings, making it lighter but much less tasty）—nor did we ever use pepperoncini, as neither of my parents cared for anything spicy, so this unassuming dish was a bit of a revelation for me.
I know it sounds silly, but out of all the meals I have eaten it still remains one of my favorites. This is partly because it was cooked by and shared with my dear friend Claudia, but also because it was the perfect balance of five simple ingredients. As I travel, research, and cook more over the years, I find this culinary equilibrium is realized with the most humble ingredients time and time again in the Italian kitchen. Even in a very small one in the back of an office in Rome many years ago.