I’m hooked on Lisa Caponigri’s walnut cake.
Featured in her new cookbook, This is Sunday Dinner, the recipe is deceptively simple, with a short list of ingredients: walnuts, sugar, eggs and lemon zest.
Each ingredient has a chance to shine, and each complements the others. The resulting cake is moist, chewy, light, not overly sweet and a perfect cap to any meal.
In This is Sunday Dinner, Caponigri shares her Italian roots with recipes that are mostly like the cake: relatively simple for a skilled cook, mostly unfussy, no outlandish ingredients (assuming you’re the sort who already knows where to find quality capers), with a finish that is more than the sum of its parts.
Caponigri—born into an Italian-American family in South Bend, IN, where she lives today—has built a career on cuisine. Her first cookbook, Whatever Happened to Sunday Dinner?, was published in 2012, and she has her own line of jarred sauces under the name Lisa’s Italian Sunday Sauces.
She grew up partially in Italy on trips with her family, and cooking has been a focus for her since she was small. Caponigri remembers fondly the big Sunday dinners with her family and seeks to share those experiences with her readers. In Sunday Dinner she includes 52 five-course dinner menus—one for every week of the year—each offering a rich variety of dishes, from soups to sides and meats to desserts. Before every menu, she writes a short piece explaining the meal, with anecdotes and memories.
The book is artfully arranged according to season, and each season draws on a region of Italy Caponigri associates with that time of year. The winter menu, for example, is inspired by the time she spent in Piemonte, away from her more familiar southern Italian fare. The 13 weeks of winter meals she offers are brimming with cheeses, white sauces, herbs, nuts, and fruits like apples and plums. The summer menu, by way of contrast, is drawn from experiences in her beloved Sicily. Here she showcases more seafood, pine nuts, honey and citrus.
You won’t find recipes here to replicate your plate at Olive Garden. Caponigri is a student of Italian cuisine, first learning to cook under the wing of her Sicilian grandmother. These recipes, from the Pumpkin and Apple Cake to the Bruschetta with Greens and Fontina to Leg of Lamb with Chestnuts, are the real thing.
The book is sprinkled with stories from Caponigri’s life, along with helpful tips and research on ingredients such as olive oil. Each menu features gorgeous photography of the food. Charming photos of Caponigri and her family are scattered throughout—some are glamorous, including one of the author, hair tied in a colorful scarf, sipping coffee at Piccolo Bar in Capri, and others are more down-home. Several pictures show Caponigri shopping at South Bend favorite Bamber’s Superette (which, incidentally, is a wonderful place to find many of the ingredients for these recipes).
Caponigri starts each season with a list of wine recommendations to complement the menus and highlight the featured region. Winter calls for wines such as Barolo DOCG, Dolcetto and Moscato, while summer is a great season for Etna reds and Nero d’Avila.
The recipes I’ve sampled from this book have turned out beautifully, even if I didn’t know what to expect. The Zuppa di Piselli, for example, is a combination of peas, leeks, garlic, parsley, mint and spinach. I admit I was skeptical as I was putting it together, but when my husband and I sat down to eat it for dinner, we were pleasantly surprised by how delicious and flavorful it was. He even went back for seconds.
Although each recipe is included as part of a five-course meal meant for a big Sunday dinner, of course readers can pick and choose which dish they want to try. Many of the entrées would make great weeknight meals with some planning. Going to a potluck? Bring one of the sides or desserts. You won’t be disappointed.
Try Caponigri’s recipes for Stufato di Manzo Piemontese (Piemontese Stewed Beef) and Torta di Noci (Walnut Cake), and read an exclusive interview with further details about her background, inspirations, favorite recipes and more.
This is Sunday Dinner Sterling Epicure, 2018
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