A Tale of Tegamaccio

I'm going to be doing a few posts about some of the dishes that have inspired me while touring Umbria and Tuscany this summer.  I had always meant to write about these dishes before my tasting event celebrating these flavors, but oh well....better late than never.

Our villa in Umbria was right on Lake Trasimeno, which is the second largest fresh water lake in Italy.  The cuisine around the lake area is, naturally, fresh water fish focused.  But drive thirty minutes either direction and the cuisine of Lake Trasimeno is nothing but an anomoly in the Tuscany and Umbria area. I mentioned this to the chef I cooked with in Tuscany.  His eyes lit up when I mentioned this cuisine.  He was familiar with this area and also marveled at the fact that Lake Trasimeno has its own distinct cuisine within Umbria and the entire region on the whole.

We were in search of a local, high quality freshwater fish restaurant one night and after deciding to avoid a pizza place that served salt water fish on a fresh water lake (?), we were guided to the local standard for high quality fresh water specialties, Restaurant Da Settimio. Being the subpar, untrendy blogger that I am, I will not post photos of the dishes I took at the restaurant.  Instead, I will reminisce and recreate a special dish that my Uncle Beef and Renee marveled over.  It was a dish called tegamaccio - a fish stew made from local carp, eel, and possibly other fish that I cannot remember.  The fish was lightly simmered in a rich, stewy tomato sauce that had a nice punch of vinegar and a spike of chili flavor.  The tomato fish stew was given substance with a slice of bread that was placed at the bottom of the stew to absorb the liquid.   

The only point of contention for me was the consistency of the tomato stew.  In the restaurant, we had it a bit on the soupier side.  However, Renee order the tegamaccio on a separate excursion and reported back that it was a bit chunkier and less soupy.  I could only make sense of this by thinking of tegamaccio as ribollita in concept - some of these bread stews are runnier or chunky than others.  I chose chunky vs. soupy, but to each their own.

I searched the internets for tegamaccio recipes but came up with very little, other than a recipe from Mary Ann Esposito from her cookbook Caio Italia.  I remember watching some of Mary Ann's cooking shows on PBS a while back.  While not riveting TV, she cooked authentic Italian food that I remember appreciating.  Anyway, her recipe confirmed the method upon which I made this dish.  I did not follow her directions (I don't follow directions well) but followed her method.  I used all the ingredients (did not pay attention to proportions), as I agreed with virtually all of the ingredients she lists in the tegamaccio.  She did not provide the vinegar-like punchiness that I recall, so if you decide to make this dish, I recommend adding a few tablespoons of white wine vinegar a few minutes before serving. 

As far as the fish is concerned, do as the Italians do - get whatever is best and freshest at the market, provided the fish is thick enough to keep its integrity while simmering in the stew.  I chose large shrimp and cod for this dish.  The above picture is from a shot I took of my version of tegamaccio.  I decided to choose this picture because I wanted you to notice the layers upon layers of flavor in this dish. 

As you can see, I liked tegamaccio so much that I made it for our Tuscany/Umbria tasting event last October 15.

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