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Little Italy

The “little Italy” of Abu Dhabi is not a cluster of pizza and ice cream cafes somewhere around a pretty square, but just one club, Cicer, in an unpretentious location in the city.

Yet, it is here where most Italians in the UAE capital find a cure for missing home and keep their culture fresh. And what better way to do all that than doing what Italians do really well: cooking!

It was Mila Sarti’s idea. One day she showed up at Cicer with a proposition to start a cooking group that would eventually end up in an Italian cooking book.

“The initiative appealed to others and before we knew it there were about 20 ladies meeting each month in my house. Our meetings were reminiscent of our old school days — what fun we had as the attentive class members while one of us took on the role of culinary arts teacher,” explained Mila.

Like every new resident in a foreign city, Mila needed some friends to feel truly welcomed in Abu Dhabi. She joined the Italian Cicer social club and, in no time, the UAE capital became a real home. When she asked her new-found friends to do some cooking together, the bonds among them grew even stronger.

“That was the inspiration for this little cook book of 30 recipes, which we hope will be used to help raise funds for charity,” pointed out Mila.

The Italian ladies met regularly for one year, cooking and sharing tips before the work on the book itself started. In the end, only 12 of them contributed with starters, pasta, main courses and sweets recipes that are not entirely classic Italian cooking.

There is, for instance, a recipe for tabbouleh and one for “warak enab”, stuffed vine leaves with a mixture of rice minced beef, herbs and tomatoes, presented by Violette.

“Eating stuffed vine leaves brings to mind happy family memories from my childhood. During holidays, my aunt would prepare some traditional dishes, stuffed vine leaves being one of them, which were not a part of my mother’s Germanic repertoire,” wrote Violette in the introduction of her recipe.

Trying to explain the book’s concept, the 12 authors simply describe their collection of dishes as family recipes that they learnt as young girls from their mothers, grandmothers or someone else in the family.

“We are, in fact, sharing our childhood,” said Lucia, one of the authors.

“Since many of us have someone in the family of different origin than Italian, there is a contamination of other cooking cultures,” she added.

“Myself, I am half Italian and half American, so you’ll find in the book I’m presenting the recipe for an apple pie, but it’s not the traditional American apple pie; it’s the apple pie my Italian baker father used to make in New York.”

The “Recipes and Chitchat among Friends in Abu Dhabi” was published with the support of the Italian embassy in Abu Dhabi and launched last week at the Millennium hotel here. The 1,000 copies — to start with — will be available for sale at the Cicer club, which, according to its director Anna Coupaud, it is still being renovated, but will reopen “very soon”.

The books costs Dh15 and all the money raised from sales will be donated to Save the Children, an international charity.

silvia@khaleejtimes.com