I couldn’t find my favourite antipasta recipe anywhere. It was the one that used hamburger relish, frozen mixed California veg, cocktail onions, both green and black olives, and a can of tuna.  I suppose I could have winged it, but I was determined to find a real recipe.

I searched through my Italian cookbooks, only to find the antipasto sections; a fancy name for hors d’oeuvres, with nothing even remotely similar to the canned spread I was looking for. Google kept telling me that I must really mean: antipasto.

With steadfast persistence, and by practically naming every ingredient in my search criteria, I finally found several recipes for antipasto in a jar; marinated vegetables in ketchup; antipasta. Exactly what I was looking for!

“Antipasto” means “before the meal.”  “Antipasta” means “before the spaghetti.” So I suppose, if your second course was going to be pasta, you would be correct in calling anything you ate before that “antipasta.” Otherwise, you are just plain wrong, although I am sure that there are many fine Italian cooks who would love to see this white-bread version of their sacred first course called by any other name than “antipasto.”

 If you have ever been to an Italian wedding or dinner at an Italian friend’s home, you will have likely had antipasto platters served to you as a first course. There are no set rules except that they should be light—a word I’m not sure exists in the Italian culinary lexicon—, compliment but not duplicate the meal to follow, and appear as if they were just whipped together from the garden, cold cellar, or forno oven without any effort at all.

Fresh vegetables; Italian cheeses; olives; marinated artichokes, mushrooms, eggplant, and peppers; fresh seafood; cold cuts such as prosciutto and mortadella; plenty of fresh Italian bread—all presented on a deceptively casual and strategically mismatched array of fine Italian ceramics mixed with classic white Ironstone plates. All so very “picnic in a Tuscan vineyard where there are never any flies, ants, or wasps.”

The woman who first came up with the brilliant idea to put this bucolic scene in a jar is, in my books, a kitchen goddess! She must have looked in her fridge one day and perhaps due to a passing addiction to Gibsons, found herself with an abundance of cocktail onions, and pulling out the vegetable keeper, the one that promised to keep those carrots, celery, and cauliflower crisp for weeks, found nearly-dead produce that could never be foisted on the family, even cleverly disguised as “au gratin.” Perhaps she had just received a Cuisinart for Christmas, and upon discovering the three part-bottles of ketchup in the back of the fridge, the seed of an idea was germinated. The addition of tuna was the spark of genius that turned this from being just another futile attempt to use up left-overs, into what became practically a new food group of almost cult status.

By fusing four different recipes, I finally made my antipasto. Instead of ketchup, I used bottled chilli sauce, and I used fresh vegetables, except for the frozen green beans that I needed to use up. I also added capers which weren’t in the recipe, but I tend to add capers to everything. I decided to heat-process my jars because I had made so much that even I couldn’t use up that much in a month, and I eat it on eggs, fish, chicken, and often as a sandwich filling by itself.

It has been hard for me to get over the fact that I have been mispronouncing the word for years. I was so sure that it was spelled a-n-t-i-p-a-s-t-a, that I went to the grocery store yesterday and looked at all the different brands they carry; darn, I feel stupid. While trying to find out if there were any evidence that “antipasta” was an acceptable Italian term, I came across one Italian site for Americanized Italian words. They explained that although it is a mispronunciation, it is technically correct, if indeed one were serving pasta as a second course, which in Italy would be most of the time. However, the explanation went on further to add, “It makes Italians laugh.”

That’s enough for me; from now on I only say “antipasto”!