This article contains spoilers for 'Justin Theroux's Italian Quest' on No Taste Like Home
In travel, food and family history programme No Taste Like Home, host Antoni Porowski and his celebrity guest, actor Justin Theroux, head to Emilia-Romagna in Italy.
Justin says his great grandfather Alessandro was a “classic one dollar in his pocket” immigrant. According to family legend, he came to New York from Piacenza in Italy in search of a better life. He was a tailor who was born illegitimately.
Justin was close to his grandmother, ‘Nonna Anne’, Alessandro’s daughter. She was famous for cooking tortellini in brodo, or stuffed pasta in broth.
Justin and Antoni meet Pietro, a local chef, who explains that in Italy, local dishes are very specific to individual towns, and tortellini in brodo doesn’t come from Piacenza. However, he does show them how to cook a traditional dish from the town – faraona alla creta, or guinea fowl baked in clay.
Alessandro’s wife Angela’s mother was Ermenegilda, from a farming family in Agazzano. Justin and Antoni meet a local farmer, who shows them the farming techniques Ermenegilda’s family would have used, including feeding hens on watermelon to ensure eggs with a more colourful and flavourful yolk.
Local chef Fabio Delledone shows them how to make sfoglia, or pasta dough, with the eggs. However, he explains that Agazzano’s traditional stuffed pasta isn’t tortellini, but tortelli con la coda, or tortelli with a tail.
“I’m gonna go write my memoir, because now I can die happy,” Antoni jokes after eating Fabio’s pasta.
Next, Justin and Antoni want to find out more about Ermenegilda’s husband, Justin’s 2x great grandfather, Francesco. They head into the Apennine Mountains to Stradella, a village so remote it doesn’t appear on maps. They can’t even travel by road and have to get a lift on a local farmer’s tractor for the last part of the journey.
They find the ruins of a farmhouse, just visible under vegetation. However, this remote spot played an important role in Justin’s family history. In 1849, Francesco was found abandoned here as a newborn baby by Domenica Carlotti, a local woman.
“I’m strangely filled with gratitude,” Justin says. “If this woman had not taken in Francesco, I would not be standing here.”
Eking out an existence in the mountains was hard for the peasant families of the 19th-century. Francesco’s mother may have given him up because she wasn’t able to feed him.
Justin and Antoni meet a modern-day descendant of the Carlotti family, and Justin is able to thank them for finding Francesco. They enjoy some coppa piacentina, or cured pork, a dish which the peasants would have eaten throughout the winter.
Antoni has found that Justin’s great grandfather Alessandro wasn’t actually from Piacenza, as his naturalisation document says that he was born in Ferrara. However, it does give his profession as tailor, so that part of the family legend was correct.
Ferrara stands near the mouth of the Po. For centuries, it was an important trade route. The poor residents of Ferrara would have fed themselves by harvesting clams from the river. Justin and Antoni try out some clam-harvesting for themselves with the help of a local family, and enjoy some vongole all’aglio, or clams with garlic.
Next, they go to a church that is a former foundling hospital. Alessandro was brought here in 1880 when he was a day old.
In Ferrara at the time, foundling hospitals were often set up by wealthy silk merchants, who sometimes used them to hide their own illegitimate children. They also used them as a source of a work force, as children like Alessandro would have learned skills such as tailoring.
Children in the foundling hospitals ate a poor diet largely consisting of polenta, and many died. However, these days polenta is an ingredient for many delicious dishes, such as a polenta lasagna, which Justin and Antoni eat next.
Justin is shocked to learn that two of his ancestors were abandoned as babies. “Those two boys who got left – what that must have done to their psyche,” he says. “It’s given me an enormous amount of sympathy for them.”
Finally, Justin and Antoni head south to learn the final part of Alessandro’s story. He didn’t grow up in the orphanage, but was raised in the town of Cento by a foster family. He lived with them until he was in his twenties, so it seems that they were truly his family. And it was here that he would have learned the recipe for tortellini in brodo.
“This has been a really great journey,” Justin says. “I definitely feel like I identify more with the region, the food, the people I’ve met along the way. To see those families – it’s really in the DNA to make these meals together and to make them as a family and to also pass them down.”
Justin Theroux's episode of No Taste Like Home will air on Disney+ from Monday 24 February and on National Geographic at 10pm on Wednesday 12 March
