WITHIN THE NARRATIVE MANY OF THE SUPPER CLUB DISHES are described in detail sufficient to guide a home cook to a fine result. Even so, I’ve chosen to further elaborate some of these, to put them down in more traditional recipe form. Also you’ll find dishes not recounted in the narrative, dishes which, over these long years of my Umbrian life, have become well-loved emblems of our table, dishes guests expect to find there.
There are two caveats: first, I’m wordy but not complicated (as a cook, as a woman). In the pages that follow, I talk to the reader as though he or she were in the kitchen with me. I want you to know more than the means to the end and so I take liberties, assuming that you, too, want what I want for you: the stories and the chatter which can be passed on.
I’ve made no attempt to offer a balance of starters, main dishes, sweets. As I tell you in the narrative, we often ended Thursday Suppers with an espresso cup of fresh ricotta drizzled with dark honey (or a piece of honeycomb) or mixed with a few crushed espresso beans and, perhaps, some dark sugar. Miranda almost always set out a tin of biscotti for dipping into the heel of our wine or into a tiny glass of ambered vin santo. That said, you won’t find ‘desserts’ here but rather several dolce salata – sweet and salty – dishes which are more often served at the end of a supper than a traditional sweet.
And caveat number two. Over and over again, I will offer you dishes based on wine, extra-virgin olive oil, pecorino and bread, the elements which form – and have for centuries formed – the cuisine of Umbria. We have sheep and pigs, we have grapes, we have olives, we have wheat. And so this is what we cook, how we eat, what we drink. Though all the dishes, in the narrative and in this section, are inspired by the gastronomic patrimony of Umbria, they are almost never lifted from the canonical repertoire of the region. Rather I’ve interpreted recipes to suit the marketplaces, the sensibilities and lifestyles of readers who do not live and cook in rural Umbria or those who do not have the Umbrian hand – la mano – as it’s said here.
After what I can now quite honestly term a lifetime’s passion for food and cooking, I admit to practising a very personalised cuisine, an amalgam of tradition and instinct. Hence these recipes represent the slowly distilled juices of my cooking not only here in Umbria, but in all the places to which I’ve travelled on my stomach, where I’ve lived and worked and cooked and fed people.
One of the finest dishes of my life (and one which I recreate as often as its components are to be found) is nothing more than bruschette served with little soup plates of tomatoes. Only tomatoes. Glorious tomatoes. Ripe, sun-struck, skin-split beauties – broken and crushed more than sliced – set to warm for a few hours under a hot sun. Spooned into the bowls, a dish of salt flakes or fine sea salt nearby, the bruschette almost too hot to handle, a dry, almost chalky white wine chilled down to a degree somewhat below that which the winemaker would advise. And there you have it. Don’t be tempted to tear basil over these tomatoes. Save that luscious idea for another moment.
THE METHOD
To begin, it seems fitting that one should learn to say bruschetta: bru-skett’-ah. A bruschetta is nothing more than freshly toasted, oiled bread spiked with sea salt. Hardly an Umbrian or Tuscan supper begins without one or two trenchers of honest country bread, lightly toasted on both sides under a grill or over the hearth embers then drizzled with fine oil. The goal of ‘toasting’ is not to harden the crumb or crust of the bread, but to enhance its good flavour and texture as only a gentle charring can do.
Once the bread is toasted – and without missing a beat – pour the best oil in thin threads (in a circular movement) over one side of the bread, take pinches of fine sea salt or salt flakes and rub them between your fingertips over the oiled bread. Again, with no delay, get the things to the table around which everyone is already seated, the wine poured.
These and only these, unornamented, are true bruschette (plural). All manner of vegetables – cooked or raw – cured meats, savoury pastes, and even sometimes the flesh of a fine juicy fig, can be laid upon the hot oiled bread. But these filips transform the bruschetta into a crostino. Often in a trattoria or ristorante, a clove of garlic stuck on the end of a toothpick will be served with the bruschette, to be rubbed over the hot bread. Unless the garlic is white and hard and has an unmusty perfume and nothing of a green heart, don’t bother. In fact, even the most fresh and delicate garlic speaks louder than good oil and tends to distract from the intended simplicity. Two or three bruschette per person is the dose which begins to arouse hunger without peril of blunting it for what will come next.
When la mezzadria – the medieval system of sharecropping – still existed in Umbria, a tenant farmer was wont to enrich his portion of the spoils with stuffs not easily tracked by his landowner. The fattore – administrator – kept a tally on the courtyard animals, dutifully marking births and slaughters, while grain yields were calculated before a harvest and counted out later, right down to the bushel. Hunters returning from the woods with bloodied sacks over their shoulders were met by the fattore or one of his squad who relieved the farmers of their spoils; and poaching was an offence punishable by beating or banishment from the farm.
Still, privateering flourished. Fruit could be bullied down from a tree, a pat or two of new cheese formed from a morning’s abundant milking could be tucked inside a linen kitchen towel and set to ripen in some secret drawer. And who could know just how many baskets of mushrooms were to be dug from beneath a stand of oaks after a rain or how a piece of honeycomb was broken off in a certain way. It was this sort of cunning that enlivened the mean substance of a poor man’s table. Now that nearly all the old survival methods are just memories, carving up a good pear and eating it with slivers of fresh or aged pecorino and thin threads of chestnut honey can raise up a long-ago reckoning in an Umbrian farmer. He’ll offer you a slice of pear from the tip of his knife, nod his head toward the round of cheese, the loaf of bread and the honey jar on the table. And while you’re helping yourself, he’ll look at you and say, ‘Sono buoni eh? Ma, credimi, erano più buoni quando erano rubati. They’re good, yes? But, believe me, they tasted even better when they were stolen.’
Honouring this ancient autumn rite of pairing pears with pecorino, I offer two dishes: the first is simple yet unexpectedly intriguing, a dish to be found within the text; the second is a dish I want you to have because it was Miranda’s favourite. In fact, when the season came around, she would begin to ask for it – sometimes as subtly as gesturing her chin toward the basket of pears sitting on my kitchen table, other times saying outright, ‘Non è ora di fare la crostata? Isn’t it time to make the tart?’ The delicious thing has never had any other name but that – ‘the tart’. More than once it composed the whole of a lunch between Miranda and me. Nothing but ‘the tart’ and some wine.
We’d begin delicately enough, cutting modest little wedges for one another. The devouring underway, we’d move the knife to a wider angle for the second cutting, wider yet for the third, until only a small desolate slice sat there in the tin. For the sake of compassion, we’d put our forks to it without the bother of lifting it to our plates. The main deed done, we’d press a finger to the crumbs, pour a last glass of wine.
The already tired fashion of transforming sweet dishes into savoury ones and vice versa is sometimes stretched to the absurd. But once in a while the idea seems valid. Case in point, trembling little moulds of cheese and cream which can be served as part of an antipasto (before the meal) or the finepasto (the end of the meal). Here we almost always have access to very young, still soft and creamy pecorino. Barring that availability, panna cotta made with grated, aged pecorino (or Parmigiano) is a lovely dish to add to one’s ‘easy and elegant’ repertoire.
THE METHOD
Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F.
Cut the cold butter into six equal pieces and insert a piece into the hollow of each pear. Massage each pear with the oil then wrap each one with a slice of pancetta beginning at its base and securing it at the stem end with a toothpick. In a shallow metal or ceramic flameproof roasting dish just large enough to hold the fruit comfortably, set the pears close together. Give a few generous turns of the pepper grinder over the fruit, pinches of sea salt rubbed between the palms over all. Now, into the bottom of the dish pour a cup of the wine and place it on the middle rack of the preheated oven. Reserve the remaining wine.
At 10-minute intervals, baste the pears with the wine in the dish and the liquid which will be accumulating as the heat coaxes juices from the pears. At each basting, add a tablespoon or two of the reserved wine. Depending upon the ripeness of the pears, roasting time will vary from 40 to 60 minutes. The pears are roasted properly when the pancetta is crisped and the point of a sharp knife sinks easily into their flesh. Do not overcook or the fruit will begin to collapse into a still delicious but less lovely result. With a slotted spoon, carefully remove the roasted pears to an oven-proof dish deep enough to hold escaping juices. Turn off the oven but place the fruit in there to keep warm.
Place the original roasting dish directly over a medium – high heat and add what may be left of the reserved wine. Allow the juices to distil and reduce until the sauce is thick but still pourable.
While the sauce is reducing, unmould a panna cotta (recipe follows) onto each of six plates, placing a pear by its side. Nap the panna cotta with the red wine sauce leaving the pear to stand as it is and serve. The goal is to get the dishes to the table while the panna cotta is still cold, the sauce still hot, and the pear at a lovely temperature somewhere in between.
THE METHOD
Pour the Marsala or sherry into a small bowl and sprinkle the gelatine powder over it. Let the mixture stand, without stirring, for 5 minutes, allowing the gelatine to absorb the wine. Now give the mixture a stir.
Meanwhile, over a medium heat, warm the cream and the cheese in a large, deep and heavy-bottomed saucepan, stirring often. Watch carefully and beware overspill since, as the mixture approaches the boil, the volume of the cream will expand and rise quickly. Remove from the heat. Add the softened gelatine to the cream and stir for a full minute to be certain that it has fully dissolved in the hot, hot cream. Quickly pour the mixture into six individual moulds, preferably metal if the plan is to unmould them or into ceramic ramekins if the plan is to serve the savoury pudding in its dish.
Allow the panna cotta to cool to room temperature, then cover each mould tightly with plastic wrap, place the six puddings on a platter and store in the refrigerator overnight (4 or 5 hours is sufficient to gel the puddings but the additional resting time allows the cheese/wine flavours to ripen). Take care to place the platter distant from foods which would not benefit from proximity to the whiff of pecorino such as desserts, most especially those made with chocolate.
A beautiful thing to see with the roasted pears standing up to their middles in a golden cream, ‘the tart’ is lush yet rustic with its medieval perfumes of honey and just-cracked pepper and can be served as a finepasto, supplanting the fruit and cheese course or, better yet, instead of dessert.
THE METHOD
Pulse the flour, pecorino, pepper, salt and brown sugar two or three times in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. With the machine running, pour the cold wine in through the feed tube all at once and process for 4 or 5 seconds, only until the components just begin to hold together and form a dough.
Turn the mixture out onto a large sheet of plastic wrap, gathering up the errant bits and gently pressing it all into a mass. Enclose the dough in the plastic, cover the plastic with a clean kitchen towel and leave it to rest in a cool place or in the refrigerator for up to 30 minutes. Roll out the rested dough to a thinness of 5 millimetres. Transfer the rolled pastry into a buttered, 25 centimetre loose-bottomed tart pan, fitting it evenly and trimming the excess. Cover the pastry with plastic wrap and place it in the freezer for 20 minutes or in the refrigerator for an hour. Preheat the oven to 220°C/425°F.
Remove the plastic wrap from the chilled pastry shell, line it with a sheet of baking paper and fill it with dried beans (or stones gathered along the Tiber and kept for this purpose) and bake it for 10 minutes before lowering the oven’s temperature to 200°C/400°F and baking the pastry for 8 minutes more or until it begins to firm and take on a pale golden colour. Remove the partially baked pastry from the oven, remove the baking paper and weight and leave to cool completely.
THE METHOD
In the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade, process all the components to a thick creamy mass. Cover and set aside.
THE METHOD
Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F.
In a spice grinder or in a mortar with a pestle, grind the cinnamon, cloves, allspice berries and peppercorns to a fine powder. Cut a very thin slice from the bottom of each pear to prevent wobbling during the roasting, core them from their bottoms with an apple corer and stripe-peel them vertically (a strip of skin removed, a strip left intact and so on around the belly of the pear) with a vegetable peeler. Leave the stems intact. Rub each pear with the cut lemon. Place generous pinches of the spice powder inside the cavity of each pear and position them, upright and nearly touching, in a ceramic or metal roasting dish, just large enough to hold them. Warm the honey and paint each pear with it. Pour the wine into the bottom of the dish and roast the pears for 15 minutes, or just until a thin, sharp knife easily penetrates their flesh. The fruit suffers if roasted to a state of collapse. Remove the pears from the oven and baste them several times with the winey juices. Pour any remaining juices from the roasting dish into a small saucepan. Add the last doses of honey and wine and warm them together. This potion will be used as a final gloss for the pears once the tart has been baked. Meanwhile, allow the pears to cool.
ASSEMBLING THE TART
Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F.
Spread the pecorino filling over the cooled pastry. Carefully position the pears over the filling and bake the tart for 15 minutes, or until the filling begins to take on a bronze skin and the pastry has crisped. Remove the tart from the oven and paint the pears with the reserved wine and honey mixture. Permit the tart to cool for 10 minutes before unmoulding it. Serve it warm or at room temperature. Present the tart with tiny glasses of the same ambered wine used in its making.
THE METHOD
Don’t even think of using a food processor for this simple, less than a minute, procedure. It will do you and your hands such good to get in there and feel what you’re doing. In a medium bowl, mix the dry ingredients by tossing them together for a few seconds until the yellow and white flours are blended. Add the crushed fennel seeds. With a fork, stir the oil and wine together in a small bowl, beating the mixture as you would an egg. Pour it all at once over the dry ingredients and mix together with that same fork or your hands until blended. Knead the mixture in the bowl six or eight times. Leave it to rest for 30 minutes in a cool place covered with a kitchen towel while you get to the olivada.
THE METHOD
Though I pound away at this mass in a large stone mortar with a wooden pestle, a food processor would be more convenient if far less satisfying.
Place the prunes in the warmed Cognac or brandy for 15 minutes until they soften and plump. Place all the elements, save the oil, into the food processor bowl fitted with a steel blade and pulse until a coarse paste is achieved. With the motor running, begin to pour, drop by drop, the good oil into the mixture until it thickens, emulsifies and turns glossy.
Scrape the paste into a bowl and cover it with plastic wrap, leaving it in a cool place to rest while the Cognac ripens. Refrigeration simply stultifies the flavours and renders the paste like something from a tin. Why the prunes? Because the natural brine in which the olives have been aged is salty. On the tongue, one hardly notices even a whiff of prune but gets rather a sensual, richer, less-aggressive taste of olives.
TO ASSEMBLE THE TART
Generously oil a 30 centimetre metal tart tin (preferably with a removable base) and press the cornmeal pastry into it, taking care to knuckle the dough evenly over the bottom and sides of the tin. Place a sheet of baking paper over the crust, weight the paper with dried beans (or river stones collected from along the Tiber and kept for this purpose) and place it in the freezer for 15 minutes while preheating the oven to 180°C/350°F.
Bake the shell for 12–15 minutes until it begins to shrink away from the sides of the tin. Remove the baking paper and the weights and continue to bake the crust until it’s golden, another 10 minutes or so. Leave the oven on. Allow the crust to cool for 10 minutes, spread the olivada evenly over the bottom, as extravagantly or as moderately as you wish. Remember the paste is rich. Should you end up with some to spare, spoon the olivada into a glass jar with a screw top and save it in the pantry. Use it over the next day or so to sauce pasta or to spread on toasted bread. Now put the tart back into the oven for 3–4 minutes, just to ‘set’ the paste. Take it out and leave it to cool a bit. Unmould the tart and serve it at room temperature or leave it in its tin and cut it at table.
If, at the end of a good supper, you’ve had the orgasmic pleasure of placing a shard or two of gorgeous bitter chocolate (70–99% cacao) in your mouth, allowing it to barely begin melting before tipping your glass to sip the last of the fine red wine which you’ve drunk with that supper, and then – eyes closed and silent – let the two elements find their way to one another and finally to wander slowly, voluptuously down your throat, you will understand what to expect from this esoteric-sounding dish.
As the narrative recounts, cooking dried pasta in water is a relatively upstart method, it having for centuries been softened in wine or broth. There are any number of methods to cook pasta in wine but it’s this unfussy way which, I think, yields the best results. Should there be a Ninuccia-type figure in your life who would dare you to produce a 15 kilo dose of the stuff, refuse.
(As a primo or first course with other courses to follow; recipe may be doubled successfully if the pasta is to be served to six as the main plate.)
THE METHOD
Bring 7 litres of water to the boil, heaving in a fistful of coarse salt just as it begins to roll. Add the pasta, stirring well until the water resumes the boil. Quickly drain the pasta after 3 minutes. While waiting for the water to boil, pour 240ml of red wine in to a small saucepan and warm it over a slow flame without letting it approach the boil; add the 35 grams of unsalted butter, stir to melt in the warm wine, and grind in several vigorous turns of the pepper grinder. Keep the buttered, peppered wine warm over a quiet flame.
In a very large sauté pan or a very large shallow pot over a medium flame, melt 125 grams of butter, add olive oil, then stir in the ginger and cinnamon/clove mixture to perfume the oil. Add the par-boiled, drained pasta. With a wooden spoon, move the pasta about in the perfumed oil to coat each piece. Turn the heat to high and, without stirring, allow the pasta to begin taking on some colour and to form a golden crust. After about 2–3 undisturbed minutes, give the pasta a good stir so that more of it can have the benefit of the heat and begin to take on colour and crust. The process of ‘pan-toasting’ the pasta will want anywhere from 6 to 8 minutes, depending upon the size of the pan. Now begins the dosing with the wine.
From the bottle, pour in about 60ml, give the pasta a stir and, still over a high heat, allow the pasta to drink in the wine. Give the pasta the next dose when the wine has been thoroughly absorbed. Repeat the dosing and absorbing until the pasta is properly al dente. In most cases, the entire bottle of wine will be needed to achieve this texture. Should the texture be reached before the bottle is empty, pour what remains of it into the cook’s glass.
Now add the reserved buttered, peppered wine to the hot, hot pasta and toss and toss, glossing the pasta, plumping it in its final dose of wine. You’ll recall that this last dose of wine has only been heated and thus its alcohol has not gone to steam – another reason not to stint on the quality of the wine in the dish or in the glass. I am not suggesting a 1998 Pomeral, for instance, but an honest red with more muscle than fruit.
Immediately ladle the pasta into warmed deep plates and, with a vegetable peeler, shave curls of the chocolate over each plate.
A truly ancient ritual bread made once a year to celebrate the harvesting of the grapes, there are as many ways to put it together as there are women who have and who still do bake it. The single commonality is the rite which dictates that the eldest and the youngest members of a family – holding the secateurs together – cut the first of the grapes while the winemaker’s wife stands at the ready with a fine white cloth in which to take the grapes and carry them to her kitchen. This ceremony signifies continuity, the passing down of ‘life’ from generation to generation. They actually cut a branch or an arm of grapes on which hang several bunches. This is not only for convenience, since more than a single bunch is necessary for the bread, but also because the grape-stripped branch and the attached leaves are used to decorate the finished bread.
Once the grapes are in the kitchen, the breadmaker’s own fantasy and instinct prevail as long as the result is both sweet and salty, dolce salata. The taste of life itself.
This harvest bread is distinctly perfumed with rosemary, anise and fennel, while the grapes which are laid on it are again perfumed and then generously sugared and peppered, the sugar forming a kind of crust in the oven which, when broken in the mouth, gives forth a burst of warm luscious juices.
THE METHOD
In a large bowl, soften the yeast in the lukewarm wine with 1 tbsp of the dark brown sugar. Cover lightly with a kitchen towel and allow the yeast to activate for 5 minutes. Stir in 160 grams of the flour and, once again, cover the bowl with a kitchen towel and allow the yeast to further activate for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, gently warm 240ml of oil over a low heat, adding the rosemary, fennel and anise seeds and a few generous grindings of pepper. Do not overheat the oil; cover the saucepan, set aside and allow the herbs to perfume the oil.
Now, returning to the sponge, add the remaining flour, the sea salt, 60 grams of dark brown sugar, one-half of the perfumed, cooled oil with one-half of its seeds and finally, add the eggs. Incorporate the elements with a wooden spoon or, better, your impeccably clean hands. You may never use a food processor for breadmaking again. Turn the mass out onto a lightly floured pastry marble or work surface and knead in a forceful slapping–turning motion for as long as 8 minutes or until a satiny, elastic texture is achieved. Wash and dry the bowl and pour in the 1 tbsp of oil; place the worked dough into the bowl and turn it about until it’s well coated with the oil. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and then cover the wrapped bowl with a folded tablecloth or a few layers of kitchen towels. I keep a small quilt, once my son’s carriage blanket, for this use. We are, after all, in pursuit of continuity here.
Allow the dough to rise until doubled. Time required depends upon the atmospheric conditions in your kitchen, the quality of your flour and the will of Destiny. The combination of yeast and wine rather than yeast and water causes dough to rise somewhat more rapidly (while giving the eventual bread a delicate crumb and an almost imperceptible sourdough flavour) so the dough may want only 30 minutes to double.
Deflate the dough with a single deft punch, place it on a large sheet of baking paper and place the baking paper on a baking tray. Flatten the dough into a free-form circle about 1 centimetre thick. Press the small bunches of grapes or single grapes pulled from their stems over the dough. Leave a 3 centimetre border of dough around the edges grape-free. Evenly pour on the remaining perfumed oil, sprinkle the bread with the caster sugar and grind pepper over the whole with an un-shy hand. Cover lightly with a clean kitchen towel and allow to rise for 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F. Bake the flatbread for 30–35 minutes or a bit longer, until the edges are golden and swollen and the grapeskins have begun to burst. Cool the bread on the baking tray for 5 minutes then transfer it to a wire rack for further cooling. Best served warm, it can be baked several hours in advance of supper then very gently reheated at about 100°C/200°F.
I won’t apologise for setting down here yet another ‘androgynous’ recipe which serves just as magnificently with drinks before supper as it does passed about with a last glass of wine instead of dessert. Less will I wince in telling you again of the glorious harmonies struck by the mixing of rosemary and anise. My reach is toward authenticity rather than variety for variety’s sake. If you make this once, you’ll make it forever. It’s almost too simple, wants five minutes to mix and pat into its tin, less than half an hour in the oven. It’s meant to be broken rather than cut, passed about the table or sent hand to hand among a small group standing in a meadow to watch the sunset. If stored in an airtight metal tin, it keeps longer than most love affairs. You’ll give it your own name – Ginuzza is nothing more nor less than the diminutive of a friend who’s name is Gina Maria and who is inordinately fond of the thing.
THE METHOD
Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F. Smear the 1 tbsp of softened unsalted butter over the bottom and sides of a 30 centimetre metal cake tin. Set aside. In a medium bowl, cream 185 grams of softened butter with 25 grams of dark brown sugar and the icing sugar until smooth. A beater is hardly necessary. In another medium bowl, combine with your hands the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, fine sea salt, anise seeds and the 2 tbsp of chopped rosemary leaves. Add the dry mix to the butter/sugar mixture and, with the fingertips, combine the elements into a mass. Turn the mass out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead three or four times, just to further render it a more cohesive dough. Lightly pat the dough into the buttered tin, knuckling and pressing it to evenness.
In a cup, combine the remaining 40 grams of dark brown sugar, the remaining 2 tbsp chopped rosemary with the sea salt flakes or the pounded coarse sea salt and sprinkle the mixture evenly over the cake. Knuckle the surface one last time so that the herb/sugar/salt is ‘embedded’ into the dough. Bake the cake on the middle shelf of the oven for 20 minutes or until the cake has taken on a pale but distinctly gold colour. Don’t underbake. Let the cake cool in its tin for 10 minutes then turn it out onto a wire rack to cool completely at which time it will be ready to serve or to store. I prefer to divide the dose of dough into two 20 centimetre tins only because the cake is thinner, crisper, lighter that way.
As written in the narrative, Miranda kept a five-litre jug of this ‘violently’ herbed oil in her pantry and used it as a marinade for meats and vegetables to be grilled over her fire or to paint same after they’d been wood-charred. She smeared it over hot roasted bread to bring forth a rather unusual sort of bruschetta. She always claimed it was the only substance better than grappa to soothe bodily wounds and bruises.
It would hardly be worth the trouble to concoct less than two litres of this at a time. Use only the most beautiful fresh sage and rosemary and only white, crisp, juicy garlic. If the purple variety can be found and it, too, is crisp and juicy and with no green heart, grab it (promise yourself to avoid the obese, acidic heads of what is sometimes referred to as elephant garlic save, perhaps, to feed it to the animal whose name it bears).
Wild fennel flowers are not readily available in even the smartest little food shops. If you live near a river, it’s likely that wild fennel will be growing, here and there, along its banks. A tall, very tall stalk with a frothy yellow-flowered head, it is unmistakeable. Gather it by cutting the stalk rather than pulling it by its roots. With heavy string, tie the stalks in bunches of six or seven and suspend them, upside down, in a cool airy place to dry. A process which sometimes asks several months. The dried stalks can be used as a bed for roasting meat or fish while the dried heads, rubbed between the palms, yield a most astonishingly perfumed herb – delicate, assertive, lingering. Substitute good old fennel seed if all this foraging by a river is not part of your plan.
THE METHOD
Stuff the sage branches (without tearing off the leaves), the rosemary branches (without stripping them of their leaves), the fennel flowers or seeds and the chillies (uncrushed) into the 2 litres of oil. Slap the heads of garlic with the flat of a knife and scrape the smashed, unpeeled cloves into the oil. Cork the oil, shake it, put it to rest in a cool, dark place. Give it a shake two or three times a day and in two weeks, it will be ready to use. As time passes, the violenza will become more so.
Note: One could scald the oil before adding the herbs but, according to Miranda, the result is far more pure and ‘fresh’ if time rather than heat ripens the various essences.
I’d been making a version of this dish for years and years before I came to live in Italy, but when I tried to build it with the local, watery-fleshed, pimply, green-skinned things called Zucca Invernale, the result was less than good. It was in the Lombard city of Mantua where I first found small, green-skinned squash whose flesh most resembled the native American pumpkin. One October Saturday morning there, we filled the boot of our car with twenty-two squash, having been assured by the farmer that, if stored in a cool place, they would stay firm and fine until Easter. He was right. I stuffed and roasted and scooped and fed the Thursday Night tribe on them until Miranda finally took a mallet to the few which remained by February, roasted the pieces, mixed the flesh with white wine vinegar, crushed mustard seeds, mustard oil (bought here in the pharmacy) and sugar to make la mostarda di zucca, a luscious condiment (typical of the city of Cremona in the region of Lombardy) through which we dragged shards of pecorino and skated crusts of bread at the finish of many suppers.
THE METHOD
In a medium sauté pan, melt 45 grams of unsalted butter and saute the onions, reserved pumpkin flesh (finely diced) and mushrooms until the mass softens and the mushrooms give up their juices (if using dried mushrooms, strain the soaking liquid and add it, at this point, to the sauté pan). Add the sea salt and give the pepper grinder three or four good turns.
In a large bowl combine all other elements save the bread and remaining butter. Beat the mass with a wooden spoon, stir in the onion, pumpkin and mushroom mixture. Melt 60 grams of butter in a sauté pan and in it brown the bread, tossing the pieces about until they are crisp and golden.
Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F. Place the readied pumpkin or squash in a large, heavy baking dish or on a baking tray. Spoon one-third of the cheese mixture into the pumpkin, add half the crisped bread, another third of the cheese, the remaining bread, ending with the remaining cheese mixture. Replace the pumpkin’s hat and roast it in the oven for 1½ hours or longer – until the pumpkin’s flesh is very soft when pierced with the tip of a sharp knife. Beware not to over-roast it to the point of collapse. The natural sugars in the pumpkin will caramelise and melt into the stuffing. It’s least perilous to serve the pumpkin in it’s roasting dish or on its baking tray, though it can be transferred to a warmed deep platter with the aid of two wide spatulas. In either case, a few autumn leaves, branches of bittersweet (or bacche as the wild orange berries are known here) would not be out of place. Most importantly, get it to the table quickly. Into warmed soup plates, spoon out the stuffing, scraping the spoon along the wall of the pumpkin shell for some of the good caramelised flesh.
This is an ‘interpreted’ version of the brandy-injected leg of wild boar Miranda proffered as her ‘final’ solo Thursday Night supper. Along with the boar, her method asked only three elements: brandy, juniper berries and sea salt. Here we forage and dry juniper berries to use in many game preparations and shun the already-dried berries which are sometimes available commercially, the reason being that the commercial variety lack the delicacy of ours and can, even when used sparingly, trounce every possibility of achieving the desired complexity of flavours in a dish.
If one is partial to the taste of good Dutch gin with its decisive but still pastel juniper flavour, one could inject it into the pork rather than brandy. I have done this often and always with fine results. As usual, much depends on the quality of the pork (organic, corn-fed), and the quality of the gin or the brandy. One would hardly be amiss using Cognac, Armagnac or Calvados.
THE METHOD
Fill the injector or syringe with the gin or brandy and, with an un-shy hand, insert it deeply into the flesh of the pork, expelling all the liquid. Repeat the process over all surfaces of the meat. Place the injected meat into a deep ceramic or enamelled dish, cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate. (Shockingly dangerous as it will seem, we don’t refrigerate but simply retire the meat to rest in a cool place.) Several times during the first day, repeat the injection process. On the second day, once again repeat the injections, carefully covering and refrigerating the meat. On the third day, preheat the oven to 230°C/450°F. Inject the meat all over its surfaces for the last time, then score the skin in a criss-cross fashion, cutting right down into the flesh, so that the skin will roast to a good gold, hard crackle. (Should there be gin or brandy left in the bottle, resist pouring it out for the cook since it will come in handy a bit later.)
Now rub the entire leg with the allspice/sea salt mixture, place the leg on a roasting rack set in a large roasting pan and roast at the high temperature for 30 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 180°C/350°F and continue to roast the leg for 20 minutes per 500 grams.
Remove the roasting pan from the oven but not the leg from its rack in the pan. Leave it to rest for 15–30 minutes, uncovered. Tenting the leg with foil or covering it in any way will risk softening the crackled skin. After the leg has rested, transfer it to a cutting board. Place the roasting pan over a medium–high flame, add what’s left in the gin or brandy bottle and the dry Marsala. Scrape and stir to release the clinging bits and reduce the liquid by one third.
On an Umbrian table, no sauce would be served with the meat, its succulence already assured by the liquor-plumping process. Slice the pork and its crackled skin and, if you must, drizzle with the reduced pan juices. Otherwise, serve the juices as a sauce for buttered pasta before serving the roast. (An example of ‘the conducting thread’ through a meal.)
Though the pork is delicious served warm, it is equally delicious served at room temperature. No rushing here to get hot, hot ‘meat and gravy’ to the table.
What to serve with the roast? Good bread and good wine. Resist ‘apple sauce’ or any such travesty. A bowl of wine-plumped, spiced dried prunes would not be inappro priate nor would a dish of fine whole-fruit Cremona mostarda if such is to be found wherever you are.