Sweet Vegetables, Soft Wines
Why is it that Italian wines are so seldom featured on the wine lists of restaurants other than those which serve specifically Italian food? Italy produces a great variety, as well as a very large quantity of wines, and it does seem rather unimaginative to confine them to drinking entirely with Italian food. In the repertory of French regional and country cooking there are surely scores of dishes with which an authentic Italian wine would make a most refreshing change from the inevitable Beaujolais, and in fish restaurants especially, the too familiar and usually unidentifiable Chablis. Personally, I would welcome the occasional offer of a Verdicchio with the mussels, a fresh, light Frascati with the sole and spinach. And as far as the red wines are concerned, the lighter ones of Verona and Garda harmonize uncommonly well with pâtés, the fuller ones of Piedmont and Tuscany with daubes of beef, hot cheese dishes, rich ox-tail stews, game birds, herb-flavoured chickens.
Then for that matter, why not Italian wines with English food? We are, after all, more practised than are the people of wine-growing countries at the game of matching our dishes to appropriate wines. I have found that roast duck and a bottle of Piedmontese Barolo make a most excellent combination. And I think that a Barbera from the same region should do particularly well with a steak, kidney and mushroom pudding, or a jugged hare, while a Chianti Classico is a wine for roast lamb or a handsome joint of pork, as indeed it is in its native country, where the whole roast pigs, marvellously aromatic with wild fennel and whole garlic cloves roasted golden and translucent, are one of the most splendid features of Tuscan food markets. Impaled on a huge pole, the pig is carved to order, hefty slices, each with a portion of the golden garlic cloves scooped out from the inside, are handed to you with a big hunk of bread and wrapped in a paper napkin. The local housewives are buying it for the midday meal, but we are tourists, so we go off to another stall to buy cheese, perhaps a good big piece of Parmesan, finest of all cheeses with red wine. And we drive off, up into the beautiful Tuscan hills to find a picnic place in the warm autumn sun. We are worlds away from the baked lasagne, the veal with ham and mushrooms, the standard caramelized oranges and Bertorelli ices of everybody’s Italian trattoria down the road. And although here in England we cannot hope to reproduce anything very close to true Italian country food (the ingredients are so elusive – where is the veal, where the good Parmesan, where the sweet, pale rose Parma ham, the fish straight out of the sea, the fruity Tuscan olive oil?) we can at least enjoy Italian wines and an increasingly large variety of them, without going to the local pizza house or trattoria, and with food of our own cooking and choosing. I do suggest too that these wines will benefit by being served with a shade less of that careless abandon which characterizes the Italian trattoria wine waiter. Open the red wines well in advance, don’t chill the whites until they are as frozen as a sorbet.
For the pork dish, which I have chosen as being a good one with Italian red wine, I would settle for a flask of Chianti Classico Montepaldi, a very typical Chianti, clean and bright, not too heavy. A lighter wine, the delicious estate-bottled Lamberti Valpolicella from the Verona district would also be a happy choice. This wine incidentally is one which I would fancy for the Christmas turkey, while the full and fragrant red Torgiano from Umbria would be lovely with a roast fillet of beef, should anyone be rich enough for such a luxury this year. And for everyday drinking nobody should despise the much cheaper Tuscan red wine. It seems to me to offer remarkable value. But this wine too will improve noticeably if given an hour or two to breathe. At normal room temperature. NOT, please not, in front of the fire. And the corner of the Aga is the place for the kettle, not for the red wine.
STUFFED AND ROLLED PORK
A dish of Italian origin, and, properly, made with veal. But since in England veal is so hard to come by, so expensive, and so different in quality from Italian veal, I have found that it is best to make the dish with pork which is very successful cooked in this manner.
Buy a piece of loin of pork boned by the butcher and weighing after boning 2½ to 3 lb. The joint should also have the rind removed. Other ingredients are 2 whole eggs, 2 thin slices of mild cooked ham, parsley, about 1 oz. of grated Parmesan, a small onion, ¾ pint of milk, butter and olive oil, seasonings of salt, freshly ground pepper, grated nutmeg, a clove of garlic.
Put the meat upon a board and flatten it out with a rolling pin; season it. Cut the peeled garlic clove into little slivers and set them neatly over the surface of the meat. With the eggs, chopped ham and parsley (about 2 tablespoons), and the cheese and seasonings make an ordinary omelette but don’t fold it. It is to be spread flat upon the meat, which you then roll up and tie as neatly and securely as possible into a nice fat sausage, not, however, tying the string too tightly, or the stuffing will burst out during the cooking.
In a small oval cocotte, braising pan, or other utensil in which the meat will fit without too much room to spare, melt 1 oz. of butter and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. In this melt the chopped onion until it turns yellow. Put in the meat, let it gently brown on both sides. Pour in the heated milk. It is important that the milk be scalding hot. Let it just come back to simmering point. Cover the pot with foil or paper and a lid. Transfer it to a slow oven (gas no. 2, 310°F.) for 2 to 2¼ hours, then remove the meat and keep it warm in the oven. Transfer the pan containing the sauce to the top of the stove and let it cook fairly fast, stirring it continuously until the thin part of the liquid has reduced by about half. Press the sauce quickly through a fine wire sieve and pour it over and round the meat (having first removed the string). Sprinkle some parsley over the top, and your dish is ready to be served with a few plain, new potatoes. And it is just as good cold as hot. There should be ample for six people.
The pork rind and the bones should not be wasted. They will make very good stock.
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Now for two dishes which should really bring out the charms of the sweeter white table wines of Italy. One of the recipes is for Florentine fennel, and perhaps it sounds freakish to suggest a sweet wine with a vegetable dish. But consider a moment. When the experts make a big production of choosing food to go with their wines, I wonder how often it is remembered that many vegetables are very sweet, that they quarrel badly with the claret chosen for the lamb, distort the burgundy with the game? Who stops to think that chestnuts, parsnips, peas, carrots, turnips, celery, Belgian endives, onions, even to a certain extent potatoes have potent overtones of sugar in their make-up which are intensified by the so-called classic French methods of cooking them to an almost caramelized state of sweetness. Think, for instance, of navets glacés, carottes Vichy, and those small golden, syrupy onions which accompany so many French meat and chicken dishes. Delicious, but they don’t help the red wine. Try these same vegetables as a separate course after the meat or fish, and you find that they almost take the place of a sweet or pudding. Mangetout peas are a good example. Their alternative name of sugar peas should provide sufficient indication of their qualities, and to me it is all wrong to muddle these exquisitely delicate and sweet vegetables with meat and potatoes, sauce and gravy. They should always be eaten as a separate course. With them try one of the naturally sweet wines of Italy, the ones they call amabile (soft rather than luscious or rich). They make a most interesting partnership with sweetish vegetables, perhaps even better than they do with a dessert dish proper for which they are not full enough. In fact the Lacrima Christi del Vesuvio, a wine which in the past I have not much appreciated, has proved quite a revelation to me when I have drunk it with a gratin of Florentine fennel. The two have a real affinity. This wine – which should be drunk chilled, but not with all the fragrance frozen out of it – is also very successful with dishes based on white cream cheese, either sweet or savoury. Italian cooking offers a rich variety of such dishes, the savoury ones often mixed with spinach, the sweet ones with cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon.
Orvieto amabile (the one in the flask) to my mind far more attractive and somehow more natural and right than the dry version, is a little sweeter than the Lacrima Christi, and makes a happy partnership with cooked dessert apples, or provides a nice finish to a meal when served with delicate little biscuits or cakes such as French madeleines. This wine should be well chilled.
FLORENTINE FENNEL WITH PARMESAN
This is a simple and refreshing vegetable dish; it is surprising that it is not better known; it consists of the bulbous root stems of the Florentine or sweet fennel – this form of fennel now arrives in England from Israel, Kenya, Morocco and sometimes from France and Italy, during the late summer and again in the very early spring. The sweet, aniseed-like flavour of the plant is not to everybody’s taste, but to those who do like it, it is quite an addiction.
For this dish, allow a minimum of one large fennel bulb – for want of an alternative short name, that is what everyone calls these root stems – per person. Other ingredients are butter, grated Parmesan cheese, and breadcrumbs. Trim the bulbs by slicing off the top stalks, the thick base, and removing all the stringy outer layers of leaves. There is a good deal of waste. Slice the bulbs in half, longitudinally. Plunge them into a saucepan of boiling salted water. According to size they should cook for 7 to 10 minutes. When tender enough to be pierced fairly easily with a skewer, drain them.
Have ready a buttered gratin dish or the appropriate number of individual dishes. In this arrange the fennel halves, cut side down. Strew breadcrumbs over them (approximately 1 tablespoon per bulb) then grated Parmesan (again, 1 tablespoon per bulb) and finally a few little knobs of butter. Put the gratin dish in a medium oven (gas no. 4, 350°F.) and leave for 10 to 15 minutes until the cheese and breadcrumbs are very pale gold, and bubbling.
APPLES WITH LEMON AND CINNAMON
A cool and fresh sweet dish to serve after a rich or heavy meat course.
Core, peel and slice (as for an apple flan) some good eating apples, preferably Cox’s, allowing two apples per person. Put the cores and peel into a saucepan with a heaped dessertspoon of sugar and a slice of lemon, peel included, for each apple. Cover amply with water and cook to a syrup. This will take about 7 minutes’ rapid boiling.
Put the sliced apples into a skillet, sauté pan, or frying pan. Over them strain the prepared syrup. Cover the pan and cook over moderate heat until the apples are soft but not broken up. Add more sugar if necessary.
Arrange the apples in a shallow serving dish, with a few lemon slices on the top – for decoration and for the scent. These apples can be eaten hot or cold.
An alternative method of cooking this dish, much easier when you are making a large quantity, is to arrange the sliced apples in an oven dish, pour the prepared syrup over them, cover the dish (with foil, if you have no lid) and cook in a moderate oven (gas no. 3 to 4, 325 to 340°F.) for 25 to 35 minutes. Serve the apples in the dish in which they have cooked, not forgetting the final sprinkling of cinnamon.
An alternative flavouring for those who do not care for cinnamon is a vanilla pod, cut in half and put in with the apples before cooking. The lemon slices are still included in the flavouring of the syrup.
Wine Mine, 25 November 1973
