“It is true that man does not live by bread alone; he must eat something with it.”
Pellegrino Artusi
Italians are very impatient people. We can’t sit for more than a minute in traffic and we hate to wait for our food. That is why we invented antipasti, which literally means “before the meal [pasto].” When I first came to England, I thought it so strange to see people at parties and weddings standing around having drinks before they ate. Italians just want to get to the table as soon as possible, so the bread can arrive. Not just bread – we also want salami, prosciutto, maybe some marinated artichokes, some olives … We want to enjoy a glass of wine, to talk and argue, because everything we do in a day is a small drama and everyone has an opinion on it – but we need to eat while we are discussing it. Once the antipasti are on the table, that is the signal to relax, get into the mood and interact, because you have to pass the plates and everyone is saying, “Oh, what is this?” and “Can I have some of that?” It is all about conviviality and sharing and generosity.
A few miles from my home in Corgeno, in Lombardia, on the way to nowhere, is the village of Cuirone, with its pale, yellow-washed houses; a place that has hardly changed since I was a child. In the middle of the village is the Società Mutuo Soccorso, the cooperative shop and restaurant with a bakery attached, where they make fantastic chestnut and pumpkin bread, as well as the big pane bianco, which is the everyday bread. Inside the bakery, they have a basket full of drawstring bags, some gingham, some flowery. Each family makes its own bag, and the bakers know which bread they have, so in the morning when the loaves come out of the oven, the bags get filled up and delivered by scooter.
At one time in our region of Italy, most of the villages had a cooperativa, run by the locals, where everyone could bring their produce to sell and where you could get a simple lunch for not much money. Everything you ate would be produced locally. You have to remember that Italy has been a united country for not much more than a hundred years. Before that it was made up of different kingdoms, dukedoms, republics, and so on, each influenced by different neighbors and invading armies throughout its history.
Also in Italy you have a massive geographical change, from mountains to coastlines, from the colder north with its plains full of cows giving beef and milk for cheese, to the hot south, on the same parallel as Africa, where they grow a profusion of lemons, tomatoes, capers and peppers. So in every region, town and village, they have their own particular ingredients and style of cooking, which of course they will insist is absolutely the right way – and that what everyone else does is wrong.
In Corgeno, the cooperativa was next to my uncle’s restaurant, La Cinzianella, overlooking the lake, and when you turned twenty years old, you were asked to run it for the summer (the year my friends and I took charge we had a fantastic time). But now the space is rented out as a cafá and restaurant. In Cuirone, though, the cooperativa is still thriving, and sometimes, especially when I come home to visit, my mum and dad and my aunts, uncles and cousins all meet up there for lunch at the weekend. Lunch is at 12:30, and 12:30 is what they mean, so you don’t dare be late.
It’s a very simple place: a large room with a long bar down one side and wooden tables and chairs where the farmers and the old men of the village drink red wine and play cards. But the moment you sit down, big baskets of bread from the bakery arrive with bottles of local wine, and then the plates of antipasti: salami, prosciutto, lardo, carpaccio, local cheeses, artichokes, porcini. As one plate is taken away, more arrive, and so it goes on and on. Then, just when my wife, Plaxy, especially, is thinking that there can’t be any more food, out comes a pasta dish – maybe a baked lasagne – and then a fruit dessert.
The antipasti are based around simple produce, just like in people’s homes and most small restaurants. The members of the cooperativa bring whatever they have that is fresh that day, along with ingredients such as artichokes and mushrooms, prepared when they were in season, then preserved in big jars under vinegar or oil, or salamoia (brine). In Italy, things are done differently from in the UK, especially London, where you buy your food, eat it, and then buy some more. Most people in Italy still behave like they did in the old days, when you would always have a store cupboard full of dried or preserved foods because you never knew when there would be a war or some other disaster.
In smarter restaurants, the kitchen would have the chance to show off a little more with the antipasti. In my uncle’s kitchen at La Cinzianella we really worked at our antipasti, bringing out some fantastic flavors, because we knew that this prelude to the meal said a lot about what we were trying to achieve with our food, and about the dishes that would follow. The slicing machine was right in the middle of the big dining room, so everyone could see the cured meats being freshly cut, and we would prepare seafood salads and roasted vegetables. Imagine how I reacted the first time I went to a French restaurant and they sent out some canapás before the meal – those tiny, bite-sized things. I was shocked. I thought, If this is what the rest of the food is going to be like, forget it! Italians don’t like to fiddle about with fancy morsels, they just want to welcome people by sharing what they have, however simple, in abundance. An Italian’s role in life is to feed people. A lot. We can’t help it.
In Italy the concept of the “starter” – individually plated dishes that you eat by yourself, just you – is quite a modern thing. Only in the last twenty years or so have restaurants started putting them on the menu. Traditionally, after the antipasti the real “starter” was the pasta course, or first plate (i prini piatti). Then came the second plate (i secondi piatti), which would be meat or fish, and, to finish, fruit or a dessert (i dolci).
When I look at the books I have of old regional recipes, no mention is made of “starters” as we think of them today. One of the books I love most is La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well) by Pellegrino Artusi. All Italian cooks know about Artusi – he was a great gourmet and one of the first writers to gather together recipes from all over Italy. He published the book himself back in 1891, in the days when Italian food was considered a bit vulgar in “smart” society because the food of the royal courts was French.
Artusi spent twenty years traveling around Italy and his knowledge of regional produce and cooking was remarkable. His stories are full of beautiful descriptions and witty comments, sometimes using old Italian words that I have to look up. I keep his book in my office in the kitchen at Locanda to research ingredients and old recipes. But even Artusi has only a short section on “appetizers,” which is really just an acknowledgment of the moment before the meal when you show off your capacity to bring out food of a high quality. (Interestingly, he says that in Toscana they did things differently from other regions and served these “delicious trifles” after the pasta, not before.) Artusi talks about various cured meats, caviar and mosciame (salted and air-dried tuna), but the only “recipes” he gives for appetizers are a selection of crostini: fried bread topped with ingredients such as capers, chicken livers and sage, or woodcock and anchovies.
Traditionally, the kind of antipasti you ate was determined by where you lived. Around the coast there would obviously be more seafood, while inland there were cured meats. Every region would have different breads to serve with the antipasti: light, airy breads in the north, white unsalted bread in Toscana and enormous country loaves made with harder flour in the south – fantastic for bruschetta, which these days has become rather elevated in restaurants, but is really just chargrilled stale bread with a bit of garlic and tomato rubbed over it and some oil drizzled on top.
Even now, food in Italy is very regional, but after the Second World War, when everything became more abundant and people began to travel more, some chefs started to be a little inventive and borrow ideas for their antipasti from other regions, and from the street food you see cooked in cities such as Napoli by vendors with gas burners on trolleys: arancini (rice balls), crocchette (mashed potato croquettes), panzerotti (little pasties filled with meat, cheese, tomatoes or anchovies, then deep-fried), mozzarella in carrozza (mozzarella “in a carriage” – deep-fried between slices of bread), and frittelle (fritters filled with artichokes, mushrooms or prawns).
Nowadays in Italy – in the cities at least – like everywhere else in the world, the way people want to eat is changing, though perhaps a little more slowly than everywhere else. Not everyone wants a meal of several courses anymore. They want to be more relaxed, so you can order just a bowl of pasta and nobody thinks anything of it. And there are now city bars serving only antipasti, where you make yourself up a plate of whatever you want, and that’s all you have. Then there are the newer, smarter restaurants, which try really hard to make their starters more imaginative than a plate of carpaccio or an insalata caprese (tomatoes and mozzarella).
As for me, I am an Italian chef who has cooked in Paris and come of age in London, and inventive starters are what people expect from me. I might have in the kitchen a salami that is so beautiful it makes you cry, but I can’t just slice it and put it out with some artichokes and bread. I have to present it in a more sophisticated way. We must include such starters in the restaurant, but we can’t lose the pasta course, so the modern Italian menu usually has four sections: starters, pasta, main courses and dessert, which I know can seem daunting. Sometimes customers say, “What should I do? Do I have to have a starter, then pasta and a main course after that? Or can I have just pasta and a dessert?” Of course, you can do what you like; we just try to give a selection of everything an Italian would want to be offered, so you can eat as few or as many courses as you want.
However sophisticated our menu may be at Locanda, it always has its roots in classic regional Italian cooking. Sure, some of our favorite starters have come about, like all good dishes, from getting excited about a particular ingredient that comes into the kitchen, but many of them are simply our interpretation of the traditional elements of the antipasti misti – the artichokes, porcini and cured meats with which I and most of my kitchen staff have grown up. We look at them, rethink them and work at representing them in more imaginative or surprising ways.
The key is always to concentrate on just a few flavors. I think it is terrible to eat out in a restaurant and not remember afterward what you had because there were too many tastes happening at once on your plate. It is better to buy primary ingredients that have their own fantastic flavor and then you have to do less with them.
One of the great things that has happened since I came to this country is the revolution in the quality of ingredients. When the first Italian immigrants came to the UK and set up their restaurants, they brought what they could over from Italy and created a limited Italian kitchen, making Anglo-Italian dishes that catered to British tastes. Then when people began to be more interested in the genuine food of Italy, and were prepared to pay for real Parmigiano Reggiano and prosciutto di Parma and mozzarella di bufala, the best-quality food began to be imported, and producers in this country began to think, “We can do this, too,” So now there is a wonderful mix of high-quality Italian and British produce that you can use in your antipasti.
Very little of the traditional antipasti misti involves hot food – just a few deep-fried dishes, such as zucchini blossoms or squid, or the panzerotti and frittelle I mentioned earlier. Personally, I don’t like to eat too many fried foods at the start of a meal. So, instead, for our hot starters at the restaurant we look to the kind of main dishes that every Italian knows – great classics with brilliant flavors, such as sardines baked in bread crumbs, or pig’s feet – then we refine them and scale them down into starters. We play a bit of a game with the presentation, or make them easier for people to eat in a restaurant environment. Sometimes, when I see some of our famous customers thoroughly enjoying an appetizer of gnocchi fritti with culatello, it makes me smile to see something that you would find in any antipasti bar in Italy being celebrated in such a way, when I am only playing around with an idea that was worked out hundreds of years ago in Mantova. But perhaps that is the magic of a restaurant like Locanda – with a little imagination, the essential flavors and combinations of ingredients that have stayed in people’s hearts and minds for centuries can be elevated into something glamorous.
What we do in the restaurant and what we do at home, however, are two different things. At home, the idea is to keep things simple. But if you can approach cooking for family and friends with a little of the organization we need in a professional kitchen, you will enjoy a good meal as well, instead of being in the kitchen with smoke everywhere and your hair standing on end, so when someone comes in and says, “How are you?,” you want to scream. Use this chapter more as a source of inspiration than as a series of recipes. You don’t have to serve the dishes as individual starters, as we do in the restaurant. If you are having friends over, use the idea of shared antipasti to your advantage. Buy some good prosciutto, salami or mozzarella, which need nothing done to them, then choose a few of the recipes and dedicate your time to working on them, doubling the quantities if necessary, so you can serve everything on big plates to hand around. You can make your dessert in advance too, so you have only a main course to cook, which can be as simple as you like. It is my job to stay in the kitchen and cook for people. Your job is to make life as easy as possible, so when your friends arrive you can just put everything down on the table and sit and have a drink and talk with them.
At home in Corgeno I don’t remember my grandmother ever making a salad that was a dish in its own right, or had any sophistication, but salads have become an important part of the way we eat now. As with all our dishes in the restaurant, we look to classic Italian combinations of ingredients and flavors for our inspiration. What is exciting is to play with whatever is in season and what is good from the market: porcini mushrooms in autumn, root vegetables in winter, asparagus in spring, tomatoes in summer.
Like any other dish, a good salad needs structure – different textures, such as something soft, something with a little crunch. Throw in some pomegranate seeds and people think you have done something fantastic. Italians often find it difficult to put fruit in salad, but a chef who has been a real inspiration to me is David Thompson at Nahm, such a clever man – I really like what he does with Thai food. I came up with the idea of putting pomegranate into a winter salad after eating at Nahm, and having a brilliant salty-sweet warm salad, layered with leaves and peanuts and fruit such as mango and papaya – almost like a lasagne.
When we eat, we experience taste sensations in different parts of the mouth: sweet, sour, salty, bitter – and the most recently recognized, umami. Think about balancing ingredients that satisfy all these tastes, so that when you eat the salad it fills your whole mouth with flavor. A tomato can give sweetness; maybe you want something peppery, like arugula, or something aniseed, like raw fennel, which is so underused in salads in the UK. And remember that salad leaves all have different flavors and textures, so it is good to include a mixture.
I don’t like to see ready-prepared salads and vegetables in supermarkets, though – all those bags of mixed leaves, looking perfect thanks to a little cocktail of pesticides and kept going in their “modified-atmosphere” bags, alongside packets of shelled peas, and beans with their tops and tails cut off. Vegetables and leaves begin to lose some of their nutrients, especially vitamin C, the moment they are plucked or cut up, so who knows what value is left in prepackaged ones by the time they reach your plate?
I know not many of us are lucky enough to do what my grandmother did and just go out into the garden and pick a few heads of this and a head of that, depending on what my granddad had planted. But I would far rather buy a variety of different salads in their entirety at a farmers’market, from someone I know doesn’t use chemicals, and mix them myself. What I get especially mad about are those bags of romaine lettuce with their little packets of ingredients ready to make Caesar salad. If you simply buy a head of lettuce, make up a vinaigrette and grate in some cheese, you achieve double the quality at half the price.
If you are serving salad leaves with hot ingredients – for example, seared scallops or grilled porcini mushrooms – try to use the more robust leaves, such as wild arugula, which will not “cook” and wilt too quickly. And if you are serving your salad on individual plates and want it to look good, arrange the heavier ingredients on the plates first, then the lighter ones, such as leaves, on top.
Finally, you need careful seasoning and a good vinaigrette or other dressing to pull all the different elements together. Again, I love the way Thai people make dressings out of crushed peanuts, fish sauce and lime juice to bring everything together. That is what we are aiming at – to transform an assembly of ingredients into something exciting.
“Liquid gold”
In Italy, olive oil is still considered something you buy from someone you know, either direct from a small local producer, or via a shop that will probably only stock a few oils, mostly local. The bigger national companies often export more of their oil around the world than they sell at home in Italy. Margherita, my daughter, asked me one day why, when Noah sent one of the doves out from the ark, it flew back with an olive branch in its beak; and I explained to her that the olive – and the oil that is pressed from it – has always been seen as the fruit of peace, and often prosperity.
Olive oil has been made since around 5000 B.C., first in ancient Greece and then in countries like Israel and Egypt, eventually being introduced to Italy by the Greeks around the eighth century B.C. The Romans planted olive trees everywhere throughout their empire. It seems strange that something that has been made and used since ancient times should almost have been reinvented, at least outside the Mediterranean countries, over the last twenty years or so, since everyone started talking about its health-giving properties. Good extra virgin olive oil is rich in antioxidants that can help fight bad cholesterol and prevent heart attacks and cancer. Even in ancient times, however, people understood that olive oil had special properties, that it was good for the body, and in some cultures it has an almost mythical significance. Homer called it “liquid gold"; and it was considered so precious that champion athletes at the Olympic games were presented with it instead of medals. Olive branches were even found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and Roman gladiators used oil on their wounded bodies. And as far back as A.D 70, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote that “olive oil and wine are two liquids good for the human body.”
The highest grade of oil, extra virgin, means first that it is “virgin” olive oil, that is, the liquid from the fruit is extracted purely by cold pressing – with no heat or chemicals used. Then, to be “extra virgin” and therefore the best quality, the oil must have less than 1 percent oleic acidity – a higher percentage than this would suggest that the acids had been released because the fruit was damaged or had been roughly handled. If an oil is labeled just “olive oil,” it will be a blend of inferior oil that has been refined, probably using chemical treatment, and virgin oil.
When I was growing up in Lombardia we used very little olive oil, except in salads and minestrone, and what we had was the light gold, fruity, quite delicate oil from Liguria, made from Taggiasca olives, which I still love. There is also a beautiful, sophisticated oil from the Lombardia shores of Lago di Garda, which we use in Locanda. It is made right on the northern limits of where olives can grow and now has its own DOP (Denominazione di Origine Protetta, or Protected Designation of Origin, and any producers who want to use its symbol must meet strict criteria).
In our house in Corgeno, if an olive oil was peppery it was considered a defect, whereas in Britain, since everyone fell in love with Toscana, the deep green, peppery, often prickly oils that characterize that region are more fashionable. When I first came to London, Antony Worrall Thompson was the man at Mánage à Trois – and one of the first to serve little bowls of olive oil with the bread, instead of butter. His idea of oil was the more peppery, the better. Then, when the River Café opened in London, Tuscan oil became even more popular. I remember when I was working at the Savoy; I took a bottle of River Cafá oil home to Corgeno. My dad tasted it and said, “Take it back to England!” Peppery oil has its place, of course, but not for everything: if you steam a delicate fish, like sole, the sweetness of the fish juices can make a strong oil taste almost rancid. And if you use a peppery oil with an equally hot leaf, the two will just clash.
When I cook a dish from a particular area, I like to try the oil that comes from there too; as with all Italian food, local produce – even the oil – determines the flavors. In general, olives that have had more exposure to the sun and more dramatic variation in temperature between day and night give more peppery oils; whereas in more temperate areas, the oil is lighter. Even within a region, though, the character can vary dramatically, and from producer to producer, as so much depends on the variety of the fruit, the altitude at which it is grown, the time of harvest and the care taken in handling the olives. For example, Tuscan oils made from olives grown around the coast, which really soak in the sun, have a different character from those grown in the Chianti hills, which are picked when only just ripe, before the frost, and so can produce young, herbaceous, almost prickly oils. Umbria can make oil that is sweet and fruity, or spicy; Marche and Abruzzo tend to make oils that are similar to Tuscan ones, whereas the ones from Puglia (the biggest production area), Calabria and Sicilia are mostly intense, but they might be almondy or very green and grassy. In Sicilia there is also a rare and beautiful oil made from the Minuta olive, which is unusual for the island in that it is delicate and fruity.
I’m not suggesting you have a kitchen full of bottles sitting around waiting to turn rancid, but it is good to taste a few different good-quality oils from various regions and get to know the flavors that you like. Read the labels carefully first. Just because an oil is bottled in Italy doesn’t mean that the olives have been grown there, too. It hurts my heart to say it, but there is a big scam where olive oil is concerned. We sell millions of liters a year, but we don’t grow nearly enough olives for that. Instead, a poor farmer in somewhere like Spain or North Africa sends his olives to Italy, because the oil is worth more if it says on the bottle that it was “produced” in Italy. That, to me, is completely wrong, because I believe first of all that an oil should have something of the character of the region it comes from, just as a wine should represent its “terroir.” And second, how much quality of the olives is lost in transportation? If the farmer had pressed his olives there and then in his own country, I believe it would be better oil. Because of such problems, scientists are developing amazing tests that use infrared spectroscopy to detect the geographic origin of the oil and could be used in the future to prevent cheating, and the European Commission has tightened up the laws, so that if the olives are not grown in Italy, this should be declared on the label. Also, if a producer wants to say that his oil comes from a particular region, he must meet the strict criteria of the DOP or Indicazione Geografica Protetta (Protected Geographical Indication or PGI), which is awarded to food where at least one stage of production occurs in the traditional region, but doesn’t specify particular production methods.
However, if you want to be sure what you are buying is good quality, look for bottles that state that the oil has been made from olives grown, and preferably handpicked, pressed and bottled on the same estate. Such oils are now being regarded almost like fine wines and, on the best estates, the olives will have been picked at just the right moment, to give the maximum flavor and the optimum level of health-giving polyphenols. They may cost you $30 a bottle, but what is that really – 40 cents per tablespoon? Not that much to pay for something so good for you, that gives so much pleasure and adds so much flavor to a dish. Think how much we pay for some bottled waters, when very little has been proved about their health-giving properties in comparison with olive oil.
When you taste an oil, do so like wine: pour some into a spoon or glass and check the aroma first; there should be a connection with the fruit there, rather than just an oiliness. Then taste, holding the oil in your mouth until you really experience the flavors.
What happens to the fruit on the tree and during the pressing is only part of the story. Just as important is the way it is bottled, and the way we the consumers store the oil, which must be away from heat, light and air, otherwise it will quickly lose its particularity, and its health-giving properties will begin to deteriorate. I only fully understood this from talking to Armando Manni, who makes the most expensive but probably most healthy oil in the world, high up on Mount Amiata in Toscana. His oil has levels of polyphenols that can reach 450mg per liter, compared to 100 to 250mg in other high-quality oils. It is truly beautiful, but most special because, in order to keep the oil as “alive” and valuable to the health as the day it was bottled, instead of using clear glass to show off the color of the oil he uses dark ultraviolet-resistant glass, and only tiny 100ml bottles. So when they are opened the oil won’t deteriorate as quickly as it would in big bottles. He also treats the oil like wine in that he puts in a layer of inert gas to help prevent oxidization, before corking the bottles with a synthetic stopper, rather than cork, which he believes can contaminate the oil.
Cooking with olive oil
The last thing to know about the best extra virgin olive oil is not to use it for frying. For a start, when it is heated to a high temperature it burns easily, changes flavor and the polyphenols begin to lose their properties. Use a lesser olive oil, or even a vegetable, sunflower, or other interesting oil, and keep your extra virgin oil for making dressings, or drizzling over fish or pasta, so that it has the maximum impact.
“A big, big difference to every salad you eat”
As with olive oil, the flavor of vinegar and how much you use of it is quite a subjective thing – if you were to eat a salad dressed the way my mother likes it, you might spit it out, because she loves the flavor of vinegar to come through really strongly. At home in Italy, there will always be one bowl of salad on the table just for her, and a big one for everyone else.
I use very little white wine vinegar; I prefer red wine vinegar, and what I actually like most of all is not officially classed as vinegar in Italy (which by law must have 6 percent alcohol per volume) but is known as condimento morbido (morbido means “soft"). This is brewed in the same way as vinegar but is filtered through wood chips, which smooths it out and takes away some of the sharpness, leaving a “condiment” with lower acidity and alcohol – only 3 percent.
When we talk about good wine, we often think of there being great merit if the production is small and intimate, but with wine vinegar, providing you begin with good grapes, there is no such advantage. You can make millions of liters and still have the same quality; it is like brewing beer. However, you can usually be sure that if you buy vinegar from a producer who makes good wine, the vinegar will also be good quality. People tend to think that it isn’t worth spending a few more pounds on a bottle of good vinegar. But, as I always say when people complain about the price of good olive oil, if you think about how little you use at a time, you are only talking about a few cents, which will make a big, big difference to every salad you eat. And the vinegar isn’t going to go bad, unless you actually put it in the sun with the top off and let it evaporate.
Balsamic vinegar, which comes from Modena and the surrounding region of Reggio Emilia, is something completely different, which I use only occasionally and sparingly. As far back as 1046, a visiting German emperor, Henry II, wrote about a special vinegar that “flowed in the most perfect manner,” and it has been eulogized ever since as a mysterious, precious elixir. Originally, it was taken as a tonic as much as it was used in cooking – balsamic actually means “health-giving.” However, it remained something of a local secret, made in small quantities that you used when a guest came to visit, or at Christmas, but not every day. In Lombardia, I never saw balsamic vinegar until I was about sixteen and started working in restaurants. We didn’t even have any in the kitchen at La Cinzianella. Then, like sun-dried tomatoes, balsamic vinegar suddenly became fashionable all over the world, and people fell in love with it, using it for everything. Because the traditional production in and around Modena was so small, people began manufacturing it commercially to meet the demand – so now there is great confusion about what is the authentic vinegar and what is just an industrial product that resembles it. In America, especially, there are even balsamic “sauces,” “glazes” and “creams” that you can buy in squeezy bottles, like ketchup.
Unlike other vinegars, true balsamic vinegar is made not from wine but from the must of the Trebbiano grape that has been cooked slowly to concentrate it. This is blended with aged wine vinegar, then matured for at least twelve years in a series or family (acetaia) of barrels, which range downward in size, and are made from different woods (typically oak, cherry, chestnut, mulberry, ash and juniper), so that each adds its own character. Each year, as some of the vinegar evaporates, the smallest barrel is topped up with liquid decanted from the next smallest one, and so on, until finally, the last and largest barrel is topped up with freshly cooked must from the new grape harvest. It is a continuous, complex, serious art, which produces a naturally thick, syrupy vinegar with a taste that should have a perfect balance of sweetness and acidity. (The barrels are traditionally stored in attics under the rooftops, where the heat of summer and then the cold of winter are intensified, as this naturally prompts the processes of fermentation and oxidization.)
In 1980 a controlled denomination of origin for the vinegar was set up, and by law, for a vinegar to be called aceto balsamico tradizionale, it has to be produced according to these methods and approved by the Consortium of Producers of Traditional Balsamic Vinegar (Consorzio fra Produttori di Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Reggio Emilia). If you are a producer, you must send your vinegar to them; they taste it blind and, if it is good enough quality and meets all the requirements, they bottle it in their special tulip-shaped bottles. They then mark it with different-colored stamps: red for up to 50 years, silver for a minimum of 50 years, and gold for a minimum of 75 years. Production of this balsamic vinegar is very limited, and for some of the people who supply their vinegar to the consorzio it is almost more of a hobby than a business: some will only make 100 or so bottles a year. We are talking about vinegars that cost up to $200 a bottle, but when you taste the real thing, the experience is extraordinary.
There is another category of balsamic vinegar that is either produced outside the designated region of Reggio Emilia, and so cannot be called “tradizionale,” or is made by people who don’t want to deal with the consorzio – maybe they have such a small production that it isn’t worth their while. Or sometimes, producers of “tradizionale” also make other, high-quality vinegars that haven’t been aged for so long. Such vinegars must be labeled condimento balsamic vinegar and although they can’t be called “tradizionale” they are made using identical methods, so they can be fantastic quality, and are usually cheaper. I have stayed near Modena and seen people go to the local producers with their own bottles, which the guys fill up for them – and it is beautiful vinegar – but, of course, you have to rely on local knowledge to find out where to go.
The big difficulty is over bottles that are just labeled “aceto balsamico di Modena.” Ever since the world “discovered” balsamic vinegar there has been a huge industrial production, which bears no relation to the true artisanal product. The legal definition of this vinegar is very loose. Much of it is only white wine vinegar with caramel added. I could make it for you in a pot in the kitchen in 15 minutes – but what an insult to the people who have been making beautiful vinegar in the proper way for hundreds of years. Some of it, though, has been made in a way that is similar to the traditional methods, using at least some cooked grape must, and aged in wood for at least a few years. So how to tell? Often “aceto balsamico” vinegar comes in elegant bottles, sealed with wax, with beautiful labels that suggest ancient traditions, but it is important not to be distracted by the lyrical descriptions that the producers tend to use, and go straight to the ingredients list. The first thing to be listed should be the must of the grape, and there should be no mention of caramel, or any added flavorings. Look for a vinegar that says it has been aged in wooden barrels – as “aged in wood” can sometimes mean that wood chips have been added as the vinegar ages.
There is yet another type of vinegar, called vincotto ("cooked wine"), which is similar to balsamic, made in a serious way but without the aging and complexity. They say vincotto has its roots in the old Roman tradition of pressing grapes that had been partly dried, then fermenting them to make raisin wine. It became something farmers would make as a sweet dressing for festivals, or as a tonic, but is now being produced commercially, using the Trebbiano grape in the north. As you move further south it is more likely to be made with the Negroamaro and the Black Malvasia, which are left to dry on the vine or on wooden frames before being “cooked” and reduced for 24 hours. The syrup goes into small oak barrels with some of the “mother” or “starter” vinegar from their wine vinegar production, and it is then aged for four years.
In the kitchen at Locanda we use various different balsamic vinegars, and also sometimes vincotto, but for the table we use only the “tradizionale,” which we often dispense with great ceremony, using a syringe. It is very expensive, but used sparingly it will last you a long time. I would say that if you can afford to buy only one bottle of it in your life, it is worth it, because only by tasting the true traditional vinegar can you begin to understand what balsamic vinegar is about. It is something I would like everyone around the world to experience, because then it can be used as a benchmark by which to judge other, less expensive, balsamic vinegars.
Almost everyone likes the taste of a true balsamic vinegar, kids especially. At one time, the only way we could get my daughter, Margherita, to eat a green bean salad was to toss it in balsamic vinegar. It is like a natural flavor enhancer. Good balsamic vinegar needs to be used very simply, though, with specific ingredients. Its combination of sweetness and acidity is at its best with salty, fatty things: so a few drops are perfect with Parmesan, especially the concentrated flavor of an aged cheese. A lovely thing to serve before dinner with an aperitif is just a sliver of Parmesan on a spoon with a drop of vinegar on top. Or sometimes, when we have held parties at Locanda, we have put out half a wheel of Grana Padano cheese, which is similar to Parmesan (see page 209), so that people can pick up small pieces, drizzle some vinegar over it and eat it with a glass of Prosecco. I always keep a good bottle of balsamic vinegar at home and sometimes, if I go home late at night from the kitchen, that is all I have – a big wedge of Parmesan with a little vinegar. Since both the cheese and the vinegar originate in the same region of Italy, there is an affinity there that comes with produce of the same land, and so the combination is very satisfying.
Sometimes we make agnolotti with Parmesan, tossed in a little butter, with a couple of drops of balsamic vinegar added; and I love to serve balsamic vinegar with pork belly, or with calves’liver, in a simple sauce made with golden raisins and nuts (see page 484). A little drop is amazing with plainly cooked wild salmon, and balsamic vinegar and strawberries is another famous combination.
I don’t think balsamic vinegar works with bland food. With a cheese like mozzarella, the effect is wasted, and I wouldn’t usually use it to dress a leaf salad, as it loses its impact, unless you are using strongly flavored leaves like chicory, radicchio or arugula. And I completely disapprove of serving bread with a bowl each of oil and balsamic vinegar – oil yes, but if you dip good bread into balsamic vinegar, you ruin both things. For me it doesn’t work with complicated dishes either. If you were to spoon balsamic vinegar over an elaborate fish dish with lots of different elements, yes, it would add another level of flavor, but again it would be a waste of something special that deserves to be treated with respect.
There is no real Italian equivalent for the word vinaigrette because traditionally, when you went into a restaurant and ordered a salad, they would bring the oil and vinegar and some salt to the table – or if you wanted oil and lemon, you would just ask for olio e limone. Nowadays, if a salad comes ready-dressed, we just borrow the French term. Or we might use the word condimento, which can mean any kind of seasoning or flavoring as well as a dressing; or even aspretto – from aspro, meaning “sour.” We usually use this term when we create a dressing in which there is an element that we have made ourselves – such as our saffron “vinaigrette,” which we would call aspretto di zafferano.
When my brother, Roberto, and I were kids, we were sometimes taken to a local restaurant where dressing the salad was considered a bit of an art. Usually we didn’t want to eat salad at all; we just wanted to watch the waiter perform his ceremony at the table. He would take a silver spoon, put some salt into it, then pour in the vinegar and let the salt dissolve in it. Then he would drizzle a line of oil into the salad bowl and pour in the seasoned vinegar at the same time, so the two met in a stream. Finally, he would put in the leaves and toss everything together in front of us.
The point is that dressing salad leaves should be done at the very last moment before serving, to preserve some crunchiness. Wash the leaves well, trying not to squeeze them, let them drain naturally in a colander, then finish off in a salad spinner. Dress the leaves very lightly so that the dressing just coats them without drowning them and when you toss everything together, really lift up the leaves so that the dressing coats every single one.
If you are dressing a more complex salad that includes other ingredients besides leafy greens, think about their consistency before you add the dressing. It is only the delicate leaves that need to be dressed at the last minute, so if, for example, you are making an arugula and tomato salad, the heavier, denser tomato will need more seasoning – earlier – than the arugula. What I would do is put the tomatoes in the salad bowl with some dressing, season them and leave them for ten minutes or so to soak up the flavors and release the juices that the salt will bring out. Then, at the last minute, I would throw in the arugula and toss everything together, adding a little more vinaigrette if necessary – a lovely thing to do at the table.
I will never understand why people buy ready-made vinaigrette in a bottle when there can hardly be anything simpler than mixing together some good oil and vinegar, seasoning it with a little salt (I also add some water, just to soften the dressing), putting it into a bottle with a cork in it and storing it in the fridge. That’s it. My children make vinaigrette at home without even thinking about it. So how can commercial manufacturers tell us that what they put in a bottle is better? Some of them seem to have invented a machine that leaves the dressing in a state of permanent emulsion, which people think must be a good thing. But all you have to do to emulsify a dressing is shake your bottle of oil and vinegar.
There is, of course, no rule that says you must use olive oil for everything – not even in an Italian kitchen would we be that partisan. Sometimes we use other oils, including walnut and hazelnut, to give a different taste to a salad. Just think about your flavors before you add a very distinctive – tasting oil, so that your ingredients and your dressing complement each other and von have no violent clashes.
The reason this is called Giorgio’s vinaigrette is not that I am doing anything special – millions of people around the world make exactly the same thing. It just happened that when I was at Zafferano there was a young Algerian chef who could never remember which dressing was which, because we used several in our kitchen. We would shout to him, “Vinaigrette!“ and he would say. “What does it look like?” Eventually he stuck a label on each bottle and he called this basic vinaigrette, with oil and vinegar. “Giorgio’s vinaigrette” – so the name has stuck.
I like to mix the vinegar and oil in the ratio of one part to six, but the flavor of vinaigrette is a very subjective thing and everyone has their own ideas. Personally, I don’t like to use a strong Tuscan oil, nothing too peppery and strong for vinaigrette, and you might prefer to add more or less vinegar. It also depends on the quality of the vinegar and its alcohol level. Make up some vinaigrette, taste it and adjust it as you like. The important thing to remember is that if you try it alone, it will taste more powerful than when you mix it with a salad. So, either test it with some greens, or do what I suggest to my chefs: take a little of the dressing on a spoon, put it into your mouth, then suck it in quickly – it should be sharp enough to make you cough slightly, but not so strong that it really catches in your throat.
Buy the best-quality oil and vinegar you can afford, because you can’t put in flavor that isn’t already there. And make up a big bottle, so that you use it all the time. I would be a very happy man if every British family had a bottle of Giorgio’s homemade vinaigrette in the fridge.
Makes about 1 ½ cups
½ teaspoon sea salt
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons water
Put the salt into a bowl, then add the vinegar and leave for a minute so the salt dissolves.
Whisk in the olive oil and the water until the vinaigrette emulsifies and thickens.
Pour into a bottle, seal and store in the fridge, where it will keep for up to 6 months. It will separate out again into oil and vinegar, so before you use it, just shake the bottle.
Put the white wine, vinegar and saffron into a pan over low heat and bring to a boil. Simmer until reduced by three-quarters, then remove from the heat, stir in the sugar until dissolved and leave to cool. Whisk in the oil.
Makes about 3 ¼ cups
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons white wine
2/4 cup white wine vinegar
1 level teaspoon saffron strands
1 tablespoon superfine sugar
about ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
Store the vinaigrette in the fridge, where it will keep for up to 6 months in a screw-top jar or bottle – or a plastic squeeze bottle. Take it out of the fridge half an hour or so before you need it, and shake to emulsify before use.
Condimento allo scalogno
Finely chop the shallots, then put them in a bowl and season with salt and pepper.
Makes about 1 cup
2 banana shallots or 4 ordinary shallots
⅓ cup red wine vinegar
⅔ cup extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
Add the vinegar and leave to stand for 30 minutes.
Whisk in the oil and use right away.
Condimento all’aceto balsamico
Put the salt into a bowl, then add the vinegar and leave for a minute so the salt dissolves. Whisk the oil into the vinegar.
Makes about 1 ½ cups
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup plus 2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
about ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
This will keep in the fridge for up to 6 months in a screw-top jar or bottle – or a plastic squeeze bottle. Take it out of the fridge half an hour or so before you need it, and shake to emulsify before use.
Olio e limone
Put the salt into a screw-top bottle or jar, then add the lemon juice and leave for a minute so the salt dissolves.
Makes about ¾ cup
pinch of salt
3 tablespoons lemon juice
⅔ cup extra virgin olive oil
Add the oil, put the top on, and shake well to emulsify. It is best to use this dressing immediately.
Put the egg yolk in a mixing bowl and break it up a bit.
Add the salt and mustard with half of the vinegar and whisk together for a couple of minutes (this is very important as it helps the mayonnaise to emulsify once you start to put in the oil).
Makes about 2 ½ cups
1 egg yolk
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon dry mustard
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
juice of ½ lemon
Slowly start to add the oil, whisking continuously, until it is completely incorporated. If it starts to get too thick, add the rest of the vinegar; and if is still too thick add a tablespoon of hot water – just enough to loosen it.
When the oil is completely incorporated, add the lemon juice and adjust the seasoning to your taste – add a little more vinegar or lemon juice if you like it a little sharper.
“All about balance”
At home, when I cook something that Plaxy regularly makes, my kids often say my version tastes different – the reason, I think, is the seasoning. I was shocked the first time I saw chefs using salt in a restaurant kitchen because the proportions seemed enormous: handfuls were going into every pot, over meat, fish, vegetables. I remember going home to my grandmother and saying: “They use so much more salt than you.”
As a chef, you are taught to see salt in a different way. You have to think about how we taste our food, receiving different sensations in different parts of the mouth. If you underseason, you are taking away a whole layer of flavor; if you overseason, you block out all the other sensations. Salt can also help you experience sweet flavors in a more pronounced way. Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck in Bray does an experiment with a glass of tonic water – if you keep adding salt a little at a time, it gets to the point where it tastes sweeter; then obviously if you carry on, the saltiness takes over. At Locanda, we do a tomato “soup” for a dessert with basil ice cream. When we first made it, we served it with sweet sablé biscuits, then we tried it with slightly salty biscuits, and the difference was amazing.
Seasoning is all about balance, so you must be constantly tasting and adjusting. Of course, it is also true that taste is a subjective thing, and I would never be so fussy as to get angry with anyone in the restaurant who wanted to add extra seasoning to their food, as some chefs famously have. I only hope that people taste first.
These days everyone is rightly concerned about the quantity of salt that children, in particular, are eating, but most of the damage is done not when we cook fresh food, but by the salt we often unconsciously eat in processed food. Also, if you taste and season carefully as you are cooking, allowing the salt time to dissolve and do its job of flavoring properly, you will end up using far less than if you taste at the end, panic because everything is bland, and start seasoning crazily.
Most chefs have cut back the quantity of salt in cooking over the years, and looked for different ways of amplifying tastes, for example bubbling up juices and sauces in the pan, so that they reduce and thicken and the flavor intensifies. Also, we are constantly trying to find producers and farmers who value traditional methods and believe that flavor is more important than fast-grown, perfect-looking homogeneous products that will please the supermarkets. So, when you have a carefully and slowly reared, properly hung piece of meat, a terrific vegetable that has not been forced under glass, or a fish straight from the boat, you don’t need to season heavily, or you will distort the essential flavors.
On the other hand, everyone is crying, “Salt, salt, salt!” as if it were a demon, but we all need a certain amount of it for our bodies to function properly. We can take a lesson from the behavior of animals in the wild, whose trails will often lead to natural sources of salt, because it is essential for them to stay alive. I remember reading about the big apes, the ones that are so human that they look like us and have a “spouse” and family – at certain times of the year they will head toward mountains which they know form natural rock salt and lick the salt.
Because we are so used to refrigeration, we underestimate the importance that salt has played in our civilization and politics. As well as keeping the body healthy, and flavoring food, when it was first discovered that you could use it to extract moisture from meat or fish, and therefore cure and preserve foods so you had something to eat year-round, it must have seemed a magical thing. No wonder whole communities were built around the production and trade of something so precious. In Italy, Venezia owes much of its splendor to its position at the center of the salt trade (along with Genova). Roads were built: especially to transport salt; wars were fought over it, taxes raised on it – all of which Mark Kurlansky brings together in his brilliant book called Salt: A World History.
The first proper saltworks date back to 640 B.C., when one of the early Roman kings, Ancus Martius, built an enclosed basin at Ostia and let in seawater, which evaporated under the sun, leaving behind sea salt. The road that the salt traveled in order to be sold was called the Via Salaria, and the soldiers who protected it were often paid in salt, which is where the word salary comes from. If someone didn’t do his job properly he was considered “not worth his salt.” The word salami (pork preserved with salt) comes from the Latin sal for salt, as does salad (it was used to describe the Roman way of adding salt to greens and herbs, perhaps to draw out bitter juices in the way that we do with eggplant, then dressing it with oil and vinegar).
We have Parma ham because people in the region needed to preserve meat, and salt could be brought in from Venezia, with payment in either money or hams. Of course, there was a massive trade in smuggling in order to avoid paying the taxes that were levied on salt. The route the smugglers used is called La Via del Sale (the road of salt) and runs all the way from the Appeninos to Liguria. Nowadays part of the route is used for a fantastic endurance motorbike race, also called La Via del Sale.
What we are talking about is natural sea or rock salt, very different from “table salt,” which is bleached and refined, often has chemicals added and has a harshly salty flavor. I always thought what a great job it would be to spend your days skimming off the perfect little crystals at some natural salt pan, somewhere wild and beautiful. This is the kind of salt you can pack around a piece of meat or fish for baking in the way that has been done for thousands of years. (Originally, you would have dug a pit in the ground, put in the fish or meat in its salt crust, covered it over and built a fire over the top.) As it cooks, the salt crust becomes rock hard, sealing in all the moisture and juices, and gently seasoning at the same time, but without making the cooked meat or fish taste “salty.”
When Thomas Keller, the inspirational chef of The French Laundry in California, came to Locanda to eat, we got talking and he told me about the way he served foie gras with five different salts, including Dead Sea salt and Jurassic salt. When he went back to America he sent me some of the Jurassic salt, which is mined in Utah. It is incredible to think that it comes from a geological layer underneath that of the dinosaurs. At one time most of North America lay below a shallow sea, which evaporated over millions of years, leaving behind the salt, then in the Jurassic era volcanoes erupted around the old seabed and sealed the salt inside volcanic ash. The salt comes in a pinkish block that you have to grate, and it has a flavor that is amazing; it almost has an almost fizzy quality. We sprinkled it over some carpaccio and served it with nothing else but a piece of lemon and it was beautiful.
When you are seasoning, it is important to remember that salt has the function of extracting moisture as well as flavoring. You need to season meat or fish before you start to cook it, because once the outside has been sealed, your salt and pepper won’t penetrate in the same way. However, once you season a piece of meat or fish with salt, it will start to “sweat” out its juices, so if you do this too far ahead of cooking it the flesh will become tougher. The trick is to season your meat or fish with salt and pepper just before you cook it – then, especially if you are cooking it over a high heat, the meat will be properly seasoned, and the salt and pepper will help form a nice “crust” around the outside of the meat, while the juices will be sealed inside.
With some dishes you also need to consider how much salt is contained in the ingredients you are cooking before you add any extra. I will taste and season a risotto, for example, only right at the end, because you are working with a lightly seasoned stock all the way through, which will intensify in flavor as it reduces, and then it will be finished with pecorino or Parmesan, which is also quite salty.
And remember that when you cook beans or pulses in water, unlike other vegetables, they should be seasoned only at the end of cooking, as the salt will draw the moisture from their skins and toughen them up if you put it in at the beginning.
At home, we always have a pot of sea salt crystals in the kitchen, which we keep away from the heat and moisture from the steam around the cooker, so that it keeps dry. Then we put a little of it into the grinder at a time.
Always also use freshly ground black pepper, which has much more warmth and aroma and a cleaner taste than white pepper. As with all spices, the flavor is held in the volatile oils inside the peppercorns, which are quickly lost once they are released; so ready-ground pepper, especially if it is exposed to warmth or sunlight, will lose its potency very quickly. I hate big pepper grinders, not only because they remind me of the way many “Italian” restaurants were when I first came to England, but because everyone fills them up and leaves them for years. I prefer small ones that you can fill with a couple of teaspoonfuls of freshly bought peppercorns on a regular basis.
“Such an Italian flavor”
Parsley and garlic… the mixture has such an Italian flavor. It has become a joke in our house that whenever I am wondering what to cook – “Shall I do this? Shall I do that?” – Plaxy always tells me, “Just do your parsley and garlic!” She knows that whatever I do, I will use them, and also that by the time I have stopped talking and finished chopping, I will have decided what I am going to cook.
Every morning in the restaurant kitchen, one of our jobs is to chop parsley and garlic, ready to sprinkle into dishes whenever needed. We put the garlic cloves on a chopping board and squash them to a rough paste with the back of a knife. Then we put the parsley on top and chop it quite fine, so that the crushed garlic is chopped too. That way the garlic becomes almost a pulp, and it releases its flavors into the parsley and vice versa.
By parsley, I mean flat-leaf parsley, not the curly sort that was once the only kind available in the UK and the U.S. The first time I saw curly parsley, I thought it looked beautiful – but then it was the nouvelle cuisine era.
Now I can’t imagine cooking with anything else but the flat-leaf variety, which has a much more refined flavor – though I have had a few discussions about the merits of curly parsley with Fergus Henderson of St. John restaurant. A big champion of English food, and one of the few chefs I know who loves to use the curly variety, he persuaded me to try it chopped in a salad, and it wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.
Caponata is a Sicilian dish of eggplant and other vegetables, cut into cubes and deep-fried, then mixed with golden raisins and pine nuts, and marinated in an agrodolce (sweet-and-sour) sauce. In some parts of Sicilia, it is traditional to mix in little pieces of dark bitter chocolate. Because it is such a southern dish, I had never even tasted it until I started cooking at Olivo. Then, one day when we were looking for something sweet-and-sour as an accompaniment, I found the recipe in a book and I remember thinking: “This will never work!’’ But we made it, the explosion of flavor was incredible, and it has become one of my favorite things. You can pile caponata on chunks of bread, or serve it with mozzarella or fried artichokes (see page 70). Because it is vinegary, it is fantastic with roast meat, as it cuts through the fattiness, particularly of lamb. Traditionally it is also served with seafood – perhaps grilled or fried scallops (see page 108), prawns or red mullet. With red mullet, I like to add a little more tomato to the caponata.
We often cut some fresh tuna into 1 ½-inch dice and either sauté it in olive oil or grill it until it is golden on the outside but still rare inside (to test whether it is ready, cut open a piece and it should be a nice rose color in the center). Then we add the tuna to the caponata just before serving and toss everything together well.
If you don’t like fennel or celery, leave them out and increase all the other ingredients slightly. Keep in mind that this is not a fixed recipe; it is something that is done according to taste and you can change it as you like.
1 large eggplant
olive oil for frying
1 onion, cut into ¾-inch dice
vegetable oil for deep-frying
2 celery stalks, cut into ¾-inch dice
½ fennel bulb, cut into ¾-inch dice
1 zucchini, cut into ¾-inch dice
3 fresh plum tomatoes, cut into ¾-inch dice
bunch of basil
⅓ cup plus 1 tablespoon golden raisins
⅓ cup plus 1 tablespoon pine nuts
about ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
5 tablespoons good-quality red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon tomato passata
1 tablespoon superfine sugar
salt and pepper
Cut the eggplant into ¾-inch cubes, sprinkle with salt and leave to drain in a colander for at least 2 hours. Squeeze lightly to get rid of excess liquid.
Heat a little olive oil in a pan and gently sauté the onion until soft but not colored. Transfer to a large bowl.
Put the vegetable oil in a deep-fat fryer or a large, deep saucepan (no more than one-third full) and heat to 350°F. Add the celery and deep-fry for 1 to 2 minutes, until tender and golden. Drain on kitchen paper.
Wait until the oil comes back up to the right temperature, then put in the fennel. Cook and drain in the same way, then repeat with the eggplant and zucchini.
Add all the deep-fried vegetables to the bowl containing the onion, together with the diced tomatoes.
Tear the basil leaves and add them to the bowl with all the rest of the ingredients, seasoning well. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap while the vegetables are still warm and leave to infuse for at least 2 hours before serving at room temperature. Don’t put it in the fridge or you will dull the flavors. It is this process of “steaming” inside the plastic wrap and cooling down very slowly that changes caponata from a kind of fried vegetable salad, with lots of different tastes, to something with a more unified, distinctive flavor.
People think deep-frying is easy, but it isn’t at all, and it can be dangerous. If you shallow-fry something you can touch and turn it easily, but with deep-frying you enter into a contract with the oil in which you have no control. Little home fryers are brilliant because they have safety mechanisms and you can set the temperature, which is so important, to avoid having something that is burnt on the outside and raw on the inside, or vice versa. If you must use a pan, never put more than 6 cups in a 1- gallon pot because not only will the level rise when you add your ingredients, but oxygen is released and so the expansion will be even greater. And use a thermometer.
Insalata di radicchio, prataioli e gorgonzola piccante/dolce
In Lombardia, we call Gorgonzola erborinato, after the “parsley green” color of the mold. In the old days, it was made in damp caves around the Lombardia town of Gorgonzola, where it was left for up to a year so the mold developed naturally. Nowadays the mold is introduced by piercing the cheese with steel or copper needles when it is around a month old. In the restaurant, we use 90-day-old Gorgonzola, which is harder and saltier (piccante), instead of the young creamy one (dolce), but you could use either.
2 small round heads of radicchio
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 handfuls of button mushrooms, sliced
½ wineglass of white wine
2 ¼ ounces (about ⅓ cup) mature Gorgonzola cheese
2 to 3 tablespoons mayonnaise (see page 53)
1 garlic clove handful of flat-leaf parsley
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
Clean the radicchio, removing all the white parts from the base and keeping the small red leaves whole. Tear the larger leaves into halves or quarters.
Heat the olive oil in a pan, add the mushrooms and sauté until golden. Add the wine and stir until that has evaporated. Season, remove from the heat and keep warm.
Break up the Gorgonzola and melt it gently in a bowl placed over a pan of simmering water until it is creamy. Allow to cool slightly and mix into the mayonnaise to make a dressing.
Squash the garlic to a paste with the back of a knife, put the parsley leaves on top and chop it, so that the two combine.
Season the radicchio and toss with the extra virgin olive oil. Arrange the radicchio in nests on 4 serving plates, so the whole leaves are around the outside. Mix the parsley and garlic with the mushrooms and spoon into the middle. Drizzle with the Gorgonzola dressing and serve.
Insalata di porcini alla griglia
This is a dish for those times when you go shopping and just happen to see fantastic fresh porcini (see page 232). Whenever I find them, I buy 2 pounds, use some for a risotto, put some in a veal stew and keep back the most beautiful ones to grill for this salad. In the restaurant, we serve quite a smart porcini salad with reduced veal stock and beurre fondu drizzled around the plate. This is too complicated to do at home, but it is just as good simply to grill the mushrooms, dusted with chopped garlic and parsley, as suggested below, and then rub your plates with a cut lemon before you put the porcini on them.
½ garlic clove
2 handfuls of flat-leaf parsley
10 ½ ounces small porcini mushrooms (ceps) (see page 239 for preparation)
a little extra virgin olive oil
½ lemon
2 handfuls of mixed green salad leaves
5 celery stalks, cut into matchsticks
1 ¼ ounces Parmesan
4 tablespoons Oil and lemon dressing (see page 52)
small bunch of chives, cut into batons
salt and pepper
Preheat the grill or, preferably, a ridged griddle pan. Squash the garlic to a paste with the back of a knife, then put the parsley on top and chop it so that the two mix together well.
Cut the mushrooms lengthways into slices about ¼ inch thick (cutting through the stem, too) and reserve any trimmings. Season the slices and brush with extra virgin olive oil, then dust with the parsley and garlic mixture.
Grill the porcini slices, turning them over to cook the other side as soon as they start to brown. Rub the serving plate or plates with the halved lemon and arrange the porcini on top.
Slice any reserved porcini trimmings very fine and mix with the salad leaves and celery strips. Grate about 2 tablespoons of the Parmesan, season the salad and mix with the grated cheese.
Toss the salad with the dressing, then pile it on top of the porcini and scatter with the chives. Shave the rest of the Parmesan and sprinkle it over the top.
“A fish that deserves respect”
Sometimes it seems to me that people in the United States and Britain don’t think of the anchovy as a fish at all but as something in a category all of its own, something that goes on top of pizza or into a salade niςoise. In Italy, though, we have great respect for anchovies. The ancient Romans ate them fresh and it is thought that, together with sardines and mackerel, they also saturated them in salt and let them ferment in the sun, sometimes adding herbs and wine, to make a sauce called liquamen for seasoning food – rather like Thai fish sauce. In the north, they sometimes add anchovies to osso buco. In Sicilia, they like to cook them al beccafico – boned, sprinkled with a little vinegar, covered in bread crumbs and herbs and grilled or baked. In Trentino–Alto Adige, they specialize in speck (the hind leg of the pig, cured in salt, pepper, juniper and bay, then smoked over wood and juniper berries), which they serve with anchovies mashed into butter. In the south, anchovies are used in a sauce for pasta.
When I was a child, at Christmas and on special occasions, such as my granddad’s birthday, we used to have anchovies in salsa piccante (the only time I ever tasted chile pepper when I was growing up), which came in small gold tins decorated with three little dwarves, like the ones in Snow White, wearing yellow, red and green hats. They were made by a company called Rizzoli in Parma, which still produces them, in a sauce it has been making to a secret recipe for a hundred years. Whenever I go to Italy and see the gold tins in a delicatessen, I still can’t resist them.
Another thing I adore is dissolved or “melted” (sciolte) anchovies. You put some anchovies into a pan with some olive oil, turn on the heat and warm gently to “melt” the anchovies, rather than fry them, or they will lose their flavor. If you buy a pound of salted anchovies, rinse off the salt, dry them, then “melt” them like this, you can transfer the paste to a sterilized jar and cover it with a layer of olive oil. It will keep for six months in the fridge, so you can take it out and spoon some over pasta whenever you want. “Melted-down” anchovies are the basis of the famous Piemonte autumn dish bagna càôda, which literally means “warm bath” (see page 146). Like so many Piemontese recipes, it is a dish that needs lots of people to gather round the table with a bottle of good Barolo and share big plates of vegetables, usually raw but sometimes boiled, which you dip into the bagna càôda. It is made with anchovies, garlic (soaked first in milk), oil and butter, and is kept warm in an earthenware pot over a spirit flame in the middle of the table. Sometimes, when only a little of the sauce is left, people break in some eggs and scramble them. Such a fantastic, convivial thing to do.
It is a funny thing that Piemonte, one of the only regions of Italy that doesn’t touch the sea, has a dish based on anchovies as one of its specialties. The reason is historical. About 300 years ago, the Piemontese people harvested salt and made butter in the mountains. These were traded along the ancient salt routes in return for anchovies from Liguria. A traditional thing that many Piemonte bars do in the early evening is to put out little sandwiches made with butter and anchovies, which you can eat with a glass of wine. Even now, there are still associations of anciue (anchovy sellers) in and around the old trading town of Val Maira that hold dinners to celebrate the relationship between salt, anchovies and butter.
In British fish markets, you rarely find the blue-green and silver fresh anchovies. So you usually have to buy them either still on the bone and preserved in salt (the fish are layered with sea salt in small barrels), or filleted and preserved in olive oil. Frequently, though, the oil is cheap and tastes rancid, and if the fillets are in upright jars they are squashed in so tightly that the ones in the center become mashed and broken (the fillets laid flat in tins are better), so I always prefer to buy the ones in salt. I have to admit that I buy Spanish ones, because the quality is so good. You have to soak them first in water to get rid of excess salt, then take out the bones and pat the fish dry. Then you can either marinate them in good olive oil, a little vinegar and some chopped herbs and serve them as part of an antipasto, or use them in whatever recipe you want.
Insalata di puntarelle, capperi e acciughe
Puntarelle (Catalogna chicory) is difficult to get in this country, but beautiful, especially raw, rinsed and kept in a bowl of ice cubes to get rid of the bitterness. It’s a real thirst-quencher. When people ask me what puntarelle is like, I usually compare it to fennel, because they share very similar characteristics, apart from the aniseed flavor of fennel. The puntarelle season runs from October to January or February, but as time goes on it can become more bitter and woody, so you need to wash it much more, and also eventually discard the tougher parts. Otherwise, the closest you can get is regular chicory cut into strips, but don’t put these in ice.
When we make this dish, we usually discard the outer leaves of the puntarelle, but, if you like, you can keep them to serve as an accompaniment to fish or meat, especially barbecued meat. Blanch the leaves briefly in boiling salted water, then drain, chop and sauté in a little olive oil. Mix with some toasted pine nuts and some golden raisins that have been soaked in water for half an hour or so to plump them up. You could even add the mixture to this salad – spoon it onto your plates first, then arrange the salad on top.
2 tomatoes
2 heads of puntarelle (or chicory)
8 anchovy fillets
2 tablespoons baby capers (or 3 tablespoons larger capers)
small bunch of chives, cut into batons
4 tablespoons Oil and lemon dressing (see page 52)
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
Blanch the tomatoes, skin, quarter and deseed (see page 304).
Discard the outer green leaves of the puntarelle, slice the hearts very thin lengthways, then wash well under cold running water until the water is clear – the puntarelle will turn the water green at first – to take away some of the bitterness. When you serve the puntarelle it needs to be really crisp, so put it into a bowl with some ice cubes and leave in the fridge for a couple of hours, adding more ice if necessary, and it will curl up beautifully.
Drain the puntarelle well and pat dry. In a bowl, mix together the tomatoes, anchovies, capers, chives and finally the puntarelle. Season, but be careful with the salt, as the anchovies and capers will add quite a lot of saltiness. Toss with the oil and lemon dressing and serve as quickly as possible, drizzled with the olive oil.
“Unique and pungent”
Capers are beautiful things, with a unique pungent flavor, which we use a lot in Italy, especially with antipasti, but also with meat and fish. When Prince Charles talked about boiled mutton with caper sauce at a celebration of English mutton and they said this was an old English sauce, I was amazed. Of course you see capers in jars all over the world these days, but I had always thought of fresh capers as Italian. Then I did some research, and found out that in the 1700s there were merchants who brought Marsala wine and capers over to England from Italy.
The best capers come from the islands of Salina and Pantelleria off Sicilia, with their volcanic soil and hot climate. The capers, which are not seedpods, as many people think, but tiny tight flower buds of the shrub Capparis spinosa, grow everywhere. The shrubs are planted in special trenches which are dug to hold them firm and protect them from the sirocco wind. And of course, the people of each island say that their capers are the best.
Like saffron, capers are harvested by hand, in the late spring to early summer, before they begin to open. It is only if you pick them at just the right time that you get the proper, stratified texture. If the bud hasn’t developed enough, they are too compact. Like olives, they must be cured, as they are too bitter to eat as they are. The best are laid down on canvas outside, to get the sun for a couple of days, then layered with salt in wooden barrels, though they can also be put into brine or wine vinegar.
We use them in tartar sauces, hot caper sauces, sweet-and-sour sauces and salsa verde, and serve them with any kind of dish where you want their saltiness and special flavor to cut through a fatty ingredient. Sometimes, also, we soak them for 24 hours, then crush them, and fry them as a garnish for fish dishes. It is always best to add capers to dishes at the end if you are using them in cooking, or they will be too strong.
If the buds are allowed to stay on the bushes, they open into beautiful white flowers that seem to turn the whole island into a sea of white, before developing into fruit, which we call the caper berry, or cucunci. They look a little like green olives on stalks, but when you cut them in half they are full of tiny seeds. They have a flavor similar to capers but are less intense. Sometimes we combine capers and caper berries in the same dish, as in Monkfish with walnut and caper sauce (agrodolce, see page 426) in which the caper berries go into an arugula salad.
Insalata di endivia e Ovinfort
Ovinfort is a fantastic Sardinian blue cheese that didn’t exist ten years ago. Now I think it beats any French Roquefort – though I would say that, wouldn’t I? In the north of Italy we are more used to blue cheeses made from cow’s milk, but this is made from very high-quality sheep’s milk and matured for 90 days, so it has quite a strong spicy flavor. People sometimes forget that cheeses have seasons – like every other natural product – and this one is available most of the year except between September and mid-December, when the ewes need their milk for their lambs. If you can’t find Ovinfort, you could use a hard Gorgonzola, or even Roquefort – just don’t tell me.
If you want to serve this dish for a party, you could use each chicory leaf to hold the pear and cheese. Drizzle a little mayonnaise into each leaf, put a slice of pear on top, followed by a slice of cheese, and let everyone help themselves.
Peel, quarter and core the pears, then slice them thin lengthways.
Cut the base off each head of chicory, so that the leaves come away. Mix the mayonnaise with the mustard and add 2 to 3 tablespoons of hot water to loosen it up enough to be able to drizzle over the salad.
Put the chicory leaves in a bowl, season and toss with the vinaigrette. Put a layer of chicory on each serving plate, followed by a laver of pear, then more chicory. Drizzle with the mayonnaise and, using a potato peeler, shave the Ovinfort over the top.
2 ripe pears, such as Cornice
2 heads of yellow chicory and
2 of red chicory (if possible, otherwise 4 yellow)
2 tablespoons mayonnaise (see page 53)
1 teaspoon dry mustard salt and pepper
2 tablespoons Giorgio’s vinaigrette (see page 51)
5 ¼ ounces Ovinfort cheese (or mature Gorgonzola)
“Beautiful, purple, perfect…”
In the restaurant kitchen we get through one box of baby globe artichokes a day when they are in season in the spring – usually carciofi spinosi from Sicilia or the purple violetta di chioggia. They are such beautiful things, less intensely iron-flavored than the bigger ones, so they make a perfect raw salad. Slice them very thin, mix with some salad leaves, season with salt and pepper, and dress with a little lemon juice or vinegar and oil mixed with a tablespoon of grated Parmesan. Finish with a handful of chopped chives and some shavings of Parmesan over the top – beautiful.
First, of course, you have to prepare them, which isn’t as complicated as you might think. Start by taking the artichoke in one hand and, leaving the stalk on (because it makes the artichoke look more elegant), snap off and discard each outside leaf in turn, stopping when you get down to the tender, pale green-yellow leaves. Next, with a small sharp paring knife, peel off the stringy outside of the stalk and work around the top of the stalk at the base of the artichoke, trimming and scraping away the base and turning the artichoke as you go. Finally, trim off the pointed tops of the remaining leaves, then cut each artichoke in half lengthwise and use a spoon to scoop out and discard the hairy choke from each half (it will be very small, as the artichokes are not fully developed). To prevent the artichokes from discoloring, rub them with a halved lemon, then keep them submerged in a bowl of water with a squeeze of lemon juice added (or vitamin C, which you can buy from health food shops) until you are ready to use them.
Something we like to do with baby artichokes is to make carciofi fritti. We prepare the artichokes as described above, dust them with hard durum wheat flour, then deep-fry them in moderately hot oil (325°F) until crisp, season and serve right away.
Another of our favorite starters is Artichoke salad with Parmesan (see overleaf), which uses both raw and marinated blanched artichokes, prepared in the same way my grandmother used to do them. In our kitchen at home in Corgeno, we always had a jar of preserved artichokes on a cool shelf, ready to use in the winter months when fresh ones were out of season. Homemade marinated artichokes are so much tastier than store-bought ones that I suggest whenever you are making a recipe that calls for artichokes, you prepare four or five times the quantity you need and preserve the rest (see page 84). Then you will always have some on hand, not only for this salad but also just to serve with prosciutto or salami, or as part of an antipasto.
Insalata di carciofi alla Parmigiana
The combination of marinated and raw artichokes gives a fantastic contrast of flavor and texture in this salad. If you like, you can add some split chile peppers (with or without seeds, depending on how spicy you like them) to the marinade to give it an extra kick. The boys in the kitchen always do this for my wife, Plaxy, because it is her favorite way of eating artichokes. In winter, when you don’t have any fresh artichokes, you can make the salad with ones that have been kept under oil.
Sometimes, if you are lucky, you can find really tiny artichokes, the size of golf balls. When we get these in the kitchen, we leave them whole and just trim the tops, remove the outer leaves and clean what there is of the stalk. You don’t need to worry about the choke, because there will be nothing there. We blanch them as described in the recipe below, then brush them with olive oil and chargrill them on a hot griddle until they are well marked, to give them a roasted flavor, before marinating them.
10 baby artichokes
¾ cup white wine
¾ cup white wine vinegar juice of ½ lemon
a little olive oil
a good wedge of Parmesan
2 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52)
4 handfuls of mixed green salad
2 tablespoons Giorgio’s vinaigrette (see page 51)
small bunch of chives, cut into batons
salt and pepper
For the marinade:
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 black peppercorns
2 juniper berries
2 bay leaves
5 sage leaves sprig of rosemary
2 garlic cloves, lightly crushed
⅓ cup white wine vinegar
Prepare the artichokes and cut in half as described on page 70, and keep 2 of them to one side. Blanch the remaining artichokes in a mixture of the white wine, white wine vinegar, ¾ cup water and 2 teaspoons of salt for 3 to 4 minutes. They should still be quite firm. Drain and leave to cool.
To make the marinade, pour the olive oil into a pan and add all the remaining marinade ingredients except the vinegar. Place over medium heat (the oil shouldn’t be too hot – just enough to cook the herbs gently). As soon as the herbs start to fry and the garlic starts to turn lightly golden, turn down the heat and stir in the vinegar.
Cut the blanched artichoke halves in half again and put them into the pan. Bring back to the boil, turn off the heat and cool completely.
Slice the 2 reserved artichokes, toss with the lemon juice and a little olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Keep to one side. Grate about 2 tablespoons of Parmesan and set this aside, too.
Spoon the blanched artichokes from their pan (you can save the marinade for next time). Dress with Shallot vinaigrette and arrange on 4 serving plates.
Season the mixed green salad, toss with the grated Parmesan and Giorgio’s vinaigrette, and arrange it on top of the artichokes. Sprinkle the raw artichokes over the top. Shave the rest of the Parmesan and sprinkle that and the chives over the salad to serve.
Insalata di fagiolini, cipolle rosse e Parmigiano
You can prepare the onions for this salad a few hours before you need them – or even the day before – to improve the flavor. It is important that they be quite soft, not crunchy.
2 large red onions
1 ¼ cups red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
⅓ cup plus 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
8–9 ounces fine green beans
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan, plus extra for shavings
3 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52)
small bunch of chives, chopped
salt and pepper
Preheat the oven to 425°F. Leave their skins on and wrap the onions in foil and bake in the oven for about 1 hour until soft.
While the onions are cooking, put the vinegar into a small pan and boil until reduced by about a third. Remove from the heat, stir in the sugar until dissolved, then stir in the extra virgin olive oil to make a vinaigrette.
When the onions are cooked, unwrap them and peel off the skin. While they are still warm, cut them in half, separate the layers and season with salt and pepper, then put them into the vinaigrette.
Blanch the green beans in plenty of boiling salted water for about 5 minutes, then drain. Place in a bowl, sprinkle with the grated Parmesan and season with salt and pepper. Toss with the Shallot vinaigrette and sprinkle over the chives.
Arrange the onion layers on your serving plates. Place the beans on top and shave some more Parmesan on top.
Insalata di fagiolini gialli, patate e tartufo
One day some lovely yellow beans came into the kitchen, fresh from the market, and I remembered something my grandmother used to make for me and my brother, Roberto, when we came home from school after the summer holidays. My granddad grew yellow beans in our garden and he would leave them as long as possible over the summer, so they developed proper little fagioli, tiny beans, inside. The flavor was fantastic.
Each summer Roberto and I used to go away to a children’s holiday camp, then our parents would come and get us and we would go to Emilia-Romagna or, later, Liguria for another few weeks. By the time we came home to Corgeno, three things were certain: we would have to go back to school, the maize would have grown as tall as Roberto and me, and the yellow beans would be ready. My grandmother used to boil them – not until al dente, like green beans, but for longer, so they were soft. Then she would boil some potatoes and break them down into a chunky mash – what has since been fashionably called “crushed” potatoes. When we came in from school, she would heat up some butter in a pan, put in the potatoes and beans and cook them until the potatoes were a little crusty and burned. Then she would break two eggs into the pan, to make a kind of frittata. I remember we would look for the little fagioli inside and pounce on them like prizes. So much of the food we ate when we were children seemed to be associated with little games.
So when, many years later, the yellow beans came into the kitchen at Locanda, that combination of beans and potatoes kept coming to mind. Of course we had to come up with something a little more refined, so we decided to bring in some black truffles – partly because they are in season at the same time as yellow beans and partly because the starchiness and sweetness of potato really support the flavor of black truffle, which is milder than the white truffle. To highlight the flavor of the truffle even more, and balance the sweet/sour/starchy elements, the salad also needs to be more vinegary than usual, so the vinegar has a real presence in the mouth. If you don’t have any truffles, you can still make a lovely salad – or, if you can find some good-quality black truffle and mushroom paste in an Italian deli, add a tablespoon of it to the vinaigrette. In Italy, I would use the yellow Piacentine potatoes, which come from very sandy ground. They have a similar quality to the baby Jersey Royals that we use in London for this salad when they are in season.
Cook the potatoes in their skins in boiling salted water until soft, then drain (it is always best to cook potatoes in their skins, to keep in as much flavor as possible). Peel them if you like (we do this in the restaurant, purely for the look of the salad, but at home I might not bother).
In a separate pan, cook the beans in boiling salted water for about 7 to 9 minutes, until they are slightly overcooked (both the beans and the potatoes should be warm for this salad, so try to make sure they are ready at around the same time). Drain and set aside.
Cut each potato into quarters lengthwise and put them in a bowl with the beans and chives. Season, sprinkle with the Parmesan and toss first with the Shallot vinaigrette, then with Giorgio’s vinaigrette. The dressing should be quite sharp to bring out the flavor of the truffle, so add a little more vinegar if necessary.
Arrange the potatoes and beans on serving plates and, at the table at the last minute before serving, grate the black truffle over the top.
8 medium-sized new potatoes
8–9 ounces yellow beans small bunch of chives, cut into batons about 1 ½ inches long
1 tablespoon freshly grated Parmesan
2 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52)
3 tablespoons Giorgio’s vinaigrette (see page 51)
2–2 ½ ounces fresh black truffle salt and pepper
Insalata di asparagi e Parmigiano
For one month of the year only – April – we get wonderful, early, thick white asparagus from Friuli in the northeast of Italy, but otherwise we make this dish only when the green asparagus is in season from late April to mid-June. Such a short time, but an exciting one, especially in Italy. For ten months of the year you have no asparagus at all, then suddenly millions of kilos, then none again, so during this precious period there are large fairs in all the growing regions, with every restaurant serving asparagus. It is no good eating tasteless asparagus all year round, flown hundreds of miles from other countries – where is the magic in that?
Sometimes, especially in London hotels, I see restaurants using little asparagus tips to decorate a dish of something else entirely, such as meat or fish. I consider that an insult – a great misuse of a fantastic flavor. Asparagus should be the entire dish – a large portion served with eggs, Parmesan, butter, or a savory zabaglione made with white wine. That’s the way to eat asparagus.
Good, fresh asparagus should be firm. If you bend a spear in the shop or at the market when no one is looking, it should snap in the natural place just below halfway – if it simply bends and doesn’t snap, then it isn’t fresh. Some people also say that only really fresh asparagus will squeak if you rub the spears together.
It is best to use a griddle pan for this recipe – or you could grill the spears on a barbecue. However, if you prefer to blanch your asparagus, divide it into bunches of five or six spears and tie with string, to prevent the tips from getting bashed and broken. Then stand the bundles in a tall pan of boiling salted water, keeping the tips above the water so they will steam gently thanks to the heat below and the flavor will be stronger.
Often people say that once the asparagus is cooked you should plunge it into ice water to stop it cooking further, but I think it is better to take the spears out of the water about a minute before they are ready (after about 4 to 6 minutes, depending on thickness).
Untie them, wrap them in a wet cloth and then let them finish cooking as they cool down naturally at room temperature – the color might not be quite so bright but the flavor will be better, as the spears won’t soak up the cold water, which would dull the flavor. If you like, you can cook the asparagus a few hours in advance, but make sure you leave it at room temperature. If you put it into the fridge, again you will deaden the taste.
Trim off the woody bases from the asparagus spears. Preheat a ridged griddle pan and grate the Parmesan.
20–24 medium-sized asparagus spears
about 3 ½–4 ounces grated Parmesan
⅓ cup plus 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
4 eggs
2 handfuls of mixed salad greens
4 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52)
2 tablespoons Giorgio’s vinaigrette (see page 51)
small bunch of chives, chopped salt and pepper
Lay the spears in a row with the tips level and divide them into groups of 3 or 4 – however many you can get a toothpick through easily – then very gently secure them with the toothpicks (this makes it easier to turn them).
Brush the asparagus with some of the olive oil, season with salt and pepper, then put the spears on the hot griddle for a couple of minutes on each side, until they are tender but still slightly crunchy. If you think they are not cooked enough but might become too charred, take the pan off the heat and cover with foil – then they will continue to cook gently for a little longer.
While the asparagus is still warm, transfer to a plate, drizzle with the remaining oil and sprinkle with about 2 tablespoons of the grated Parmesan. Cover with plastic wrap and leave for about an hour for the flavors to meld.
Boil the eggs for 6 to 7 minutes, cool under running water, then peel and push through a fine sieve. Keep on one side.
Season the salad leaves and sprinkle with another 2 tablespoons of the grated Parmesan. Toss with 2 tablespoons of the Shallot vinaigrette and Giorgio’s vinaigrette.
Arrange the asparagus spears on serving plates. Sprinkle the sieved eggs on top, together with the remaining Shallot vinaigrette. Pile the salad on top, sprinkle the rest of the Parmesan over and finish with the chopped chives.
Insalata di cardi alla Fontina
The idea here is to make little “sandwiches” of chard stalks, filled with Fontina cheese, and deep-fry them.
2 large Swiss chard stalks
2 thin slices of Fontina cheese
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 eggs
3 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan
¾ cup dried bread crumbs
2 ¼ cups vegetable oil for frying
3 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52)
small bunch of chives, cut into batons
salt and pepper
Remove the leaves from the chard stalks. Blanch the stalks in boiling salted water for 3–4 minutes, until just tender, then drain and pat dry (this is important for later). Put the chard leaves into the boiling water for about a minute, then drain and pat dry.
The chard stalks will be pointed at the top where the leaf was attached. Trim off this pointed part and cut it into thin batons, then set aside. Cut the rest of the stalk into an equal number of pieces each about 2 ¾ to 3 ¼ inches long. Then slice each of these pieces horizontally through the middle, so you are left with pairs of identical pieces.
Cut the cheese into slices just a little smaller than the pairs of Swiss chard. Keep the chard slices in their pairs, cut side up. Place a slice of Fontina on one of the slices of chard, then put the other one on top, cut side down. As long as the pieces of chard are dry when you start to fill them with the Fontina, they will stay together in a sandwich – you don’t need to secure them.
Place the flour on a large plate. Put the eggs into a bowl and beat lightly. Mix 1 tablespoon of Parmesan with the bread crumbs on another plate. Take each “sandwich” and dust each end and side in turn in the flour – leave the larger surfaces for now. Shake off excess flour. Do the same with the egg, making sure the sides and ends are covered and shaking off the excess. Finally, dip the chard into the bread crumbs – again cover the ends and sides – and shake off the excess.
Repeat the whole process, this time dipping the larger surfaces first into the flour, then the egg and then the bread crumbs. At the end every surface should be completely covered, and you can press each surface with a spatula, to make sure the bread crumbs stick really well.
Heat the oil in a large, deep pan (no more than one-third full). Meanwhile, mix the reserved little chard batons with the leaves. Season with salt, pepper and 1 tablespoon of the remaining Parmesan. Toss with the Shallot vinaigrette, then arrange on serving plates.
When the oil is hot enough to sizzle when you sprinkle in a few bread crumbs, put in the “sandwiches” and fry for about 2 minutes, until golden. Move around with a spoon or a spatula, taking care not to puncture them or the cheese will start to leak out. When they are ready, remove and drain on kitchen paper. Season with salt and arrange on top of the salad. Sprinkle the rest of the Parmesan and the chives on top.
“A taste so good it makes you cry”
A beautiful, slightly salty, bitter olive can be so good it makes you cry, but a bland olive that tastes of nothing, or that has been pitted and drowned in marinade in a supermarket tub is a disaster that makes you want to cry for a different reason. If I go into a restaurant and they serve an aperitif with a bowl of tasteless olives, I think, “Forget it” – what a terrible start to a meal. What upsets me most are the insipid olives you find on most takeout pizzas. Often they are not even true black olives, because the really jet-black varieties, as opposed to violet-black or brownish black, are quite rare. Mostly they are green olives that have been dyed black by putting them in a water bath and running oxygen through them. Then they are treated with ferrous gluconate, a colorant, to give them their shiny, bright black appearance. How unnatural is that?
You can’t eat an olive straight from the tree, whether it is unripe (green) or ripe (purplish black), because it will be far too bitter. They all have to go through a salt-curing process first before they are edible. One of my favorite olives is the small, black and quite delicate Taggiasca, the variety grown in Liguria that was first planted by the Romans. Liguria is a beautiful place, high up in the mountains that stretch all the way to Monaco. You drive there from Milano on a gray day and suddenly you are in the sunshine. They say that Caesar’s armies fell in love with Liguria. After thirty-seven years of conquering Turkey and having the Ottoman Empire at their feet, they found this paradise, almost like a spa – where it is never too cold, even in winter, and never too hot, even in summer; where there is hardly any rain, and the Alps protect the countryside from the storms that blow in from France, pushing them on toward the East. So they defeated the resistance of the Ligurians and decided to stay there.
The olives are grown on terraces and the silvery trees are beautifully twisted like no other olive tree, pruned low so they can be harvested easily by hand. Some of the trees are extremely old (they can bear fruit for around six hundred years) but so strong that even when they have been bit by frost and some of the roots have died, you will find that four more little trees have sprung up on top. Traditionally, the olives are cured by soaking them for forty days in fresh water, which is changed daily, then putting them into a brine of water and sea salt scented with thyme, rosemary and bay.
This is the way we buy them in the restaurant – in their brine, never ready-marinated. Then, if we want to, we can rinse and dry them, and mix them with olive oil, crushed chiles and garlic. I always buy unpitted olives, because the bitter flavour that is so important is concentrated in the stone.
It is ironic that in the UK and the United States olives are so, so popular now – yet many people have never tasted a really good one. Let us not forget that olives are a fruit. If you go shopping for peaches, you are careful to choose ones that are ripe and unblemished. Yet, when people buy olives, they are often content to buy cheap ones that have been pasteurized (which dulls the flavor) and commercially pitted and stuffed – not with fresh anchovies or capers, in the way that people in Italy might do at home, but with strips of synthetically flavored paste. The artificial flavorings are pushed in by machines that can pit and stuff a thousand olives an hour, no doubt in factories run by the sort of people who get excited about making extra money from packing one less olive into each jar.
The best olives, the kind that you can find in good delicatessens, cost a little more because they have been freshly imported from the region where they were grown, with the stones left in. If they are pitted, this will have been done at the last minute, and if they are marinated and stuffed, it will have been done by hand, with fresh ingredients. Sometimes you can even find a Greek or Italian delicatessen that will sell fresh (uncured) unpitted olives in season, which you can cure yourself. If you come across them, buy 2 pounds and put them into a sterilized jar with about 1 cup of sea salt. Seal it tightly and store for 12 to 15 days, turning the jar upside down one day and then upright the next, until enough brine is made to completely cover the olives. Then you can leave the jar upright. Beware, though – home-cured olives have a really powerful, pungent bite.
We serve these with culatello (cured meat made from the fillet of the pig’s thigh), but they are also lovely with slices of ricotta salata cheese. To serve 4, you need 2 zucchini, sliced at an angle to give long pieces about ¼ inch thick. Season them with a little salt, put in a colander and let them drain for 10 minutes, then squeeze lightly to get rid of excess liquid. Brush them with olive oil and griddle or grill them until they just begin to mark on both sides. Remove from the heat, then drizzle with extra virgin oil and sprinkle with some rosemary. You can do this an hour or so ahead of serving and keep them at room temperature – but not in the fridge because they will dry out and the flavor will be suppressed.
In Italy there is a ritual that goes on throughout the year of picking or buying vegetables, such as peppers, artichokes and mushrooms, when they are at their best, eating some, then preserving the rest for another time. If you have a jar of peppers, a jar of artichokes, and a salami hanging up somewhere cool, you have the makings of a feast.
If you add garlic to any of these vegetables, blanch it briefly first and then make sure that it stays under the oil all the time, to prevent it from becoming rancid. Keep the jars in a cool place, where the temperature is consistent, and always spoon out the vegetables with a clean spoon or tongs – never fingers – so you don’t introduce any bacteria into the jar.
Cipolline all’aceto balsamico
You can triple or quadruple the quantity given here and store some of these onions for a month in a cool place (the longer you keep them, the better the flavor), but make sure they are always completely covered with the vinegar. Sometimes for this recipe we also use vincotto (see page 48 ).
Peel 3 or 4 (1 pound) pickling onions but keep the root intact. Bring 2 ¼ cups white wine and 2 ¼ cups white wine vinegar to the boil in a pan, add the onions and blanch for about 3 minutes, until just soft. Remove the onions from the wine and vinegar, peel off the outer membrane and leave to cool.
Put ¼ cup light, soft brown sugar into a small pan and melt until it darkens slightly. Just before it starts to bubble, put in the onions and toss around to coat.
Add 1 cup balsamic vinegar and cook gently for about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and cool. The onions are ready to eat, but if you want to keep them, put them into sterilized jars and make sure the vinegar completely covers the onions (add a little more if necessary).
You can serve the onions with salumi, such as ham or cured pork, or, if you like, mix them into a salad. Chop the onions, then season a handful of rocket and toss with a little Balsamic vinaigrette (see page 52). Arrange the salad on the center of a plate with the slices of cured meats around the outside.
Carciofi
Prepare about 20 artichokes as for the recipe on page 70, blanching them in a big pan with 1 ¾ cups each of water, white wine and white wine vinegar and 2 tablespoons of salt. Make the marinade (doubling the quantities) and cook briefly (see page 72). When the artichokes have cooled down in their marinade, spoon them into a sterilized jar, strain the marinade and then pour it over the top, making sure the artichokes are completely covered. Seal the jar tightly. The artichokes will keep in a cool place for 3 months (the longer you keep them, the more vinegary they will taste). Serve them with whatever you like – in salads or with prosciutto or salami.
Peperoni
Halve and deseed 5 red or yellow peppers, then blanch in 21/4 cups each of white wine and white wine vinegar, plus 2 tablespoons of salt, for 3 to 4 minutes. They should still be quite firm. Take the peppers out (you can cool the cooking liquid and keep it in the fridge for next time). Put them in a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and leave them to steam for about 10 minutes, after which time you should be able to peel them easily. Leave them to cool completely, then put them into a sterilized jar. Cover with light olive oil and, if you like, a few sprigs of rosemary and bay and some blanched whole peeled garlic cloves. Make sure everything is completely covered and seal. Store in a cool place for up to 3 months.
Barbabietole
Use baby beets if possible – golden or red. If they are very small, blanch them whole and unpeeled (just washed) in 2 ¼ cups each of white wine and white wine vinegar and 2 tablespoons of salt for about 10 minutes, until just soft. Drain and, while still warm, peel and cut into halves, quarters or cubes, as you like. Put into sterilized jars and cover with light extra virgin olive oil. Make sure the oil covers the beets completely and seal. Keep for up to 3 months in the fridge.
If you can find only large beets, cook them whole and unpeeled in salted water until just soft (don’t add any vinegar to the water at this point, as the beets will take a couple of hours to cook and during that time the vinegar would flavor it too strongly). Keep topping up the water level as necessary. When the beets are cooked, let them cool, then peel and cut into cubes, etc. Because larger beets can taste blander than small ones, you need to work a bit harder at bringing out their flavor. So, put the pieces into a bowl and cover with white wine vinegar, then leave in the fridge for a couple of days. Lift them out of the vinegar and place in a sterilized jar. Top up with enough extra virgin olive oil to cover and seal. Store as before.
Melanzane
The best eggplants for preserving are the pale purple, melon-shaped ones, as they are firmer and a little sweeter. Cut them into slices about ¾ inch thick, place in a colander and sprinkle with salt. Leave for at least half an hour, preferably overnight. Drain them, brush with olive oil and grill or cook in a ridged griddle pan until they mark (a couple of minutes on each side). Don’t overcook them or they will become too soft and disintegrate after being in the oil for a while. Remove them, lay them out on a tray and sprinkle with whole peppercorns, blanched peeled whole cloves of garlic, sprigs of rosemary and, if you like, some large chiles, deseeded and split lengthwise (or with the seeds, if you prefer them spicier). Layer in sterilized jars, then cover completely with light extra virgin olive oil and seal. Keep in a cool place for up to 3 months.
There is another typical sottaceto with eggplant, which is originally from Napoli, and is often served with antipasti in bars in Italy – my wife, Plaxy, calls the little strips “worms.” What makes them very special is that the eggplant pieces, which are blanched in vinegar, retain a slight crunch, and if you eat them with a salami that is very generous with the fat, they really help to cut through the richness.
To make a jarful, take 2 eggplants, peel them, and, using a mandoline grater, cut into thin slices and then into strips. Sprinkle with salt, leave to drain for an hour, then squeeze gently. Rinse under cold running water, then squeeze again. Get a pan with a measured amount of water boiling, and for every quart of water add ½ cup red wine vinegar. Bring to the boil again, then add the eggplant and keep boiling for about 3 to 5 minutes, depending on the thickness. They should still be quite firm. Lift out with a slotted spoon onto a clean tea towel. Move them around until completely cold and dried, then put into a sterilized jar along with some big chiles that have been deseeded and split lengthwise. Cover with light extra virgin olive oil and seal.
Serve with bread and salami, or maybe some anchovies (if you like, you can scatter the eggplant with chopped garlic and parsley).
Finferli
Clean 2 pounds small to medium chanterelle mushrooms and blanch them very briefly in 2 ¼ cups each of white wine and white wine vinegar with 2 tablespoons of salt – they should cook for less than a minute. Drain and lay them on a clean tea towel to dry. This is very important or the mushrooms will release their water into the jar (in Italy we leave them out in the sun to dry – but in the United States you might have to pick your day). When they are dry to the touch, put them in a sterilized jar with some blanched peeled whole garlic cloves, bay leaves and enough light extra virgin olive oil to cover. Seal the jar and keep in a cool place for up to 6 months. Serve with salumi – if you like, you can mix them with balsamic onions (see page 82).
“Pearly-white treasure”
In Britain and America, people seem to be convinced that mozzarella is something rubbery and bland, after years of having only a version of this cheese that was made of cow’s milk (Fior di Latte), sold in packets and looked like Ping-Pong balls. This is the mozzarella that you could buy in every supermarket twenty years ago, when every neighbourhood Italian restaurant had salad caprese on the menu: mozzarella and tomatoes, sometimes turned into a tricolore with slices of avocado.
Real, fresh, hand-made unpasteurized mozzarella, made from pure buffalo milk in Campania, close to Napoli, is a beautiful pearly white treasure that keeps for only a few days – something sensual and soft, full of the sweaty, mossy flavors of the buffalo milk. When you have a large ball of this mozzarella, which drips buttermilk when you cut into it, you don’t want to do anything other than drizzle over some peppery olive oil, grind some black pepper over it and serve it as a starter, just as it is.
To make the cheese, whole fresh buffalo milk is inoculated with a “starter culture” of whey from the previous day’s cheese making, which is left to sour naturally. This is mixed with rennet and, after about half an hour, it coagulates into soft curds, which are broken up into pieces and left to ripen in warm whey for 4 or 5 hours, until the curd becomes stretchy. Then the curds are put into wooden vats of boiling water and stretched by drawing them out continuously with a wooden stick. Finally the mozzatore, the cheese maker in charge of the final stages of the process, judges just the right moment for the hot elastic cheese to be cut into pieces (the name mozzarella comes from the Italian mozzare, “to cut’’). Then it is gently shaped into large balls, trecce (plaits) or bocconcini (tiny balls weighing just 1 ½ ounces) and dipped into a brine bath to let the cheese relax and soften.
Like so many Italian specialties, buffalo mozzarella started off as a poor man’s food, made from the buffalo that were brought into Italy through trade with India and used as beasts of burden, grazing on the marshes of Campania. You had to milk the animals, so people made the milk into cheese. Now, of course, the whole world wants to eat mozzarella. But how many buffalo do people think we have in Italy? Where are they all? Do you get off the plane in Napoli and say to the kids, “Look at all the buffalo’’?
The reality is that there are only about 600,000 buffalo in Italy and each one will give you around 4 to 6 quarts of milk a day, enough to make about twenty mozzarella. You would need about a million buffalo just to satisfy the demand from the UK alone, so a lot of the cheese has to be made with cow’s milk, or a mixture of buffalo and cow’s milk. If you buy cheese labeled buffalo mozzarella, or mozzarella tradizionale, it might be made with either buffalo milk or a mixture of buffalo and cow’s milk – and there is as yet no law that says the producer must tell you which.
So the way to be sure that the mozzarella you buy is made with 100 percent buffalo milk is to look for one that carries the mark of the DOP (Protected Designation of Origin) and is labeled mozzarella di bufala Campana. This tells you that the cheese has been made by one of the consorzio of producers within a specific area with unique microclimatic conditions, who have to make their cheese according to very strict laws.
Confusingly, there is another label, mozzarella di latte di bufala (which must also carry the name or registered trademark of the producer between the words mozzarella and di latte). This means that the mozzarella must be 100 percent buffalo milk. However, it can be made anywhere in Italy and, of course, true aficionados of mozzarella di bufala Campana will say its unique taste is all to do with the particular quality and characteristics of the terrain where the buffalo graze.
Because real, traditionally made unpasteurized buffalo mozzarella is at its best for only a day or so, if we want to buy it in London the producer has to drive it to the airport just hours after it has been made, put it on a plane overnight, then have it collected and sent out to customers in the morning. So, of course, it is expensive and not always easy to find. However, there is another version allowed under DOP rules, which says that the whey in which the mozzarella is kept (in little packets or pots) can be pasteurized, so that the cheese will last longer. This is the one you are most likely to find in delicatessens, and at least you know it has been made traditionally in Campania, from pure buffalo milk.
Burrata
Another beautiful cheese is burrata, which is made in a way similar to mozzarella, but with cow’s milk. The stretched curd is made to form a little “pouch” which is filled with mozzarella-like strings of curd, mixed with cream from the whey, and the pouches are knotted and dipped in brine. Traditionally they are wrapped in bright green asphodel (lily) leaves, which look beautiful against the milky white cheese.
Burrata is brilliant as part of an antipasto with salami or prosciutto – put it in the middle of the table and let everyone scoop out a little of the rich creamy cheese with a spoon.
In England and America, people love big fish, like salmon or sea bass, with no bones left in to negotiate. But Italians have a bit of a love affair not only with octopus, squid and cuttlefish but also with little fish, cooked whole, head and bones included. I have always loved those cheap little fish like mackerel and sardines, which are so full of flavor yet so underrated because they don’t have any snob value. We always have one or two of these oily “bluefish” on the menu, and they are a very healthy option. Sardines and mackerel contain the fatty acids called omega-3, which are thought to protect the heart, and help the working of our brains and immune systems. Again, we go back to the idea that good-quality food doesn’t have to be expensive. I believe you are being more generous to someone if you give them cheap and healthy sardines than if you spend a lot of money on farmed salmon, which is so controversial in terms of the health of the fish and our environment.
At home in Italy we would prepare these fish really simply, perhaps whole under a marinade. In the restaurant, of course, it is crucial that we don’t serve things that are too fiddly to eat, or that will cause people to end up with food splashed down their clothes. So I’m afraid that some of these recipes require you to fillet the fish first – or, if you don’t want to do it yourself, ask your fishmonger to do it for you.
Sgombro all’aspretto di zafferano
This is the dish that Tony Blair ate when he came to the restaurant – I was impressed by his choice of healthy proletarian food. Where I come from in Lombardia, we are quite close to the Ligurian Sea but for some reason we get more fish from the Adriatic – mackerel is one that we used to have all the time when I was little – in addition to our usual diet of fish from the local lakes. Fat and flavorsome, mackerel actually have a better flavor when they are well cooked (unlike most fish) and, because they are very oily, the flesh won’t dry out the way other fish do.
Sometimes I make this dish without the pancetta but with a little saffron instead. You brush the mackerel fillets with oil and a few saffron threads, then season them with salt. Heat a pan and add a little oil. When it is hot, put in the fish, skin side down, pressing it down so that all the skin comes into contact with the pan. Don’t fiddle with it, just leave it for three or four minutes, until the skin turns golden, and you will see the flesh starting to turn white, rather than translucent. Once the flesh has turned white almost to the top, turn the fillets over and finish them off very briefly on the other side for about a minute. This is a dish of hot fish with a cold salad, which is why you need to choose fairly robust leaves, such as arugula. Note: if you are using saffron vinaigrette that you have made earlier and kept in the fridge, warm it up in a pan (but don’t let it boil) before using it, to bring out the flavor.
2 large mackerel (each about 3 ounces)
8 thin slices of pancetta or Parma ham
4 handfuls of mixed green salad leaves
2 tablespoons Giorgio’s vinaigrette (see page 51)
3 tablespoons Saffron vinaigrette (see page 52)
bunch of chives, cut into short lengths
salt and pepper
Take one of the mackerel and cut down either side of the central bone, so that you can remove this “panel” completely, leaving you with 2 small, boneless fillets. Repeat with the other mackerel. You don’t need to season the fish, as there will be enough saltiness from the pancetta. (See page 95.)
Wrap each fillet completely in pancetta, without overlapping it. Cut each fillet crosswise, at an angle, into 2 or 3 pieces depending on the size of the fillet.
Place a nonstick frying pan on the burner until it is moderately hot, but don’t add any oil. Put in the fish “parcels” and cook until the pancetta is crisp and golden on each side (about 3 to 4 minutes in all).
While the fish is cooking, quickly season the salad leaves, toss with Giorgio’s vinaigrette and arrange in the center of your serving plates.
Carefully remove the fish “parcels” from the pan, then dip them into the Saffron vinaigrette and toss them around gently, and arrange them around the salad. Drizzle over the rest of the Saffron vinaigrette and sprinkle with the chives.
Sardines are my favorite of all the oily fish, with an amazingly rich flavor. My grandmother used to fry sardines in really hot oil, then take them off the heat and keep them on one side. She would put some sliced onions into a big pot with plenty of oil (enough to cover the sardines later), add a splash of white wine and vinegar and let everything warm up to make an infusion. Then she would pour this over the sardines and leave them for 12 hours. Finally, she would take out the sardines, break them up and serve them with pasta. Or sometimes she would just put the pot on the table and let everyone take a bit of fish and eat it with some bread. This is a little more complicated, and a dish to make in the summer, when fresh sardines are plentiful, but make sure the ones you buy have really silvery skins. If they are being sold from a stall and the sun is out, or they are under the lights in a fishmonger’s, you should be able to see the skin shining from far away. If not, don’t buy them, because they are old. In Italy, we get smaller sardines than the ones in the U.S.; no matter – the bigger ones just look a little less precious.
There is a really famous Italian dish from Sicilia that I love, called sardine al beccafico, which is sardines split open and stuffed with bread crumbs, olive oil and tomato, then rolled up and baked for 5 or 6 minutes. The story is that the little rolls with their tails sticking out look like the beccafico, a small, greedy bird who loves to eat figs, and so is considered to be a great judge of good food. I really wanted to have this dish on the menu, but it isn’t easy to serve in a way that is right for the restaurant. I knew I would have to take out all the small bones – it is very important for a London restaurant to clean fish. So we came up with this wav of filleting the fish and then wrapping the fillets around little balls of stuffing, made of bread crumbs, herbs, olive oil and Parmesan. I have to confess, though – and whisper this – that it breaks one of the fundamental rules of Italian cooking: never put cheese and fish together.
Because sardines are so generously fatty, we cut through the richness by serving them with a little salad of tomatoes (seasoned with salt and vinegar to bring out their acidity), some leaves, black olives and plenty of chives – a really big handful. I hate to use any herb just sprinkled on a dish for decoration; I use them for their texture and taste, and I really like the oniony flavor of chives, especially in this recipe.
Whenever we can, we use the fantastic sweet San Marzano tomatoes that come in from Italy, because they have thick flesh and very few seeds, so they absorb the vinegar well. And we use wild salad greens, predominantly arugula but also red chard, mizuna and mustard – the more aromatic and peppery the salad, the better. Again, remember you are putting hot fish on soft leaves, so you don’t want any leaves that are too delicate or they will “cook” and wilt immediately. That is why we favor arugula so much, because it has real tenacity and a lovely pepperiness.
8 small, vine-ripened tomatoes, blanched, skinned, cut into
quarters and deseeded (see page 304)
10 tablespoons Giorgio’s vinaigrette (see page 51)
12 small or 8 large sardines about 20 black olives, pitted and halved
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 handfuls of arugula small bunch of chives, cut into batons
salt and pepper
Start making the stuffing well ahead. Put the slices of bread into a bowl and pour over enough milk to wet them all the way through. Transfer to a fine sieve and leave to drain for 4 or 5 hours, but preferably overnight, until the bread is moist but not wet (this step isn’t essential, but it is best if you can do it).
Toward the end of the bread soaking time, sprinkle the tomatoes with 4 tablespoons of the vinaigrette and leave to marinate.
Put the basil and parsley into a food processor with the olive oil and whiz until finely chopped. Then add the bread crumbs, soaked bread (first squeezing out any excess milk, if necessary), Parmesan and garlic. Pulse until all the ingredients come together into a paste. Taste for seasoning and add some pepper and salt if necessary (there will already be some saltiness from the Parmesan).
For the stuffing:
2 slices of soft white bread, crusts cut off
a little milk
good handful of basil
good handful of fiat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons breadcrumbs
3 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan
1 garlic clove, chopped
Under running water, scale the sardines and then open them out, leaving the heads attached. To do this, insert a sharp filleting knife at the tail end, next to the backbone, and cut upward, until you reach the belly of the fish. Turn the sardine over, then cut in the same way to the same point on the other side of the bone. Starting at the tail end, take the backbone between your forefinger and thumb and run them along the length of the bone up to the head. Cut across the bone at the tail end and head end and the bone should lift out, leaving the fillets still attached at the opposite side, so you can open them out like a book. At the outside of each fillet, you will see a black area with some fine bones. Just take your knife under these parts, and remove them. Then, with a pair of tweezers, take out any pin bones that may have remained in the fillets.
Take a little of the stuffing and work it into a ball. Then place a filleted sardine on a board, put the stuffing inside, as close to the head as possible, and wrap the fillets around it. Smooth the stuffing that is still visible at the top and bottom, then secure with toothpicks.
Alternate the tomato and olives around the edge of 4 serving plates.
Cook the sardines in 2 batches. Heat half the olive oil in a large, nonstick frying pan. Season the sardines with a little salt and, when the oil is hot, put in half of them and brown on one side for about 1 to 2 minutes. Turn over and cook for 2 minutes on the other side. To make sure the stuffing is heated through, insert a sharp knife into the center and then put the knife to your lips to check that it is hot. Remove the sardines and keep hot while you cook the remainder in the rest of the oil.
Take the toothpicks out of the sardines. Toss the arugula with 2 tablespoons of the vinaigrette and put it in the middle of the serving plates. Place the sardines on top of the arugula, then sprinkle with the chives and spoon the rest of the vinaigrette over.
Where I come from in northern Italy, the local fish is all lake fish – especially perch – which we would cook and put under vinegar with vegetables, to bring to the table cold as part of the antipasti. The idea here is that you don’t completely cook the fish in the pan but finish it off in the oven, still in the vinegar mixture. We serve it hot, but you can also leave it to cool, cut it into smaller pieces and serve at room temperature, with more antipasti. If you do this, don’t reduce the juices at the end, as you will need enough to cover the fish completely. You can also serve this as a main course with some fregola (see page 166) or couscous – use 12 onions, double the quantities of carrots, white wine, vinegar, rosemary and leek, and choose fillets of fish around ½ pound. Then cook 4 tablespoons of fregola or couscous in plenty of salted water for 7 to 8 minutes, and sauté with some diced cucumber and tomato.
8 baby onions
1 carrot
about 3 tablespoons sunflower or vegetable oil
4 perch fillets or steaks, each about ¼ pound
2 tablespoons white wine
5 tablespoons white wine vinegar
4 bay leaves
2 small sprigs of rosemary white part of 1 small leek
4 juniper berries
4 black peppercorns
small handful of flat-leaf parsley
3 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper
Preheat the oven to 425°F. Blanch the onions in boiling salted water for about a minute, then remove them with a slotted spoon and cut them in half. Blanch the carrot for 1 to 2 minutes (you can use the same water), then drain and slice thin. Set aside.
Heat the sunflower or vegetable oil in a large, ovenproof frying pan (or 2 small ones). Season the fish, put it in the pan, skin side down, and fry until golden; this will take about 2 to 3 minutes.
Turn the fish over, add the white wine and leave for that to evaporate for a minute or so, then add the vinegar, blanched vegetables and all of the remaining ingredients except the parsley and olive oil. Bring to a boil, then transfer to the oven for 2 minutes, until the fish is cooked through (larger fish may need 3 to 4 minutes).
Remove from the oven and transfer a fillet to each serving plate. Put the pan on the heat, and simmer until the cooking juices have reduced and thickened slightly. Check the seasoning, then spoon the juices over the fish and finish with the parsley and oil.
Insalata di polpo e patate novelle
For years, I always boiled octopus in water, the way I was taught when I first started cooking. Then one day I was with my good friend Vincenzo Borgonzolo, who used to own Al San Vincenzo, which was one of my favorite family-run Italian restaurants in London. Vincenzo grew up a true scugnizzo napoletano, one of the street urchins who give the city so much of its color. For some reason we were talking about octopus. He asked me how I cooked it and when I told him, he said, “But you don’t have to cook it in water – it has enough water of its own.” He showed me how he cooked his octopus for 40 minutes with no water, just simmering it gently in oil so that it released its juices and moisture into the pan, braising itself in its own liquid. You end up with a fantastic concentration of flavor and an incredibly tender octopus. After it is cut up and cooled a little, it becomes rich, sticky and gelatinous and really meaty in the mouth, with a huge flavor of the sea. When I saw the octopus done this way, I couldn’t believe it. Brilliant, brilliant. How could it be that I never knew about it before? It seems this method of braising is the way they cook octopus in Napoli, with the addition of tomatoes, where it is eaten with bread – but in the north I had never seen it done. (By the way, in the north we call octopus polpo, in the south it is polipo.) I can honestly say I had been wrong for 20 years. Except for certain recipes, like the Octopus carpaccio on page 99, boiling is completely the wrong way to cook an octopus.
Ask your fishmonger to clean and prepare the octopus. If you can’t find a fresh one, use frozen, which comes already cleaned and works almost as well. It will already be tenderized, as the freezing process breaks down the cell structure. If you use a fresh octopus you will need to pound it before cooking.
1 large octopus, cleaned
1 large chile, split in half
2 handfuls of flat-leaf parsley
4 garlic cloves
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
8 small new potatoes, scrubbed
1 onion, chopped
3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
juice of 1 lemon
2 celery stalks small
bunch of chives
2 handfuls of mixed salad greens (optional)
2 tablespoons Giorgio’s vinaigrette (see page 51, optional)
salt and pepper
Wrap the octopus in a cloth and pound it with a meat hammer for 3 to 4 minutes to tenderize it. Rinse well under cold running water for 10 to 15 minutes, to take out any excess salt.
Put the chile, one handful of parsley. 3 whole garlic cloves and 3 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large casserole. Add the octopus (don’t season it, or it will toughen up), cover with a lid and simmer gently for about 1 ½ hours, until tender. Leave to cool.
Meanwhile, boil the potatoes until tender, then drain. When cool enough to handle, remove the skins.
Heat a couple of tablespoons of the remaining oil in a small casserole dish, add the onion and sweat until soft but not colored. Add the white wine vinegar and let it bubble until completely evaporated. Remove from the heat. Cut the potatoes into quarters, mix with the onion and season to taste.
Squash the remaining garlic clove to a paste with the back of a knife, then put the rest of the parsley on top and chop it so that the two mix together well.
When the octopus has cooled enough for you to handle it, remove any big suckers and discard, then cut the rest into small chunks and put into a bowl. Add the parsley and garlic, and the lemon juice. Season if necessary and mix in the rest of the olive oil. (At this point, you can keep it in the fridge for 2 to 3 hours and finish it just before serving.)
Cut the celery into julienne strips, and the chives into batons. Combine the potatoes with the octopus mixture and add the chives. If using the salad, dress it with Giorgio’s vinaigrette and some salt and pepper. Arrange on serving plates and put the octopus and potato mixture on top. Garnish with the celery.
This is the exception to the rule of not boiling octopus, because in this case you need to keep as much gelatin as possible inside the octopus (rather than letting it come out as the octopus cooks in its own juices). It is this gelatin that will hold the pieces of octopus together in the carpaccio.
When you slice and serve the carpaccio, it looks beautiful: the perfect pearly white flesh of the octopus, with its purple streaks, against the bright red of the tomato and the green of the basil. We serve it as a starter, but it would also be fantastic as part of an antipasto.
The trick here is not to boil the octopus too fast. Just bring the water to a boil, then turn down the heat and keep it simmering very slowly. Also, put a couple of corks into the pot – don’t ask me why. I don’t know if there is anything scientific about it, but Corrado Sirroni taught me to do it in my first job and I have done it ever since.
1 large octopus (about 2–3 pounds)
1 lemon, cut in half
1 onion
1 carrot
1 celery stalk
2–3 bay leaves
3 black peppercorns
wineglass of white wine
To garnish:
3 tomatoes, deseeded and finely diced
2 tablespoons Giorgio’s vinaigrette (see page 51)
small bunch of basil
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
Put the octopus in a large pan and cover with cold water. Add the lemon halves, whole onion, carrot and celery stalk, plus the bay leaves, peppercorns and wine. Put in a couple of clean wine corks at this point if you like. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and keep at a very slow simmer for about 15 minutes. Remove from the heat.
When the octopus is still warm, take it out of the water. Cut off the head and put it inside the body, close up the tentacles and lay the octopus on a large sheet of plastic wrap. Take the edge of the plastic wrap, pull it over the top of the octopus and roll it up very tightly, twisting the ends. It is important to compress the carpaccio firmly, otherwise it will fall apart when you try to slice it.
Wrap the roll of octopus in a clean cloth, let it cool slightly, then put it in the freezer.
When the octopus is completely hard, use a very sharp knife to cut it into thin slices – as thin as you can manage – being careful not to let it warm up or it will be too soft to cut and will break up. If it starts to soften, put it back in the freezer. Lay the pieces, not overlapping, on a tray covered with plastic wrap, then lay another sheet of plastic wrap on top and keep in the fridge until required (it needs a couple of hours).
Mix the tomatoes with Giorgio’s vinaigrette, season and set aside.
When ready to serve, arrange the tomatoes on a serving plate with basil leaves around and put the octopus on top. Drizzle with the olive oil and sprinkle with a little sea salt.
“The flavor of the sea”
If I could have one really good calamari fritti a week, I would be a very happy man. It is one of those favorite childhood memories – like the little gold tins of anchovies in salsa piccante, or the bread with five faces that I used to buy with my granddad – that have lodged in my brain and make me feel good whenever I think about them.
In the summer, when I was a boy, we used to go and eat in a local pizzeria run by six brothers, all of them short and fat. They came to our restaurant; we went to theirs. It was a great place. All you had to do was decide what kind of pizza you wanted and then before it arrived the brothers would bring out a long tray piled with fried prawns and rings of calamari. The Spanish slice their calamari rings quite thick but Italians cut them very thin, like wedding rings, and dust them only in flour or semolina – not batter – before frying.
Incidentally, on restaurant menus in some parts of Italy, around the coast of Liguria and also in Sardegna and Toscana, you might come across totano, also called “flying” squid, because it shoots out of the water and “flies” over the waves. Totani are longer than squid and they hunt different prey, so the flavor is slightly different and they are a little tougher, but they are cooked in similar ways. The smaller ones are often served in a fritto misto.
Cooking squid at home is easy in one way, because it is very quick, but hard in another, because there is about 40 seconds’ difference between squid that is beautiful and squid that is as tough as a shoe sole. Like octopus, squid contains a lot of water, so you have to chargrill or sauté it extremely fast (1 to 1 ½ minutes on each side, that’s all) over a very high heat. Otherwise it will just boil in its own liquid, losing flavor and toughening up at the same time. People always tend to worry that it might not be cooked, so they leave it a little bit longer and then – disaster – it is too late.
Many people say that frozen calamari is as good as fresh, but I can tell the difference from a long way off – really I can. For me, when you blast-chill something as delicate as squid, unlike octopus, it sanitizes all those unique flavors and the smells of the sea. So, when you buy squid, look for a pearly white membrane, which shows that it is fresh.
Cleaning squid isn’t the nicest job in the world – I recommend you teach your children to do it as soon as possible, then they can take over. Usually when you buy squid, the head – with its tentacles attached – will be tucked inside the body pocket. So pull out the head, detach it from the body and set it aside. Discard the intestines, which will come out too. then reach inside the body with your fingers and pull out any other innards, including the plastic-looking quill. Throw all of these away. Next, you have to take off the fins. Pull them downward so that you pull off the purplish skin at the same time. Throw away the skin and the fins. Then you need to wash the body“pocket” inside and out. I always make my chefs turn the pocket inside out to wash it because it may contain a bit of sand or other debris – who knows? But it is very important to turn it back again – you can tell immediately when somebody has left it inside out, because the outside of the squid has a different, shinier texture. Finally, you should take the head, cut away the tentacles in front of the eyes and squeeze out and discard the beak. Keep only the tentacles.
To grill (or barbecue) squid, slash the pockets down one side, then open them out so that the whole area will touch the grill and pick up the charred flavor. If the squid are thick, pound them out a bit, or slash them on the inside crisscross fashion with a sharp knife (but not cutting all the way through). If the squid is thin, though, there is no need to do any of this. Chop some garlic, mix it with some olive oil, season it with salt and pepper and then brush it over the squid (including the tentacles) and grill as quickly as possible.
This is a lovely, quite rustic dish. It is simple to make, but relies on very good-quality ingredients, so it is another one to do in the summer, when tomatoes and basil are at their best.
The dish dates back to the days when I was cooking at Olivo and each week we used to get three large boxes of calamari arriving in the kitchen, full of squid of all different sizes.
Because I hate waste – all Italians do – I came up with this recipe using all the squid, big or small, tentacles and all, and it tastes fantastic – despite the fact that this is yet another case of breaking the cardinal Italian rule of never putting cheese with fish.
The finished dish is something between a starter and a soup, almost like squid in a broth of warm tomato salsa. Serve with a knife, fork and spoon and let people dip bruschetta into it.
Make the stuffing by putting the anchovies, oil, garlic and herbs into a food processor and processing until finely chopped, then adding the chopped tentacles and extra squid bodies, together with the bread crumbs and Parmesan. Do not add any seasoning at this point. Pulse until the mixture will come together in your hands without being too sticky.
enough squid (including tentacles) to give you 16 small, intact bodies, plus 2 or 3 extra for the stuffing, prepared as above
4 tablespoons light extra virgin olive oil, plus a little extra for brushing
2 very ripe large tomatoes, diced handful of basil salt and pepper
For the stuffing:
2 anchovy fillets
4 tablespoons light extra virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves
handful of flat-leaf parsley
handful of basil
bread crumbs made from stale bread (a quantity equal to the chopped-up squid tentacles and reserved bodies – so for a handful of squid, you need a handful of bread crumbs)
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
To serve:
8 slices of ciabatta bread
1 garlic clove, halved
a little extra virgin olive oil
a few basil leaves
Since both the squid and the Parmesan are quite salty, you need to check whether any extra salt is needed, so take a small amount of the stuffing mixture and cook it quickly in a nonstick pan; taste and season with salt if necessary. Otherwise, just add a twist of black pepper.
Stuff the squid pockets with the mixture – not too full, or they will burst during cooking – then close up and secure the openings with toothpicks.
Put the olive oil, diced tomatoes and basil into a pan with a large base set over a low heat and warm through without boiling. Season to taste.
Brush the squid with a little oil, then heat a griddle pan or heavy frying pan until smoking. (If the pan isn’t hot enough, the squid will boil, leaching out its liquid, which will make it tough and flavorless.) Don’t overcrowd the pan or griddle – cook no more than 4 squid at a time. You need enough space around each one to enable you to turn it over onto a spare hot space, so that once again you can make sure it sears rather than boils. Grill quickly (about a minute on each side), until the squid begin to mark if on a griddle or take on a bit of color if in a frying pan.
Remove the toothpicks and add the squid pockets to the pan of sauce. Move them around gently, taking care not to break them. Really, you just need to leave the squid in the sauce long enough to release some of the juices from the stuffing that will have gathered inside the pockets, so they can blend with the tomato, basil and oil – but don’t leave the squid in for too long, or it will become rubbery.
Grill or sauté the slices of ciabatta on both sides until crisp, then rub with the garlic clove and drizzle with oil.
Serve the squid in its sauce in bowls, garnished with basil leaves and with the bread on the side.
Insalata di seppia alla griglia
Cuttlefish are bigger than squid and have larger “bones” that often get made into earrings. They also have a little sac inside the body containing a sweet-tasting black ink, which they squirt at enemies in self-defense, and which we use in this recipe. Clean the cuttlefish in the same way as squid (see page 100), being very careful not to puncture the ink sac – just pull it out whole. Sometimes the sac will have emptied when the cuttlefish was caught, so it is best to buy a little packet or jar of ink, which your fishmonger will sell separately, just in case you find no ink inside.
With this sauce, we try to bring out the sweetness and full flavors of both the ink and the onion. To do this you need to cook the onion very slowly and gently because if it burns, the sauce will taste bitter. Also, when you finish off the sauce after straining it, use a straight-sided pan because you need to keep a low flame just underneath the base. It is very important that the heat doesn’t spread around the sides of the pan because, again, if you overheat it the sauce will turn bitter. The sauce can also be used for risotto and pasta.
2 ¼ pounds cuttlefish, cleaned (see above), heads reserved olive oil, for brushing
1 garlic clove
handful of flat-deaf parsley
4 handfuls of mixed peppery salad greens (or just mizuna, if you can get it)
3 tablespoons Oil and lemon dressing (see page 52) salt and pepper
For the cuttlefish sauce:
5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
4 onions, sliced
about 1 tablespoon cuttlefish ink
1 quart fish stock salt and pepper
To make the sauce, heat 3 tablespoons of the oil very gently in a small, straight-sided pan, add the onions, then cover and sweat slowly for about 15 minutes until softened but not colored.
Add the cuttlefish heads and cook uncovered, still very gently, until the juices released by the cuttlefish have completely evaporated.
Add the ink and fish stock, stir until well mixed and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Pass through a fine sieve into a clean small, straight-sided pan, pressing and squeezing the onions and heads to extract all the juices.
Bring the sieved liquid to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until the sauce thickens and becomes very syrupy. Cover and keep warm.
Cut the cuttlefish into pieces roughly 3 ¼ x 4 inches, score diagonally each way to make a diamond pattern and season with salt and pepper. Brush with a little olive oil.
Crush the garlic with the back of a knife, put the parsley on top and chop it all together, to mix well.
Cook the cuttlefish in 2 batches. Preheat a dry griddle pan or a heavy frying pan until hot and smoking (otherwise the fish will just boil in its own juices). Sprinkle the cuttlefish with the garlic and parsley mixture, put it into the pan and cook for about 30 seconds on one side, then 30 seconds on the other. As with squid, be very careful not to overcook it, or it will become tough.
Season the salad with salt and pepper, toss with the Oil and lemon dressing and arrange it in the center of 4 serving plates. Quickly beat the rest of the oil into the sauce and spoon it around the salad. Place the grilled cuttlefish on top of the salad and drizzle with extra virgin olive oil.
This is based on the dish my grandmother used to make with gamberi rossi, the beautiful pink prawns that come in from Liguria. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we can get them in London, but otherwise we use large Mediterranean prawns, or you could use tiger prawns. Of course, cooking in a restaurant is different from the way my grandmother worked at home, boiling up the beans while we waited, and then dipping the prawns into the pot al the last minute. So we have adapted the dish so that everything can be ready in advance and you have only to sauté the prawns and bring everything together in five minutes.
The fresh sweet chiles that we use are quite large – long, thin and not too spicy – not the tiny ones used in Thai cooking. This is a brilliant recipe to glorify good olive oil and demonstrate how it can enhance simple flavors. In this ease, the one we use for drizzling over the finished salad is the peppery Manni Per Me.
Remember that when you are cooking a large number of prawns, you need enough space in the pan for them all to touch the bottom, so that they all sear quickly. If some of the prawns are not in direct contact with the pan, and therefore don’t get hot enough, they will release their juices and boil in them rather than frying. So, no overcrowding. In the recipe directions. I have suggested that you cook the prawns in two batches to avoid this problem.
I have also suggested that you use some of the liquid from cooking the beans to make a little“sauce.’’ However, in our kitchen we never waste anything, so before we start this dish we make a stock from the shells of the prawns, which we use instead of the bean water.
We sauté the shells in a little olive oil with a splash of white wine, some chopped chile and garlic (for about 6 ounces prawn shells, we would use half a chile and two garlic cloves), plus a tablespoon of our homemade tomato sauce (you could use tomato passata). Then we add enough water to cover (no more, as we want to concentrate the flavor), boil everything for 10 minutes and strain the stock, really squeezing the shells against the sieve.
1 pound fresh borlotti (cranberry) beans in their pods (about 9 ounces shelled) or ¼ pound dried borlotti beans, soaked for 24 hours
½ head of garlic (unpeeled), plus 3 extra cloves, finely chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped bunch of sage
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
12 large fresh prawns, shell on
4 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons sliced sweet chile pepper
½ wineglass of white wine
2 tablespoons tomato passata salt and pepper
To serve:
1 garlic clove handful of flat-leaf parsley extra virgin olive oil, preferably Tuscan
First cook the beans: put them into a large pot with the ½ head of garlic, the celery, sage and 2 tablespoons of the olive oil (don’t add salt until the beans are completely cooked, otherwise they will harden). Cover with plenty of cold water (about double the volume of the beans), put a lid on the pan and bring to the boil. Remove the lid, skim the foam from the top and reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. Cook until the beans are soft to the bite (45 minutes to 1 hour), stirring every 5 to 10 minutes, then leave to cool in their cooking water.
When the beans are almost ready, peel the prawns, leaving only the heads on. Run a sharp knife along the back as far as the tail and remove the black thread that runs down it. Then open out the prawns as far as you can.
Cook the prawns in 2 batches. Heat a large, heavy-bottomed frying pan and add 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Add half the chopped garlic and half the sliced chile, and cook for a few seconds over a medium heat, without allowing to color. Season the prawns, then put them into the pan, back downward. Once they have seared and caramelized a little, press the heads to release some of their juices. This not only helps the flavor but will reduce the temperature of the oil and prevent the garlic from burning and turning bitter. If there still isn’t enough liquid and the garlic begins to color too much, add a little more oil. Sauté the prawns for a couple of minutes, until they turn pink or dark red (depending on the type of prawn), then flip them over. Transfer to a warm plate.
Wipe out the pan with some paper towel. Add the rest of the oil, garlic and chile and cook the rest of the prawns in the same way.
Return the first batch of prawns to the pan, then add the wine and let it evaporate. Remove the prawns and set aside in a warm place.
With a slotted spoon, take the beans from their cooking liquid (reserving the liquid) and put them into the pan in which you cooked the prawns. Season and bring to the boil, then add the tomato passata and a ladleful of the cooking water from the beans – you need to add enough liquid to create a little sauce around the beans. Adjust the seasoning if necessary. Let the beans heat through for a couple of minutes so they take on the garlic and chile flavors. As they do so, crush a few of them with a wooden spoon to thicken the sauce. Return the prawns to the pan and toss everything together.
Quickly crush the garlic to a paste with the blade of a knife, chop the parsley on top and mix together.
Serve the beans and prawns drizzled liberally with extra virgin olive oil. Season with lots of freshly ground black pepper and finish with the chopped parsley and garlic.
Capesante all’aspretto di zafferano
Sautéed scallops are fantastic just with salad, if you don’t feel like making the celeriac puree with which we serve them in the restaurant. Scallops were a great revelation for me when I came to London, because in the UK they have the best in the world. In the Mediterranean we have what are known as“queenies,’’ which are much smaller, and don’t have the same milky sweetness.
8 large fresh scallops or 12 small ones, cleaned but with any corals (ore) still attached
4–5 celery stalks
4 tablespoons Saffron vinaigrette (see page 52)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons vegetable oil salt and pepper
For the celeriac puree:
½ celeriac, diced
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 garlic cloves
1 sprig of rosemary
3 tablespoons heavy cream
1 ½ tablespoons butter
If the scallops have been in the fridge, bring them to room temperature before cooking.
To make the celeriac puree, preheat the oven to 350°F, put the celeriac in an ovenproof dish with ½ wineglass of water, a pinch of salt and the olive oil, garlic and rosemary, seal completely with foil and then bake for about 30 minutes, until soft.
Transfer to a food processor and blend, adding the cream as you go. Then push through a fine sieve, so you have a smooth puree (it is important to process the celeriac while it is still hot, as it makes the puree smoother and it will pass through the sieve more easily). Keep the puree to one side.
Cut the celery into julienne strips and leave in a bowl with a handful of ice cubes to crisp them. Have the Saffron vinaigrette ready in a large, shallow bowl. Mix the lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil.
Turn the oven up to 375°F. Heat a large ovenproof frying pan – or 2 if you have 12 scallops (see my note about overcrowding the pan on page 105). When the pan is good and hot, but not smoking (or the scallops will burn), pour in the vegetable oil, then add the scallops. Don’t season them at this stage, or the salt will make them leach out their moisture and they will become dry.
Let the scallops turn nice and golden on their undersides (about 1½ minutes for large scallops, less for smaller ones), then turn them over and place the pan in the oven for 1 minute. This just makes sure that after frying them hard on the outside they are cooked through. Season and transfer them to the bowl of Saffron vinaigrette.
Warm up the celeriac puree in a small pan and season if necessary. Remove from the heat and beat in the butter.
Spoon the puree onto 4 serving plates and arrange the scallops on top. Drain the celery from the ice, season with the lemon oil and arrange on top of the scallops. Drizzle the remaining Saffron vinaigrette around.
Skate is a great, great fish, with a fantastic flavor, and it’s in season most of the year. In winter, I love it cooked this way, served with balsamic vinegar and pomegranate seeds; or in the summer, simply with a tomato salad.
Sadly, as with so many of our favorite fish, we have taken too much of it from the sea, so it is an endangered species, but I am including this recipe in the hope that stocks will recover and we can enjoy it in good conscience again.
2 tablespoons golden raisins
1 ¾ cups white wine
1 cup white wine vinegar
1 shallot, coarsely chopped
1 carrot, coarsely chopped
1 bay leaf
2 parsley stalks (no leaves)
3 black peppercorns
2 tablespoons salt
2 medium-sized skate wings, cleaned and trimmed (ask the fishmonger to trim off the thin part of the skate wings for you)
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 ½ pomegranate
2 tablespoons pine nuts
2 bunches of arugula, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons Giorgio’s vinaigrette (see page 51)
4 teaspoons aged balsamic vinegar
Soak the golden raisins in water for about 30 minutes, until they plump up.
Put the wine, ¾ cup of the vinegar and 1 quart of water into a large pan, wide enough to hold the skate wings side by side. Add the shallot, carrot, herbs, peppercorns and salt. Bring to a boil and put in the skate wings, thickest side downward. Turn the heat down to a simmer and cook for about 3 to 4 minutes, depending on size, until the flesh will come away from the bone if you insert a knife. Remove the pan from the heat and leave the skate in the cooking liquid for a couple of minutes.
Take the skate out of the pan, then put it on a tray and drizzle it with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and the rest of the white wine vinegar. Cover with plastic wrap, so that the fish“steams” in the marinade and keeps moist.
Meanwhile, deseed the pomegranate, reserving the seeds. Toast the pine nuts in a dry pan until golden.
Take the skate wings from the marinade and cut each one in half, through the bone (it will be soft and easy to cut through).
Toss the arugula with the vinaigrette, arrange on 4 serving plates and place the skate on top. Scatter over equal quantities of pomegranate seeds, golden raisins and pine nuts. Drizzle the rest of the olive oil and the balsamic vinegar over the skate.
