A Thousand Days in Venice
Page 20
12 1-inch-thick slices of coarse-textured bread
½ cup white wine
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 shallots, peeled and minced
the reserved quail livers plus 3 ounces chicken livers, trimmed and chopped
2 tablespoons Vin Santo or other sweet wine
½ teaspoon ground allspice
sea salt and just-cracked pepper
Wrap each quail in a slice of pancetta, securing it with a wooden pick; thread the quail onto 6 skewers, alternating with slices of bread and sausage. Grill the skewers in the oven over a pan to catch their drippings; baste with white wine, giving each skewer a quarter turn every 3–4 minutes. Continue the basting and rotating until the quail are golden and the sausage crisp (18–20 minutes in all). Meanwhile warm the butter in a small pan and sauté the shallots until translucent; add the chopped livers and sauté for 3 minutes until they are colored outside but still pink inside; add the Vin Santo, allspice, salt, and pepper and sauté another minute, mashing the mixture to a coarse paste. (This paste can be made in greater quantities, using all chicken livers or a combination of the livers of chicken, quail, pheasant, and duck with proportionately increased measures of butter, shallot, Vin Santo, and allspice. It is nice to have ready to spread on thin slices of just-toasted bread to serve with aperitivi.) When the spiedini are cooked, let your guests slide the meats off their skewers onto warmed plates, spread the grilled bread with some of the liver paste, and sit each quail on its bread “pillow.”
Yield: 6 servings
Zucca al Forno Ripiena con Porcini e Tartufi
Whole Roasted Pumpkin Stuffed with Porcini and Truffles
If the stranger had let me cook for our wedding, I would have brought forth this roasted pumpkin as a first course. The natural sugars in the pumpkin caramelize and melt into the cheeses, while the truffles perfume the whole luscious mass, all of it sending up wonderfully sensual aromas. Even without the truffles, this is spectacular. If there’s one dish to add to your repertoire, this is it. Actually it’s a repertoire in itself.
1 large pumpkin or Hubbard squash, approximately 4–5 pounds in weight, its stalk end cut around to form a cap, seeds and strings removed from the cavity (retain stalk end for later)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 large yellow onions, peeled and minced
12 ounces fresh wild mushrooms (porcini, cèpes, chanterelles, portobelli) rinsed, drained, dried, and sliced thinly (or 4 ounces dried porcini, softened in ½ cup warm water, stock, or wine, drained, and sliced thinly)
2 whole black diamond truffles from Norcia (or 2 canned black truffles or 3 ounces black truffle paste), optional
sea salt
1 teaspoon just-cracked white pepper
3 cups mascarpone
12 ounces Emmenthaler cheese, grated
4 ounces Parmesan cheese, grated
3 whole eggs, beaten
2 teaspoons just-grated nutmeg
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
8 slices firm-textured, day-old white bread, crusts removed, cut into 1-inch squares
In a medium sauté pan, melt the butter and sauté the onion with the mushrooms until both soften and the mushrooms give up their their liquors (if using dried mushrooms, strain the soaking liquid and add it to the sauté pan). Add the thinly sliced truffles or the truffle paste (if used) and combine well. Add the salt and pepper. In a large bowl, combine all the remaining ingredients except the bread and butter; season with liberal amounts of salt and pepper. Beat until well combined, then stir in the mushrooms, onions, and truffles. Melt the 4 tablespoons of butter in a sauté pan and brown the bread, tossing the pieces about until they are crisp. Place the pumpkin or squash in a large, heavy baking dish or on a baking sheet. Spoon one-third of the mushroom mixture into the pumpkin, add half the crisped bread, another third of the mushrooms, and the remaining bread, ending with the mushrooms. Top off with the pumpkin cap and roast at 375 degrees for 1½ hours or until the pumpkin’s flesh is very soft. Carry the pumpkin immediately to table, remove its hat, and spoon out portions of its flesh with the stuffing. The dish needs only a cool, flinty, dry white wine as accompaniment.
Yield: 8 to 10 servings
Vitello Brasato con Uve del Vino
Loin of Veal Braised with Wine Grapes
And this would have been the main course at our wedding lunch if I’d been cooking. A beautiful autumn dish full of color and surprise—the grapes plump and softened in the wine and the warm tartness of the fruit against the sweetness of the veal make for a fine marriage. If you’re not serving the pumpkin or any other substantial first course, serve this over garlic mashed potatoes. Change the veal to pork and the white wine to red wine. and you’ll have a heartier set of flavors.
12 veal tenderloins (about 4 ounces each)
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
3 tablespoons fresh rosemary leaves, finely minced
10 whole cloves of garlic, crushed
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1½ cups dry white wine
3 cups white or purple wine grapes (or table grapes)
1 tablespoon 12-year-old balsamic vinegar
Wipe the veal with paper towels and rub its surfaces with salt, rosemary, and crushed cloves. Heat oil and 4 tablespoons of butter over medium flame in a large sauté pan. When the butter begins to foam, add the tenderloins (only the number that fits comfortably in the pan without crowding). Sauté until golden on all sides, removing them to a holding plate while you cook the remaining ones. Rinse the sauté pan with the wine, scraping up any bits, and let the wine reduce for five minutes. Add the grapes and the browned veal to the pan and lower the flame so that the wine barely simmers. Gently braise the veal for 4 to 5 minutes or until the flesh begins to feel firm when you prod it with a finger. Don’t overcook the veal. Remove the veal to a platter, covering it very loosely so as not to “steam” it, and let it rest. Raise the flame and reduce the braising liquids once again, until they begin to thicken. Remove from the flame, add the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter and the balsamic vinegar. Stir well and pour the sauce over the veal. Don’t worry about the grape seeds or, if you must worry, America is full of the seedless ones.
Yield: 8 servings
Porcini Brasati con Moscato
Wild Mushrooms Braised in Late-Harvest Wine
Of all the dishes we cooked during our sojourn at the hotel next door to our apartment during the renovation, this one has earned the status of family treasure. We cook it anytime and everywhere we can barter, hunt, buy, or beg a basketful of porcini. After successful autumn hunts, we make a dose big enough to feed the neighbors, and we stage our own Sagra di Porcini.
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 pound of fresh wild mushrooms (porcini, cèpes, chanterelles, portobelli), wiped free of surface grit with a soft, damp cloth and thinly sliced
½ pound shallots, peeled and minced
fine sea salt and just-cracked pepper
1 cup Moscato or other late-harvest white wine
1 cup heavy cream
4–5 fresh sage leaves
Over medium flame, warm 3 tablespoons of butter with the olive oil in a large sauté pan and, when the butter foams, add the mushrooms and the shallots, tossing them about to coat them in the hot fat. Lower the flame and sauté until the mushrooms begin to give up their juices. Sprinkle salt and pepper generously over all. Add the wine and continue to braise gently for 20 minutes, until almost all the wine and the exuded juices have been absorbed by the mushrooms. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan over low flame, warm the heavy cream with the leaves of sage. When the mixture is close to simmering, remove from the stove and cover (the cream will take on the perfume of the sage while the mushrooms braise). Strain the cream and discard the sage. Now add the perfumed cream to the mushrooms and continue the very slow braise, permitting the cream to
reduce for 2 or 3 minutes. Serve the dish very warm with thin toast and glasses of the same chilled Moscato used in the braise.
Yield: 4 servings
Sgroppino
Lemon Gelato with Vodka and Sparkling Wine
I learned quickly to love this icy, creamy, addictive ending to nearly every lunch or dinner served in every osteria and ristorante across the Veneto. Alas, no one even knows what sgroppino is here in the Umbrian hills, where we now live. Though I never made the drink at home in Venice, after we moved I began to improvise it from sheer nostalgia. It is so light and goes down so easily, one feels almost noble about drinking it—as though one has forsaken dessert and settled for a cool drink. Here is our house version.
½ pint lemon ice cream or sherbert
4–6 ice cubes
4 ounces vodka
1 cup sparkling wine (in the Veneto, it’s the ever present Prosecco)
shredded zest of 1 lemon
Place the ice cream or sherbert, the ice, vodka, and wine in a blender and whirl until it’s thick, creamy, and barely pourable. Transfer it to iced wineglasses, sprinkle on the lemon zest, and serve with small spoons.
Acknowledgments
It was Sue Pollock who took me by the hand, saying, “First we have to find you the most wonderful agent.”
And Sue brought me straight to Rosalie Siegel who, like all magical people are wont to do, changed the course of my life. Rosalie is Jeanne d’Arc in a Chanel suit. She is a sage. Tenaciously, devotedly, and with that rare finesse of hers, she shepherded me and my story. Now I can’t imagine any story of mine without her.
From across six thousand miles of land and sea, Amy Gash reined me in. No less than a brilliant editor, she saved me from an excess of “floating, hovering, lunging, festooning, raising up, and dancing.” She helped me to lay down some old trappings, to stand up taller as a writer. Anyone who still thinks that editing is all about punctuation and grammar should know the depth of her work. Amy loved this story and cared, unstintingly, how I told it. And everywhere in this text that three adjectives remain still lined up in a row is a result of my stubbornness, a sign of the skirmish or two among our battles that Amy let me win.
This book was made by every Venetian who showed me the way or told me a secret, every one of you who sipped Prosecco with me, taught me a word, fed me, hugged me, rescued me. And cried with me. You are a race apart, a tribe more blessed than cursed and that I lived among you for those thousand days is a divine keepsake, one that burnishes even the thinnest blaze of the sun and keeps me warm.
Finally, it’s not that I don’t remember you, you about whom I did not write among these pages. It’s not even that I don’t remember you kindly or not so kindly, as the case may be. But this is such a small book and my life is such a long story that this is all I can say for now.
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
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a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2002 by Marlena de Blasi. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-56512-589-6