An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  The Sunday Times, 1 December 1957

  1. The Big Heat by William McGovern, Penguin.

  Sweet Vegetables, Soft Wines

  Why is it that Italian wines are so seldom featured on the wine lists of restaurants other than those which serve specifically Italian food? Italy produces a great variety, as well as a very large quantity of wines, and it does seem rather unimaginative to confine them to drinking entirely with Italian food. In the repertory of French regional and country cooking there are surely scores of dishes with which an authentic Italian wine would make a most refreshing change from the inevitable Beaujolais, and in fish restaurants especially, the too familiar and usually unidentifiable Chablis. Personally, I would welcome the occasional offer of a Verdicchio with the mussels, a fresh, light Frascati with the sole and spinach. And as far as the red wines are concerned, the lighter ones of Verona and Garda harmonize uncommonly well with pâtés, the fuller ones of Piedmont and Tuscany with daubes of beef, hot cheese dishes, rich ox-tail stews, game birds, herb-flavoured chickens.

  Then for that matter, why not Italian wines with English food? We are, after all, more practised than are the people of wine-growing countries at the game of matching our dishes to appropriate wines. I have found that roast duck and a bottle of Piedmontese Barolo make a most excellent combination. And I think that a Barbera from the same region should do particularly well with a steak, kidney and mushroom pudding, or a jugged hare, while a Chianti Classico is a wine for roast lamb or a handsome joint of pork, as indeed it is in its native country, where the whole roast pigs, marvellously aromatic with wild fennel and whole garlic cloves roasted golden and translucent, are one of the most splendid features of Tuscan food markets. Impaled on a huge pole, the pig is carved to order, hefty slices, each with a portion of the golden garlic cloves scooped out from the inside, are handed to you with a big hunk of bread and wrapped in a paper napkin. The local housewives are buying it for the midday meal, but we are tourists, so we go off to another stall to buy cheese, perhaps a good big piece of Parmesan, finest of all cheeses with red wine. And we drive off, up into the beautiful Tuscan hills to find a picnic place in the warm autumn sun. We are worlds away from the baked lasagne, the veal with ham and mushrooms, the standard caramelized oranges and Bertorelli ices of everybody’s Italian trattoria down the road. And although here in England we cannot hope to reproduce anything very close to true Italian country food (the ingredients are so elusive – where is the veal, where the good Parmesan, where the sweet, pale rose Parma ham, the fish straight out of the sea, the fruity Tuscan olive oil?) we can at least enjoy Italian wines and an increasingly large variety of them, without going to the local pizza house or trattoria, and with food of our own cooking and choosing. I do suggest too that these wines will benefit by being served with a shade less of that careless abandon which characterizes the Italian trattoria wine waiter. Open the red wines well in advance, don’t chill the whites until they are as frozen as a sorbet.

  For the pork dish, which I have chosen as being a good one with Italian red wine, I would settle for a flask of Chianti Classico Montepaldi, a very typical Chianti, clean and bright, not too heavy. A lighter wine, the delicious estate-bottled Lamberti Valpolicella from the Verona district would also be a happy choice. This wine incidentally is one which I would fancy for the Christmas turkey, while the full and fragrant red Torgiano from Umbria would be lovely with a roast fillet of beef, should anyone be rich enough for such a luxury this year. And for everyday drinking nobody should despise the much cheaper Tuscan red wine. It seems to me to offer remarkable value. But this wine too will improve noticeably if given an hour or two to breathe. At normal room temperature. NOT, please not, in front of the fire. And the corner of the Aga is the place for the kettle, not for the red wine.

  STUFFED AND ROLLED PORK

  A dish of Italian origin, and, properly, made with veal. But since in England veal is so hard to come by, so expensive, and so different in quality from Italian veal, I have found that it is best to make the dish with pork which is very successful cooked in this manner.

  Buy a piece of loin of pork boned by the butcher and weighing after boning 2½ to 3 lb. The joint should also have the rind removed. Other ingredients are 2 whole eggs, 2 thin slices of mild cooked ham, parsley, about 1 oz. of grated Parmesan, a small onion, ¾ pint of milk, butter and olive oil, seasonings of salt, freshly ground pepper, grated nutmeg, a clove of garlic.

  Put the meat upon a board and flatten it out with a rolling pin; season it. Cut the peeled garlic clove into little slivers and set them neatly over the surface of the meat. With the eggs, chopped ham and parsley (about 2 tablespoons), and the cheese and seasonings make an ordinary omelette but don’t fold it. It is to be spread flat upon the meat, which you then roll up and tie as neatly and securely as possible into a nice fat sausage, not, however, tying the string too tightly, or the stuffing will burst out during the cooking.

  In a small oval cocotte, braising pan, or other utensil in which the meat will fit without too much room to spare, melt 1 oz. of butter and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. In this melt the chopped onion until it turns yellow. Put in the meat, let it gently brown on both sides. Pour in the heated milk. It is important that the milk be scalding hot. Let it just come back to simmering point. Cover the pot with foil or paper and a lid. Transfer it to a slow oven (gas no. 2, 310°F.) for 2 to 2¼ hours, then remove the meat and keep it warm in the oven. Transfer the pan containing the sauce to the top of the stove and let it cook fairly fast, stirring it continuously until the thin part of the liquid has reduced by about half. Press the sauce quickly through a fine wire sieve and pour it over and round the meat (having first removed the string). Sprinkle some parsley over the top, and your dish is ready to be served with a few plain, new potatoes. And it is just as good cold as hot. There should be ample for six people.

  The pork rind and the bones should not be wasted. They will make very good stock.

  *

  Now for two dishes which should really bring out the charms of the sweeter white table wines of Italy. One of the recipes is for Florentine fennel, and perhaps it sounds freakish to suggest a sweet wine with a vegetable dish. But consider a moment. When the experts make a big production of choosing food to go with their wines, I wonder how often it is remembered that many vegetables are very sweet, that they quarrel badly with the claret chosen for the lamb, distort the burgundy with the game? Who stops to think that chestnuts, parsnips, peas, carrots, turnips, celery, Belgian endives, onions, even to a certain extent potatoes have potent overtones of sugar in their make-up which are intensified by the so-called classic French methods of cooking them to an almost caramelized state of sweetness. Think, for instance, of navets glacés, carottes Vichy, and those small golden, syrupy onions which accompany so many French meat and chicken dishes. Delicious, but they don’t help the red wine. Try these same vegetables as a separate course after the meat or fish, and you find that they almost take the place of a sweet or pudding. Mangetout peas are a good example. Their alternative name of sugar peas should provide sufficient indication of their qualities, and to me it is all wrong to muddle these exquisitely delicate and sweet vegetables with meat and potatoes, sauce and gravy. They should always be eaten as a separate course. With them try one of the naturally sweet wines of Italy, the ones they call amabile (soft rather than luscious or rich). They make a most interesting partnership with sweetish vegetables, perhaps even better than they do with a dessert dish proper for which they are not full enough. In fact the Lacrima Christi del Vesuvio, a wine which in the past I have not much appreciated, has proved quite a revelation to me when I have drunk it with a gratin of Florentine fennel. The two have a real affinity. This wine – which should be drunk chilled, but not with all the fragrance frozen out of it – is also very successful with dishes based on white cream cheese, either sweet or savoury. Italian cooking offers a rich variety of such dishes, the savoury ones often mixed with spinach, the sweet ones with c
loves, nutmeg, cinnamon.

  Orvieto amabile (the one in the flask) to my mind far more attractive and somehow more natural and right than the dry version, is a little sweeter than the Lacrima Christi, and makes a happy partnership with cooked dessert apples, or provides a nice finish to a meal when served with delicate little biscuits or cakes such as French madeleines. This wine should be well chilled.

  FLORENTINE FENNEL WITH PARMESAN

  This is a simple and refreshing vegetable dish; it is surprising that it is not better known; it consists of the bulbous root stems of the Florentine or sweet fennel – this form of fennel now arrives in England from Israel, Kenya, Morocco and sometimes from France and Italy, during the late summer and again in the very early spring. The sweet, aniseed-like flavour of the plant is not to everybody’s taste, but to those who do like it, it is quite an addiction.

  For this dish, allow a minimum of one large fennel bulb – for want of an alternative short name, that is what everyone calls these root stems – per person. Other ingredients are butter, grated Parmesan cheese, and breadcrumbs. Trim the bulbs by slicing off the top stalks, the thick base, and removing all the stringy outer layers of leaves. There is a good deal of waste. Slice the bulbs in half, longitudinally. Plunge them into a saucepan of boiling salted water. According to size they should cook for 7 to 10 minutes. When tender enough to be pierced fairly easily with a skewer, drain them.

  Have ready a buttered gratin dish or the appropriate number of individual dishes. In this arrange the fennel halves, cut side down. Strew breadcrumbs over them (approximately 1 tablespoon per bulb) then grated Parmesan (again, 1 tablespoon per bulb) and finally a few little knobs of butter. Put the gratin dish in a medium oven (gas no. 4, 350°F.) and leave for 10 to 15 minutes until the cheese and breadcrumbs are very pale gold, and bubbling.

  APPLES WITH LEMON AND CINNAMON

  A cool and fresh sweet dish to serve after a rich or heavy meat course.

  Core, peel and slice (as for an apple flan) some good eating apples, preferably Cox’s, allowing two apples per person. Put the cores and peel into a saucepan with a heaped dessertspoon of sugar and a slice of lemon, peel included, for each apple. Cover amply with water and cook to a syrup. This will take about 7 minutes’ rapid boiling.

  Put the sliced apples into a skillet, sauté pan, or frying pan. Over them strain the prepared syrup. Cover the pan and cook over moderate heat until the apples are soft but not broken up. Add more sugar if necessary.

  Arrange the apples in a shallow serving dish, with a few lemon slices on the top – for decoration and for the scent. These apples can be eaten hot or cold.

  An alternative method of cooking this dish, much easier when you are making a large quantity, is to arrange the sliced apples in an oven dish, pour the prepared syrup over them, cover the dish (with foil, if you have no lid) and cook in a moderate oven (gas no. 3 to 4, 325 to 340°F.) for 25 to 35 minutes. Serve the apples in the dish in which they have cooked, not forgetting the final sprinkling of cinnamon.

  An alternative flavouring for those who do not care for cinnamon is a vanilla pod, cut in half and put in with the apples before cooking. The lemon slices are still included in the flavouring of the syrup.

  Wine Mine, 25 November 1973

  Bruscandoli

  One fine morning early in May, 1969, with my sister Diana Grey and her husband, I arrived at the island of Torcello to lunch at Cipriani’s lovely little Locanda, famous both for its cooking and its charm. I knew the place of old, so did the fourth member of our party. To my sister and brother-in-law it was new. This was their first visit to Venice. For all of us the trip was a particularly magical one.

  When we had settled at our table and ordered our food – the jugs of house wine were at our elbows as we sat down – I became aware of a couple at a neighbouring table exclaiming with rapture over their food. They were a handsome and elegant pair. I wondered what was so special about the rice dish which was giving them such pleasure. They in turn noticed my curiosity. With beautiful Italian manners they passed some across to me, explaining that it was a risotto unique to Venice and unique to this particular season. It was made with a green vegetable called bruscandoli, or brucelando. Wild asparagus, so they explained. It was so good that I called the waiter and changed my order. A most delicate and remarkable risotto it was. The manager of the restaurant told me that only during the first ten days of May can this particular wild asparagus be found in the Venetian countryside.

  Next day, we all went to another of the lagoon islands, to lunch at Romano’s on Burano. Surprise. There were our friends again, and again the green risotto was on the menu. They had of course ordered it. So did we. This time they told me I might find some brucelando in the Rialto market if I went early enough in the morning. Hurry though. The season ends any day now. When the charming and splendid pair had left, I asked the proprietor of the tavern who they were. Ah, you mean the Isotta-Fraschini? The inheritors of the name of that wonderful and glamorous automobile of the twenties and thirties, no less. No wonder they carried about them the aura of romance, and, he especially, of the authentic Italian magnifico. So, to me, the name of Isotta-Fraschini is now indissolubly linked with the memory of those extraordinary and subtle risotti of the Venetian lagoons.

  We went again to Torcello to eat bruscandoli, I went to the Rialto market, found an old woman selling a few bunches of it – it’s the last of the year, she said – took it back to my hotel, stuck it in a glass so that I could make a drawing of it. When I came back in the evening the zealous chambermaid had thrown it away. No, next morning there was no old lady selling bruscandoli in the market. For once it was true, that warning ‘tomorrow it will be finished’.

  I searched the cookery books and the dictionaries for more details of the wild asparagus. I could find no descriptions, no references. Months later in a little book about Venetian specialities I discovered the following sentence: ‘le minestre più usate sono quelle di riso: con bruscandoli (luppolo) kumo (finocchio selvatico) …’1 So bruscandoli is Venetian for luppoli. And luppoli or cime di luppolo are wild hop-shoots.

  It is of course well known that hop-shoots have a flavour much akin to that of asparagus, and the confusion is a common one. All the same, it was curious that neither the local Venetians to whom I talked, nor the knowledgeable Isotta-Fraschini couple should have known that hop-shoots rather than asparagus were used in those famous risotti. Maybe they did but didn’t know the alternative word (in the Milan region they have yet another name, loertis) and thought that wild asparagus was a near enough approximation. The truth is, that when I bought the brucelando in the market, it didn’t look much like any kind of asparagus, so I was suspicious. But it didn’t look like hops either. And wild hop-shoots I had never before seen.

  Research has yielded various other regional Italian dishes made with bruscandoli or luppoli. In her little book La Cucina Romana dealing with the old specialities of Roman cooking, Ada Boni gives a recipe for a zuppa di luppoli, and I have heard of a frittata or flat omelette with hop-shoots in Tuscany and also in the more northerly region of Brianza. In Belgium hop-shoots are equally a speciality. They are called jets de houblon.

  Of the virtues of hops

  As we know, hops were introduced into England only during the reign of Henry VIII. Fifty years later, by the latter part of his daughter Elizabeth’s life, the shoots of the cultivated plant were evidently accepted as a delicacy resembling asparagus. Dr Muffet, author of Health’s Improvement, written during the 1590s but published only in 1655, fifty-one years after the author’s death, even calls them lupularii asparagi. ‘Hop-shoots’, he says, ‘are of the same nature with Asparagus, nourishing not a little, being prepared in the like sort, though rather cleansing and scouring of their own nature.’ In other words, hop-shoots were yet another of the precious blood-purifying herbs of spring, so welcome and so necessary in the days when the winter diet was predominantly one of salt meat and fish, dried pulses, bread.

  A
n Italian doctor, Baldassare Pisanelli of Bologna, went a great deal further than his contemporary Dr Muffet in praise of hops and their health-giving properties. Pisanelli’s Trattato della Natura dei Cibi, et del Bere, or Treatise on the Nature of Foods and Beverages, was first published in Rome in 1583. It was evidently a popular and influential book, for it was continuously in print for the next two hundred years. Hops, declared Dr Pisanelli, ‘are the best of all edible herbs’… ‘they refresh the blood and cleanse it… they are also efficacious in cleansing the stomach organs in particular the liver, and the wonder is that with so many virtues they are so little used, for in truth the benefits they confer are most marvellous, and immediate. They are much esteemed in Germany and other northern countries … the shoots are eaten cooked, in salad … they loosen the bowels and move obstructions, the decoction of flowers and leaves clears bad smells and cures the itch. The syrup is miraculous in choleric fevers and the plague.’

  The only breath of criticism the good doctor has to make of hops is that if gathered with their tendrils and hard stalks they are of difficult digestion, and even the tender ones are still slightly windy. The defect however, is remedied by cooking and ‘the shoots are then of blameless virtue, and of great benefit to those who eat them dressed with oil and vinegar.’1

  In no way qualified to comment on Dr Pisanelli’s eulogy of the hop’s healthful and healing properties, I can confirm only that wild hop-shoots, at least as cooked in the famous risotto of the Venetian lagoons, are certainly very delicious. It comes, therefore, as no great surprise to discover from Rupert Croft-Cooke’s entertaining book Exotic Food (Allen & Unwin, 1969) that there are gardeners in Kent who grow hops especially for the shoots, although Mr Croft-Cooke says that he himself learned of their excellence through his association with gypsies.