An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  TO PREPARE HOP-SHOOTS

  The following advice comes from a Belgian chef, author of La Cuisine et la Pâtisserie Bourgeoises, 2nd edition (J. Lebègue & Cie, Paris and Brussels, 1896).

  ‘They are obtained by earthing up the plants with light soil, as for asparagus. The shoots used as a vegetable should be of the greatest freshness, if possible picked on the day of use. Take each shoot by its earthy extremity between the thumb and index finger of the left hand; slide the same fingers of the right hand down the shoot, bending it and pulling it down towards the point; the straight part of the broken shoot is edible; what remains in the left hand is fibrous and should be discarded.

  ‘Rinse the shoots thoroughly in ample cold water. As soon as they are washed, cook them in plenty of boiling water lightly acidulated with lemon juice or vinegar; keep them on the firm side. Drain them. The slightly bitter taste of the shoots, which for connoisseurs constitutes their special quality, is lost if they are overcooked.

  ‘Plunge them into cold water for a second, to arrest the cooking. The hop-shoots are now ready for eating with olive oil and lemon juice or with melted butter, or in any other of the ways appropriate to the asparagus sprue they so much resemble.’

  The risotto al bruscandoli of Torcello and Burano I have never had the opportunity to cook for myself, so I shall not attempt to give a recipe here. Indeed a Venetian risotto is a dish notoriously difficult to reproduce anywhere else. The finest quality of round-grained risotto rice from the Po valley, essential to the success of the dish, is hard to come by nowadays, and few English people appreciate its importance or are willing to accept the fact that long-grained pilau rice simply will not cook to the subtle, rich creaminess of texture characteristic of the refined and aristocratic risotti of the Veneto. So here instead are a few interesting recipes for other dishes which may be of interest to anyone who has access to hop-shoots, wild or cultivated.

  BUDS OF HOPPES

  ‘Seeth them with a little of the tender stalke in faire water: and put them in a Dish over coales with Butter, and so serve them to the Table.’

  J. Murrell, A New Book of Cookerie. Set forth by the observation of a Traveller. J.M. London. Printed for John Browne, and are to be solde at his shop in S. Dunstanes Church-yard 1615

  ZUPPA DI LUPPOLI (hop soup)

  ‘Hop-shoots, which have a distant point of contact with asparagus are called lupari in Rome and are sold by street vendors, who cry them with the characteristic chant ‘lupari, lupari’. They make a good soup in the following manner.

  ‘You clean and rinse the shoots and put them in a pan with oil, a little garlic and a few small pieces of raw ham. Leave them to cook a little, season them with salt and pepper and cover them with plenty of water. Cover the pan and let them finish cooking very gently. When cooking is complete there should be enough broth to make the number of bowls of soup you need. In the soup tureen put some slices of toasted bread, over them pour the hop-shoots and their liquid. Leave to soak a moment or two and then take to the table.

  ‘This is the simplest method of making hop-shoot soup, but it is general usage to enrich the soup with a few eggs. In this case, you beat the eggs as for an omelette, pour them directly into the pot allowing one egg for each bowl, and stir well. Leave the soup in its pot away from the heat for a minute or two before transferring it to the soup tureen.’

  Ada Boni, La Cucina Romana (Edizioni Delia Rivista Preziosa, Rome, 1947)

  It seems curious that Ada Boni, author of Italy’s most famous twentieth-century cookery book Il Talismano delta Felicità should have found that hop-shoots had only so distant a relationship with asparagus. Could it be that she was applying the highly critical standards of a Roman accustomed to the true wild asparagus, those incomparably flavoured little asparagi del campo of Rome beside which all other asparagus seems insipid?

  Here is an alternative hop-shoot soup, an English recipe unusual in our eighteenth-century cookery literature.

  HOP-TOP SOUP

  ‘Take a large quantity of hop-tops, in April, when they are in their greatest perfection; tie them in bunches twenty or thirty in a bunch; lay them in spring-water for an hour or two, drain them well from the water, and put them to some thin pease soup; boil them well, and add three spoonfuls of the juice of onions, some pepper, and salt; let them boil some time longer; when done, soak some crusts of bread in the broth, and lay them in the tureen, then pour in the soup.

  ‘This is a plain soup, but very good; the French pour in some cray fish cullis.’

  Mrs Charlotte Mason, The Lady’s Assistant (a new edition, 1786; first published 1775)

  FRITTATA CONILOERTIS (hop-shoot omelette)

  ‘The loertis or wild hop-shoots are cut into small pieces, and so long as they are really tender (this omelette should be made only in the spring) they are not cooked but mixed into the beaten eggs just before the frittata is made.’

  Ottorina Perna Bozzi, Vecchia Brianza in Cucina (Martello Editore, 1968)

  The Brianza is the Montevecchio-Como-Monza region of Lombardy, the countryside of Manzoni’s famous novel The Betrothed. And, for those not already familiar with Italian cookery, a frittata is a flat omelette, rather thick and solid, usually cooked in olive oil rather than butter.

  Herbal Review, Spring 1979

  *

  Following the publication of my article, a Mr G. Amory of Nevers, France wrote to The Herbal Review expressing doubts as to my identification of bruscandoli with hop shoots. ‘By May in the Veneto wild hops would be a tough tangle’ Mr Amory wrote. In addition he provided a fine red herring in the shape of a surmise that my bruscandoli was really a plant called ornithogalum pyre-naicum, in England called Bath asparagus.

  The ornithogalum theory was easily disposed of. The identity of bruscandoli as luppolo is beyond question. I supplied detailed evidence for my statement, starting with a check in the great Venetian – Italian dictionary of 1876 (there is a copy in the reference room of the London Library) and this was published in the 1979 Summer number of The Herbal Review. There was still, however, the point made by Mr Amory concerning the apparent lateness of the season during which I had eaten wild hop shoots in Venice, and I felt that it was worth enlarging upon this. My published notes on the strictly seasonal aspect of the minestra and the bruscandoli risotto were as follows:

  ‘The minestra can be made only in the month of April, at which period all the vegetable stalls of the famous Rialto market have it for sale. The traditional and characteristic minestra is still much in use in Venetian households … the taste of bruscandoli is midway between spinach and asparagus’ wrote a Venetian author, Mariu Salvatori de Zuliani in A Tola Co i Nostri Veci (At Table with our Ancestors) published in 1971 by Franco Angeli, Milano. It was perhaps misleading that the opening sentence of my article had been ‘One fine morning in early May’. Well, it certainly was fine, and it certainly was May. But the operative word was early. To be precise it was May 3rd. And three or four days later, as I wrote, bruscandoli had vanished from the market.

  In our English world of produce imported all the year round from all parts of the globe – strawberries from Mexico, asparagus from California, lichees from Israel, courgettes from Kenya – it is from time to time an intense pleasure to rediscover, as in Venice one does, the delicate climatic line dividing the vegetables and salads and fruit of spring from those of summer. Because of that dividing line, because they were so very much there one day and vanished the next, bruscandoli became a particularly sharp and poignant memory. In England, incidentally, wild hop shoots can be found as late as the first week of June, but I hope that those who may find them will keep the information to themselves. Were the fussy fashionable restaurants whose proprietors boast that they serve such delicacies as ‘wild’ mushrooms, smoked wild rabbit and wild seaweed to start featuring wild hop shoots on their menus the species would very soon become extinct.

  1. ‘The most popular minestre are those based on rice: with wild hops, wild fennel …’, Ugo
Azzalin, Di Alcune Minestre Venete e Particolarmente Vicentine con le Buone Norme per preparare i Soffriti (Editore Neri Pozza, Vicenza 1968).

  1 Some while after writing my hop-shoot article I came across an interesting mention of lupoli, cioè bruscandoli in Scappi’s great Opera of 1570. He lists them in the third service of a Good Friday dinner (p 393 of the 1643 edition). Scappi was personal cook to Pope Pius V.

  Mafalda, Giovanna, Giulia

  Mafalda

  In the early 1950s, Mafalda and her husband ran a small restaurant in the village of Anacapri and willingly gave me several of their recipes for Southern Italian dishes. But when it came to the bottled pimentos it was a different matter. These pimentos were rather a speciality of Mafalda’s, and they were by far the best I had’ever tasted; she used to serve them as an antipasto: beautiful, brilliant scarlet strips of tender sweet peppers lightly sprinkled with olive oil and parsley and chopped garlic. ‘Come back in the summer’, Mafalda would say, ‘and I will show you.’ So I went back in the summer, and by the end of August the market stalls near the Piazza in Capri were loaded to bursting with the most magnificent red and yellow peppers. ‘Shall I bring you back some peppers from the Piazza tomorrow morning?’ I would say hopefully to Mafalda. ‘Oh, no, it is too soon; on Thursday perhaps.’ On Thursday Mafalda would observe that the pimentos were not just quite ripe enough – another twenty-four hours and no doubt they would be ready. This went on for nearly a month, while my host and hostess on the island must have been wondering if I was ever going to leave. At last Mafalda relented: the weather was fine, the moon no doubt was in the right quarter, the peppers were fat and fleshy, the price was as low as was compatible with the goods still being in their prime. It would drop again, but then it would be too late; there might be a risk of getting one or two which were not quite sound.

  As it turned out, it was well worth waiting, because year after year I have used Mafalda’s method of bottling peppers with great success. A number of people, however, have questioned whether it is possible to do this preserve without oil. The answer is, yes it is, and I think it is because of this that they are so good, for the addition of oil tends to make the peppers soggy.

  It is difficult to say exactly when in the autumn the season for bottling peppers will arrive, since this depends not only on where you are but also on the weather conditions each year. Indeed, here in England I have sometimes waited until November for peppers in the condition prescribed by Mafalda.

  CONSERVA DI PEPERONI (preserved pimentos)

  Having obtained a number of the above described large, ripe and fleshy red sweet peppers, and some screw-top preserving jars, you impale the peppers on a long-handled toasting fork and hold them right in the gas flame of your cooker, or immediately under the grill if it is an electric cooker. (Mafalda cooked on a charcoal stove, and the peppers were placed directly on the glowing embers.) Turn them round and round until the skin is completely charred and blackened.

  As soon as each pepper is cool enough to handle peel off all the blackened skin, rinsing them in cold water from time to time to facilitate the process. Every speck of black skin must be removed, and it is a tedious process. The stalks and cores and all seeds must also be discarded. It is at this stage of the proceedings that one appreciates the reasons for waiting until the peppers are very fat and fleshy, because if they are unripe it is difficult to remove the skins and there would be very little of the flesh left by the time you had done so.

  Each skinned pepper is now sliced into strips about half an inch wide and these are packed into preserving jars. Pound-size jars are best for a small household because once opened this preserve must be fairly quickly eaten up. (Mafalda used wine bottles, still a common practice in the country in Italy where it would be thought wasteful to buy special preserving jars; she tied the corks with a piece of string with that deft manipulative skill which appears to be instinctive to all Italians.)

  Having filled your jars, add a teaspoon of salt to each, and, if possible, a couple of basil leaves. Screw down the tops, and wrap each jar in a cloth or in several sheets of newspaper – this is a precaution to prevent the jars touching each other during the next stage of cooking. The jars are now to be laid flat1 in a large pan and completely covered with cold water. Bring to the boil and continue boiling for 15 minutes. When quite cold, remove from the pan and make sure that the tops are screwed as tight as they will go.

  I have kept jars of peppers preserved in this way in the autumn until well into the following summer; but, as for all preserves, a dry airy larder or cupboard is essential.2

  Giovanna

  SPAGHETTI WITH CHICKEN LIVERS AND LEMON

  This is an unexpected combination of flavours and textures. I haven’t seen the recipe in print before. It was given to me some years ago by Giovanna, the young Tuscan girl who cooked it in a country restaurant, now alas vanished, in a remote part of the Chianti district of Tuscany. Far from any town or village, lost among the trees on a gentle hill overlooking a man-made reservoir, the restaurant didn’t even have a name. We called it ‘the lake place’. There was no telephone. If we wanted to make sure of a table we would drive up the previous day to order our meal, but sometimes we would take a chance, arriving at midday and hoping that Giovanna would have some of her freshly-made pasta for us. We were never disappointed. Giovanna was a most original and gifted pasta cook, and it was on a day when we had turned up without warning that she first gave us this delicious dish. Her pasta, by the way, was made with 7 eggs to the kilo of flour, the more normal allowance being 5.

  Ingredients: for 500 gr. of spaghetti, 5 eggs, 3 large chicken livers (about 100 gr. in all – Tuscan chickens are well fed and their livers art large), 100 gr. of Italian raw lean ham or coppa, 4 or 5 cloves of garlic, 1 lemon, 200 gr. of grated Parmesan or pecorino cheese, seasonings of salt, pepper and nutmeg, 150 gr. of olive oil.

  Cook the spaghetti al dente, in the Italian way. While it is cooking prepare the sauce. Put the olive oil in a sauté pan. Clean the chicken livers, cut them in small pieces. Peel the garlic cloves and crush them with salt on a board. (You must use your judgement about the amount of garlic. You may find that just one or two small cloves are sufficient. It would be a mistake, though, to leave it out altogether.) Cut the ham into fine strips.

  Warm the olive oil, throw in the chicken livers, add the ham, the garlic, salt, freshly milled pepper, and the coarsely grated lemon peel. The cooking of all these ingredients should take scarcely three minutes. The chicken livers will be spoiled and tasteless if they are overcooked.

  Now, in a big bowl beat 1 whole egg and 4 yolks. Add the grated cheese and a sprinkling of nutmeg.

  When your spaghetti is ready, drain it (see Note 1 below), turn it into a big, deep, heated dish.

  Quickly, pour the egg and cheese mixture into the sauté pan containing the hot olive oil and chicken livers, garlic and ham. Mix all together very thoroughly, but away from the heat. Now amalgamate the sauce with the pasta, turning it over and over, as if you were mixing a salad. The eggs cook in the heat from the pasta. You must have warm deep plates ready. Your guests must be ready too. Tepid pasta is as dismal as a fallen soufflé. 500 gr. of pasta should be ample for 4 to 5 people, 100 gr. per person being the usual Italian allowance.

  Notes

  1. It is a mistake to drain pasta too thoroughly. A little of the water it has cooked in should always go into the dish with it. This helps to keep it moist and retain the heat.

  2. Enormous quantities of chickens are eaten in Tuscany. Hence the regional cooking provides many ways of using up the livers. One of the most popular of these dishes is called crostini. The livers are quickly cooked in butter or olive oil, well-seasoned, mashed to a rough purée and spread on oven-toasted, French-type bread. These hot crostini are invariably served as part of an antipasto or hors-d’œuvre, usually with a fine big dish of locally cured salame and raw ham. Anyone who would like to try the chicken liver and lemon mixture without the pasta and eggs will
find that it makes an excellent little spread for crostini. They are good as an accompaniment to scrambled eggs.

  3. At the lake, as at many other Tuscan country restaurants, the meals always followed much the same pattern: a platter of locally cured raw ham (the lake family produced their own) and various salame, accompanied by hot crostini spread with fresh chicken liver or sometimes anchovy paste; a gigantic dish of pasta; meat or birds or rabbit – or all three – cut into chunks and roasted on a narrow spit in front of a wood fire; fried vegetables such as aubergines, sliced leaf-artichokes in batter, tomatoes, fruit, and another big platter of very thin light crisp cenci, strips or, more literally, rags and tatters of a sweet pastry batter deep-fried to a crackly pale gold in olive oil, and dusted with icing sugar. With these, a bottle of the local sweet white wine, called vin santo, was put on the table in one of the old, now fast-vanishing, straw-covered flasks.

  Giulia

  Giulia Piccini was Tuscan. She came from a hill village near Florence, and during the fifties she cooked for Derek Hill, the English painter, who at that time occupied the villino in the garden of I Tatti, Bernard Berenson’s villa at Settignano. Giulia’s cooking was like herself, elegant and delicate – in bearing she was more the fastidious aristocrat than the sturdy peasant – subtly seasoned, but with unexpected contrasts, as in a cold, uncooked tomato sauce which she served with hot dry rice. Conversely, riso ricco, or rich rice, consists of plain white rice left to cool until barely more than lukewarm, when a hot cheese sauce resembling a fonduta is poured over it. Not an easy dish to get right, but when it comes off, glorious.