The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club
Page 28
Deflate the dough with a single deft punch, place it on a large sheet of baking paper and place the baking paper on a baking tray. Flatten the dough into a free-form circle about 1 centimetre thick. Press the small bunches of grapes or single grapes pulled from their stems over the dough. Leave a 3 centimetre border of dough around the edges grape-free. Evenly pour on the remaining perfumed oil, sprinkle the bread with the caster sugar and grind pepper over the whole with an un-shy hand. Cover lightly with a clean kitchen towel and allow to rise for 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F. Bake the flatbread for 30–35 minutes or a bit longer, until the edges are golden and swollen and the grapeskins have begun to burst. Cool the bread on the baking tray for 5 minutes then transfer it to a wire rack for further cooling. Best served warm, it can be baked several hours in advance of supper then very gently reheated at about 100°C/200°F.
La Ginuzza A Sweet–Salty ‘Cake’
I won’t apologise for setting down here yet another ‘androgynous’ recipe which serves just as magnificently with drinks before supper as it does passed about with a last glass of wine instead of dessert. Less will I wince in telling you again of the glorious harmonies struck by the mixing of rosemary and anise. My reach is toward authenticity rather than variety for variety’s sake. If you make this once, you’ll make it forever. It’s almost too simple, wants five minutes to mix and pat into its tin, less than half an hour in the oven. It’s meant to be broken rather than cut, passed about the table or sent hand to hand among a small group standing in a meadow to watch the sunset. If stored in an airtight metal tin, it keeps longer than most love affairs. You’ll give it your own name – Ginuzza is nothing more nor less than the diminutive of a friend who’s name is Gina Maria and who is inordinately fond of the thing.
TO SERVE 8 TO 10
INGREDIENTS
185 grams plus 15 grams unsalted butter at room temperature
25 grams plus 40 grams dark brown sugar
50 grams icing sugar
110 grams plain flour
160 grams coarsely ground cornmeal
½ tsp baking powder
1 tsp fine sea salt
2 tbsp anise seeds
2 tbsp plus 2 tbsp fresh rosemary leaves, finely chopped
1 ½ tsp sea salt flakes (fleur de sel) or coarse sea salt, pounded but not to a powder
THE METHOD
Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F. Smear the 1 tbsp of softened unsalted butter over the bottom and sides of a 30 centimetre metal cake tin. Set aside. In a medium bowl, cream 185 grams of softened butter with 25 grams of dark brown sugar and the icing sugar until smooth. A beater is hardly necessary. In another medium bowl, combine with your hands the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, fine sea salt, anise seeds and the 2 tbsp of chopped rosemary leaves. Add the dry mix to the butter/sugar mixture and, with the fingertips, combine the elements into a mass. Turn the mass out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead three or four times, just to further render it a more cohesive dough. Lightly pat the dough into the buttered tin, knuckling and pressing it to evenness.
In a cup, combine the remaining 40 grams of dark brown sugar, the remaining 2 tbsp chopped rosemary with the sea salt flakes or the pounded coarse sea salt and sprinkle the mixture evenly over the cake. Knuckle the surface one last time so that the herb/sugar/salt is ‘embedded’ into the dough. Bake the cake on the middle shelf of the oven for 20 minutes or until the cake has taken on a pale but distinctly gold colour. Don’t underbake. Let the cake cool in its tin for 10 minutes then turn it out onto a wire rack to cool completely at which time it will be ready to serve or to store. I prefer to divide the dose of dough into two 20 centimetre tins only because the cake is thinner, crisper, lighter that way.
Miranda’s Violenza – Piquant Herbed Olive Oil
As written in the narrative, Miranda kept a five-litre jug of this ‘violently’ herbed oil in her pantry and used it as a marinade for meats and vegetables to be grilled over her fire or to paint same after they’d been wood-charred. She smeared it over hot roasted bread to bring forth a rather unusual sort of bruschetta. She always claimed it was the only substance better than grappa to soothe bodily wounds and bruises.
It would hardly be worth the trouble to concoct less than two litres of this at a time. Use only the most beautiful fresh sage and rosemary and only white, crisp, juicy garlic. If the purple variety can be found and it, too, is crisp and juicy and with no green heart, grab it (promise yourself to avoid the obese, acidic heads of what is sometimes referred to as elephant garlic save, perhaps, to feed it to the animal whose name it bears).
Wild fennel flowers are not readily available in even the smartest little food shops. If you live near a river, it’s likely that wild fennel will be growing, here and there, along its banks. A tall, very tall stalk with a frothy yellow-flowered head, it is unmistakeable. Gather it by cutting the stalk rather than pulling it by its roots. With heavy string, tie the stalks in bunches of six or seven and suspend them, upside down, in a cool airy place to dry. A process which sometimes asks several months. The dried stalks can be used as a bed for roasting meat or fish while the dried heads, rubbed between the palms, yield a most astonishingly perfumed herb – delicate, assertive, lingering. Substitute good old fennel seed if all this foraging by a river is not part of your plan.
MAKES 2 LITRES
INGREDIENTS
2 litres of extra-virgin olive oil (please don’t think that because the oil will be herbed that an inferior quality will do)
4–6 branches of fresh sage leaves, depending upon the size of the leaves (don’t use dried sage; better to omit if fresh is not available)
3–4 branches of fresh rosemary (not the ornamental sort which is pretty to see but contains sparse essential oil)
2 tbsp dried fennel flowers or fennel seeds
Dried chillies (the quantity and variety are entirely a personal choice. I would use 10–12 dried ones of the variety we call diavolini, tiny, fierce but not vicious.)
2–3 heads of garlic (see note above)
THE METHOD
Stuff the sage branches (without tearing off the leaves), the rosemary branches (without stripping them of their leaves), the fennel flowers or seeds and the chillies (uncrushed) into the 2 litres of oil. Slap the heads of garlic with the flat of a knife and scrape the smashed, unpeeled cloves into the oil. Cork the oil, shake it, put it to rest in a cool, dark place. Give it a shake two or three times a day and in two weeks, it will be ready to use. As time passes, the violenza will become more so.
Note: One could scald the oil before adding the herbs but, according to Miranda, the result is far more pure and ‘fresh’ if time rather than heat ripens the various essences.
Zucca Arrostita Whole Roasted Cheese and Wild Mushroom-stuffed Pumpkin
I’d been making a version of this dish for years and years before I came to live in Italy, but when I tried to build it with the local, watery-fleshed, pimply, green-skinned things called Zucca Invernale, the result was less than good. It was in the Lombard city of Mantua where I first found small, green-skinned squash whose flesh most resembled the native American pumpkin. One October Saturday morning there, we filled the boot of our car with twenty-two squash, having been assured by the farmer that, if stored in a cool place, they would stay firm and fine until Easter. He was right. I stuffed and roasted and scooped and fed the Thursday Night tribe on them until Miranda finally took a mallet to the few which remained by February, roasted the pieces, mixed the flesh with white wine vinegar, crushed mustard seeds, mustard oil (bought here in the pharmacy) and sugar to make la mostarda di zucca, a luscious condiment (typical of the city of Cremona in the region of Lombardy) through which we dragged shards of pecorino and skated crusts of bread at the finish of many suppers.
TO SERVE 6 TO 8
INGREDIENTS
1 large good pumpkin (approx. 2 kilograms in weight). Slice off the top (keep to use later) remove the seeds and strings, then carv
e away a centimetre or so of its interior flesh with a thin, sharp knife. Also put this flesh aside with the top. Massage the pumpkin’s interior walls with fine sea salt.
45 grams plus 60 grams unsalted butter
2 large brown onions, peeled and finely chopped
The reserved pumpkin flesh
300 grams fresh wild mushrooms, (porcini, cepes, chanterelles, portobello) swiftly rinsed, then drained, dried and sliced thinly or 100 grams dried porcini, softened in 120ml warm water, stock or wine, drained and sliced thinly, the soaking liquid reserved
1 ½ tsp fine sea salt
A pepper grinder
720 grams mascarpone
300 grams emmentaler, grated
100 grams Parmigiano, grated
3 whole eggs, beaten with 80ml brandy or Cognac
2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
8 slices firm-textured, day-old white bread, crusts removed, cut into 2 cm squares
THE METHOD
In a medium sauté pan, melt 45 grams of unsalted butter and saute the onions, reserved pumpkin flesh (finely diced) and mushrooms until the mass softens and the mushrooms give up their juices (if using dried mushrooms, strain the soaking liquid and add it, at this point, to the sauté pan). Add the sea salt and give the pepper grinder three or four good turns.
In a large bowl combine all other elements save the bread and remaining butter. Beat the mass with a wooden spoon, stir in the onion, pumpkin and mushroom mixture. Melt 60 grams of butter in a sauté pan and in it brown the bread, tossing the pieces about until they are crisp and golden.
Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F. Place the readied pumpkin or squash in a large, heavy baking dish or on a baking tray. Spoon one-third of the cheese mixture into the pumpkin, add half the crisped bread, another third of the cheese, the remaining bread, ending with the remaining cheese mixture. Replace the pumpkin’s hat and roast it in the oven for 1½ hours or longer – until the pumpkin’s flesh is very soft when pierced with the tip of a sharp knife. Beware not to over-roast it to the point of collapse. The natural sugars in the pumpkin will caramelise and melt into the stuffing. It’s least perilous to serve the pumpkin in it’s roasting dish or on its baking tray, though it can be transferred to a warmed deep platter with the aid of two wide spatulas. In either case, a few autumn leaves, branches of bittersweet (or bacche as the wild orange berries are known here) would not be out of place. Most importantly, get it to the table quickly. Into warmed soup plates, spoon out the stuffing, scraping the spoon along the wall of the pumpkin shell for some of the good caramelised flesh.
Roasted Loin of Drunken Pork
This is an ‘interpreted’ version of the brandy-injected leg of wild boar Miranda proffered as her ‘final’ solo Thursday Night supper. Along with the boar, her method asked only three elements: brandy, juniper berries and sea salt. Here we forage and dry juniper berries to use in many game preparations and shun the already-dried berries which are sometimes available commercially, the reason being that the commercial variety lack the delicacy of ours and can, even when used sparingly, trounce every possibility of achieving the desired complexity of flavours in a dish.
If one is partial to the taste of good Dutch gin with its decisive but still pastel juniper flavour, one could inject it into the pork rather than brandy. I have done this often and always with fine results. As usual, much depends on the quality of the pork (organic, corn-fed), and the quality of the gin or the brandy. One would hardly be amiss using Cognac, Armagnac or Calvados.
TO SERVE 8 TO 10
INGREDIENTS
A large injector or disposable syringe
A bottle of gin or brandy or any of the others mentioned above
A leg of fresh, young, organic pork, bone-in, weighing 2–3 kilograms
12 whole allspice berries, coarsely crushed and mixed with 2 tbsp fine sea salt
480ml dry Marsala or dry sherry
THE METHOD
Fill the injector or syringe with the gin or brandy and, with an un-shy hand, insert it deeply into the flesh of the pork, expelling all the liquid. Repeat the process over all surfaces of the meat. Place the injected meat into a deep ceramic or enamelled dish, cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate. (Shockingly dangerous as it will seem, we don’t refrigerate but simply retire the meat to rest in a cool place.) Several times during the first day, repeat the injection process. On the second day, once again repeat the injections, carefully covering and refrigerating the meat. On the third day, preheat the oven to 230°C/450°F. Inject the meat all over its surfaces for the last time, then score the skin in a criss-cross fashion, cutting right down into the flesh, so that the skin will roast to a good gold, hard crackle. (Should there be gin or brandy left in the bottle, resist pouring it out for the cook since it will come in handy a bit later.)
Now rub the entire leg with the allspice/sea salt mixture, place the leg on a roasting rack set in a large roasting pan and roast at the high temperature for 30 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 180°C/350°F and continue to roast the leg for 20 minutes per 500 grams.
Remove the roasting pan from the oven but not the leg from its rack in the pan. Leave it to rest for 15–30 minutes, uncovered. Tenting the leg with foil or covering it in any way will risk softening the crackled skin. After the leg has rested, transfer it to a cutting board. Place the roasting pan over a medium–high flame, add what’s left in the gin or brandy bottle and the dry Marsala. Scrape and stir to release the clinging bits and reduce the liquid by one third.
On an Umbrian table, no sauce would be served with the meat, its succulence already assured by the liquor-plumping process. Slice the pork and its crackled skin and, if you must, drizzle with the reduced pan juices. Otherwise, serve the juices as a sauce for buttered pasta before serving the roast. (An example of ‘the conducting thread’ through a meal.)
Though the pork is delicious served warm, it is equally delicious served at room temperature. No rushing here to get hot, hot ‘meat and gravy’ to the table.
What to serve with the roast? Good bread and good wine. Resist ‘apple sauce’ or any such travesty. A bowl of wine-plumped, spiced dried prunes would not be inappro priate nor would a dish of fine whole-fruit Cremona mostarda if such is to be found wherever you are.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BOOKS ARE OFTEN MADE AS MUCH OF CALAMITY AS OF blessing. In the case of Supper Club, it was my splendidly perceptive editor at Hutchinson in London, Sarah Rigby, who provided rescue from the former and an abundance of the latter. If Sarah had a theme song it would be ‘Amazing Grace’.
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Copyright © Marlena de Blasi 2015
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First published by Hutchinson in 2015
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ISBN 9780091954307