Omelette and a Glass of Wine (16 page)

SARDENARA CASALINGA

5 oz plain flour; 1 ½ oz butter; 1 egg; ½ oz yeast; salt; a little water.

Cut the softened butter in little pieces and rub it into the flour. Add a good pinch of salt. Make a well in the centre, put in the egg and yeast dissolved in about 2 tablespoons of barely tepid water.
Mix and knead until the dough comes away clean from the sides of the bowl. Shape into a ball, put on a floured plate, cover with a floured cloth and leave in a warm place to rise for 2 hours.

For the filling: 1 lb onions; ½ lb tomatoes; a dozen anchovy fillets (in San Remo, home of the
sardenara
, salted sardines are used); a dozen small, stoned black olives; pepper; salt; dried oregano or basil; and olive oil.

Heat 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy frying pan. Put in the thinly sliced onions and cook them very gently, with the cover on the pan, until they are quite soft and pale golden. They must not fry or turn brown. Add the skinned tomatoes, the seasonings (plus garlic if you like) and the basil or oregano. Continue cooking until the tomatoes and onions are amalgamated, and the water from the tomatoes evaporated.

When the dough has risen sprinkle it with flour and break it down again. Knead once more into a ball, which you place in the centre of an oiled, 8½- to 10-inch (21- to 25-cm) removable-base flan tin. With your knuckles press it gently but quickly outwards until it is spread right over the tin and all round the sides. Put in the filling. Make a criss-cross pattern over the top with the anchovies, then fill in with the olives. Leave to rise another 15 minutes. Stand the flan tin on a baking sheet and cook in the centre of a pre-heated oven at gas no. 6,400°F, for 20 minutes, then turn down to gas no. 4,3500°F, and cook another 20 minutes.

Alternative pizza or
pissaladière
filling: 1 onion; 2 cloves of garlic; 1 lb fresh tomatoes; 4 to 6 Italian tinned tomatoes and their juice; ½ coffee cup olive oil; dried basil or marjoram, seasonings, olives and anchovies.

A PROVENÇAL PISSALADIÈRE

This used to be spread with a brined fish product called
pissala
, peculiar to the Mediterranean coast between Nice and Marseille. It is now a thing of the past, and the
pissaladière
is made mainly with stewed onions and anchovies. There is also a version in which a tomato sauce figures. This one is excellent.

It is made as follows: spread the dough, prepared as for Ligurian pizza, with a mixture of 6 tablespoons of the onion and tomato sauce (also made as for the Ligurian version), the contents of a 50-gr tin of anchovy fillets and 2 cloves of garlic pounded up together,
almost to a paste. Bake as before. This anchovy-flavoured filling is my own favourite.

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 cloves, 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.