Omelette and a Glass of Wine (17 page)

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.

An 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.

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.