Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (12 page)

If the marrows are fried in oil, make the sauce in this fashion. Instead of soft cheese take crumb of bread steeped in verjuice, with the same aromatic herbs, and instead of eggs use almond milk, and cook the sauce in the same way. But when the marrows are larger, you may cut them in the fashion of lardoons. They may also be stuffed, as I have told you. Patty cases may be made from them, and in fine they make such a diversity of dishes that they could constitute an entire course.

VIVANDA D’AVENTANI

(a dish of eggplants)

Providing a rare variant on the Italian name of the eggplant – so rare indeed that it appears not to have been known to R. Arveiller when he wrote his nineteen-page article on
Les noms français de l’aubergine
, necessarily covering numerous Italian and Catalan variations, published in the
Revue de Linguistique romane
, Vol. 33, 1969
¹
– this recipe of Stefani’s is both original and easily

adaptable. It also tells us that this fruit was at that time, in northern Italy at any rate, cultivated in monastery gardens and was still unfamiliar enough for the readers to need a description. The name used by Stefani which derived, I think, not from the now obsolete
avelenoso
meaning something injurious, harmful, poisonous, but from
aventare
, to wind, to fill and puff with wind, or from its participle meaning windy, puffed, full of wind.
²
To judge from what Stefani says, he was approaching this fruit with caution, but not with the deep suspicion it had so often engendered in the past.

‘The
aventani
are certain fruits grown in gardens and in which monks such as Capucins, Osservanti and the like are specialists. When in perfection they turn a purple colour and are smooth as ivory; they are about the size of an apple, oval in shape. Take these, remove their skins with very exact care, and having split them, take away their seeds, then divide them in small pieces, plunge them in cold water, which you must change two or three times, in order to remove their natural bitterness: take them from the water, dry them, put them in a
pignatta
or other vessel of a suitable size, with oil, salt and pepper, and set them on a charcoal fire, stirring frequently. When they are cooked, take sweet almonds, three ounces (90 g) for every pound (500 g) of eggplant, toast them in the oven, taking care not to scorch them, and pulverise them in a mortar, add a little nutmeg, and a little sugar according to your judgement, all to be tempered with the juice of bitter oranges, put this into the vessel containing the eggplants, which are to be turned into a dish and served hot.

If you wish to cook this dish with butter, do it as above, but instead of the almond sauce dress it with
piacentino
(Parmesan), with cinnamon over.’

I have many times cooked aubergines on the lines described by Stefani, but bypassing the cold water baths he recommends – I find that aubergines nowadays don’t need any pre-cooking treatment to remove bitterness – and the removal of seeds (I have come across this same daunting direction in a Spanish
MS
recipe of about the same date as Stefani’s), a refinement I have not even contemplated.

For the sauce, the three ounces (90 g) of almonds to a pound (500 g) of aubergines is rather too high an allowance, I find, particularly as Stefani appears to have been using the twelve ounces (350 g) pound, and one and a half ounces (45 g) to the
juice of a couple of Seville oranges seems about right. A word of warning here. The bitter orange juice and the scrap of sugar in combination with the almonds makes a sauce so vastly superior to the same made with sweet orange juice, without the sugar but with the addition of lemon juice, that I am tempted to say don’t bother to try the dish until you can lay hands on Seville oranges, but perhaps after all it is worthwhile persevering until you find some satisfactory way round the problem. A sprinkling of ground red sumac, that favourite Persian seasoning, might provide a simple lemon, sweet orange and almond mixture with just the required quality of aromatic acidity; or sweet-sour pomegranate juice could be the answer. It is a pity to have to keep so good a dish as Stefani’s
Vivanda d’aventani
for just those few weeks of the year when Seville oranges are obtainable in England.

I think, by the way, that the dish is better cold than hot. And I do find that a very small amount of garlic, chopped with parsley, and added during the cooking, is an improvement, almost a necessity.

VIVANDA DI SILARI

(a dish of celery)

Take the celery well cleaned of its leaves and green stalks so that what remains is half a palm’s length of the heart of the celery close to the foot; throw it into cold water and wash it; have ready a pot of vegetable broth on the fire, when it is at the height of boiling throw in the celery, let it boil until half cooked; then take it from the broth, put it in a dry vessel, squeezing lemon juice over it and adding crushed pepper; in the meantime prepare a frying pan with butter. And because celery, like many other things is calculated by the piece not by measure or weight, it is obvious that there are small and large ones, so that in some places the average ones may be larger than the large of elsewhere; and in other places so small that the largest are smaller than even the medium ones of elsewhere, so it is necessary to use judgement and to take a quantity proportioned to the ingredients here given:

For every two pounds (i kg) of celery, therefore, prepared as above: put into a frying pan over a slow fire a
piccata
(a chopped foundation as in the modern
battuto
) of
ventresca di porco
(salt pork belly), or
panzetta
(the same cut but differently cured) as you please, and this you cook lightly, and when it is almost cooked you add the celery; and separately you beat the yolks of six fresh
eggs with lemon juice, two ounces (60 g) of fine sugar, six ounces (180 g) of Genoa capers in vinegar, removing their stalks, three ounces (90 g) of crushed pine nuts, and all this you throw into the pan set over a very low fire; when you see that this composition is setting, like curded milk (
cagliata
), have in readiness a dish spread with slices of bread which you have sprinkled and rubbed with garlic cloves, then fried in butter; and on these put the celery heads with their sauce, garnishing the dish with grated Parmesan cheese and powdered cinnamon.

This is a graceful and delicate dish; serve it hot.

Note

This is perhaps an appropriate place for a note on the Italian cookery book use of the term
cagliata
and its correct meaning.

Usually taken by English translators to mean curdled in the sense of separated, as when a custard or an egg-thickened sauce or soup gets over-cooked, the direction has been a puzzle to many people. No wonder. It was not the intention, I am sure, in the minds of the people who initially recorded the recipes concerned that their sauces should be curdled. It was simply that a more precise term for describing a smooth, creamy, egg-thickened sauce or custard did not exist in Italian or Spanish culinary language – in French it was
prise
– and the nearest one to use was
cagliata
or
quagliata
in its secondary sense of congealed, set, clotted, or if you like, curded (but not curdled) as in our own lemon curd, which after all is not and never has been curdled, at any rate not intentionally. A related English usage of the term, which I came across only recently, occurs in a seventeenth-century
MS
receipt embodying the direction to ‘whip the whites till ye come to curd’.

A good example of a recipe demonstrating that
quagliata
did not in fact mean curdled in the sense usually understood occurs in Scappi’s
minestra di zucchi
with almond milk (1643 edition, p. 511). In this recipe the sliced gourd or marrow, boiled in chicken or veal broth, is reheated in almond milk based on the broth in which the marrow has boiled, plus verjuice. There are no eggs and no milk proper in the mixture, but it is to be sweetened with sugar, the cooking is to continue until it becomes thick,
venge quagliata
, and the minestra is to end up of
maggior sostanza
, of great substance. In other words you are aiming for a reduced and dense mass of syrupy marrow. It doesn’t sound very enticing, but curdled in our sense of the term it is not and could not be.

Quagliata
by the way derived from the Arabic
quajar
, meaning both to curdle and to congeal. I could cite many more Italian recipes, mainly from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books, in which the term is used in a sense which can only be understood to mean thickened or congealed, as in a custard or a béarnaise sauce. Stefani’s book alone contains a great number of such recipes. Now and again he even used the term
congelata
, instead of
cagliata
. Evidently the 1660s in Mantua, as elsewhere in Italy, was a great time for egg-thickened sauces, often served over bread as Stefani directs for his
vivanda di silari
. Something of the kind was of course the origin of the
zuppa inglese
, that favourite dessert of modern Italy, the
zuppa
having indicated, originally, the sup or sop of bread, not the custard sauce.

References

1
. A copy of this article was most kindly sent to me by a reader, Mr C. A. Stray of Swansea, after he had read my essay on aubergines (‘Mad, Bad, Despised and Dangerous’, in
PPC
No. 9), to whom my very grateful thanks.

2
. John Florio’s
Worlde of Wordes
, 1611 and 1688 editions, and the
Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana
, 1972. It may be worth noting that Florio also gives what could conceivably put another interpretation on the derivation of Stefani’s
aventani
. This is
aventiccio
, a foreigner, a stranger, one that hath no settled place of abode, but is going and coming, etc.

Petits Propos Culinaires
, No. 12, 1989

Home Cooking

It’s a dull schoolboy who doesn’t collect things. Birds’ eggs and butterflies are discouraged nowadays, matchboxes aren’t what they were, cigarette cards and model trains are for adults who go to auction prepared to spend the year’s rates three times over on a Dinky toy. The odd child prodigy does of course gather in Krugerrands, Stradivarius violins, London theatres, and lost Tom Keatings. But to collect potatoes like George V collected postage stamps it took a Scots schoolboy, now Captain Donald MacLean of Dornock Farm near Crieff in Perthshire. Not just a few varieties
of potato picked up like pebbles to take home and gloat over, you understand, but potatoes to cultivate, potatoes of widely differing characteristics, colours, shapes, flavours, textures, cooking properties. Potatoes red, blue, purple, black, even ordinary potato-coloured potatoes. A splendid and rare mania. Did the youthful MacLean by any chance catch it from a boyhood reading of that extraordinary book by Redcliffe N. Salaman published in 1949 and, a trifle forbiddingly, entitled
The History and Social Influence of the Potato
?

Whatever the origin of Captain MacLean’s obsession, Jane Grigson, in
The Observer Guide to British Cookery
, her latest and to date bravest book, tells us that he now has 350 varieties of potato under cultivation. Yes. Not that it’s the world’s largest collection, as Mrs Grigson thought when she wrote her potato piece; that’s maintained by the World Potato Collection in Lima, Peru, native habitat of the potato. Still, for a start 350 will do. How many varieties of potato can a London greengrocer name by name? Two? Three? How many can any of us buy in our local shops? How often do we eat them as a dish in their own right? What’s happened to the vegetable cooks in our upmarketish London restaurants, that, apart from frites or pommes Pont Neuf, engagingly offered on the menu of the old Derry & Toms roof garden restaurant as Ninth Bridge potatoes, the only potato dish they seem to know is a damp and usually inappropriate little portion of gratin which arrives on a tea-plate along with a dab of carrot purée and a couple of broccoli spears? Couldn’t those cooks ever be persuaded that customers would welcome the chance of trying, let’s say, real griddle-baked Irish potato cakes or the potato pancakes called boxsty? Mrs Grigson produces a plausible explanation for the name as well as a careful recipe. Why not have a go?

In France, a country to which potatoes came late, much later than to us, several localities boast of their potato pancakes. Not after all a very resounding culinary achievement, but still a worthwhile one. I remember a restaurant at Vonnas, north-east of Lyon, where back in the Fifties the patronne’s potato pancakes were so famous that her establishment was awarded two Michelin stars. If you stayed there you climbed down steep stairs from your bedroom and proceeded through the kitchen to the restaurant. Adjoining it, the bar would be busy with local workmen drinking their evening aperitifs. I’m afraid it isn’t like that now. The present
proprietor, Georges Blanc, grandson, I believe, of the Mère Blanc of those days, currently has three stars and a helicopter pad, though I’m sure that doesn’t stop him offering the family’s famous potato speciality. Michel and Albert Roux, Nico Ladenis, Anton Mosimann, where are you? And Captain MacLean will you help?