Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (11 page)

Søndags B-T
, Denmark, June 1976

Le Rouge et le Noir

Black looks give all dishes in which aubergines cooked in their skins – as with rare exceptions they should be – an alluring and dramatic appearance. To a certain extent the same applies to black olives in beef and wine stews; also to caviare and black truffles; to cèpes and flat field mushrooms stewed in olive oil in a pot lined with vine leaves; and to squid cooked in its own ink. This dish, served with the ritual slabs of marigold yellow polenta of northern Italy, has a high theatrical appeal to the eye; to the palate it is rich, strange, and worth at least a venture when one comes across it in Venice and on the Adriatic coast.

A generation or two ago I think that English people would have felt just as adventurous in approaching the ratatouille, that handsome mixture of onions, aubergines, peppers and tomatoes imported from Provence. Such is the power of a memorable name and dramatic looks that, at any rate according to Mr Egon Ronay reporting in his restaurant guide, ratatouille has become the national dish of Chelsea. If that is the case, best leave our Chelsea restaurant cooks to evolve their national dish in their own way, without worrying too much if their way is seldom recognisable as the way of Provence.

When the time comes for a change, as alluring a name on the menu and a dish which demands less ritualistic preparation and production is the bohémienne. I don’t say that this is one of the world’s great regional dishes; it is a relation, lighter in weight, less compact and less demanding, of the ratatouille. It is a red and green dish rather than a black and bronze one; a dish of inland and upper Provence rather than of the Mediterranean littoral. It has another name, barbouillade, as descriptive as ratatouille, which after all is only French for a stew, mish-mash, hotch-potch.

The ingredients for bohémienne, susceptible of a good deal of variation, are approximately as follows:

4 tablespoons of olive oil, 250 g (8 oz) onions, 2 small red or green sweet peppers, a clove of garlic, 500 g (1 lb) courgettes, 2.50 g (½ lb) skinned tomatoes, salt, a little fresh basil or parsley.

The method of cooking is much as for ratatouille: the vegetables, put into the pot with the olive oil, in the order given, are stewed gently for about 45 minutes.

The owner of the restaurant at Gap in upper Provence where I first encountered this dish informed me that the omission of aubergines is the point which differentiates bohémienne from ratatouille. René Jouveau in his recently published
La Cuisine Provençale de Tradition Populaire
, a book produced with heavy-handed luxury but into which the author has put much painstaking research concerning every local dish mentioned in Mistral’s poems and a good many others besides, gives a recipe for bohémienne in which aubergines are the
raison d’être
of the dish and does not mention ratatouille at all (I believe that ratatouille is technically a Niçois dish; and to the
félibriges
, the writers and poets of Mistral’s Provençal revival period, Nice was not Provence); possibly bohémienne is simply the inland version of a typical southern vegetable stew.

Unexpected recipes from authors regarded as classic are always interesting. About Escoffier’s work a relevant point to remember is that he was a Provençal who was born and spent his early boyhood in the village of Villeneuve-Loubet in the Alpes-Maritimes. From his post-
Guide Culinaire
cookery books and articles one has the impression that he did not ever entirely lose the taste for the village cooking of his very humble childhood and that occasionally, bored with exquisite subtlety and the standards of perfection he had himself created, he had wistful hankerings for the primitive food of his childhood. Today’s interest in all regional cooking and in particular in the dishes of his own native Provence would surely have been welcome to him.

I do not know whether Escoffier’s sweet pepper and onion mixture, a cross between a chutney and a sauce to be eaten with cold meat, was derived from a Provençal recipe – it is a little reminiscent of the Italian peperonata – whether he evolved it from some other source, or invented it entirely. It is an uncommonly interesting and unusual sauce. Escoffier calls it simply
piments pour viandes froides
and the recipe is to be found in his
Ma Cuisine
, published by Flammarion in 1934, the year before the author’s death at the age of eighty-nine.

This Escoffier sauce, one which evidently never found its way into the bottles of the Peckham factory he founded in 1898, is one which became a favourite of mine during the years I lived in Egypt. The ingredients were all to hand, cheap and common, and the sauce was a great enlivener for the local meat. My own slightly
simplified and reduced version of the recipe is no longer quite that of Escoffier.
^*

You need 2 large fat fleshy sweet and very ripe red peppers (about 500 g/i lb), 250 g (8 oz) mild Spanish onions, 500 g (1 lb) ripe tomatoes, 1 clove of garlic, 125 g (4 oz) raisins, half a teaspoon each of salt, powdered ginger (or grated dried root ginger) and mixed spices such as allspice, mace and nutmeg, 250 g (8 oz) white sugar, 4 tablespoons of olive oil and 150 ml (¼ pint) of fine wine vinegar.

Melt the finely chopped onions in the olive oil, add the chopped peppers (well washed, all core and seeds removed), salt and spices, and after 10 minutes, the peeled and chopped tomatoes and the raisins, garlic and sugar, lastly the vinegar. Cook extremely slowly, covered, for at least 1¼ hours.

A tall marmite-type pot rather than a wide preserving pan should be used for this confection. The sauce does not, and I think is not supposed to, turn into a jam-like substance. It is another bronze dish,
mordoré
to use the marvellous French word.

Bottled in screw-top jars the mixture keeps well for two or three weeks, although I have never made enough at one time to report as to whether it has a more enduring shelf life. It is good with cold lamb and beef.

For an ancient black-a-vised dish, I think that a recipe from Robert May’s
Accomplisht Cook
(1660) is worth consideration:

Tart Stuff that Carries its Colour Black

Take three pounds of prunes and eight fair pippins par’d and cor’d. stew them together with some claret wine, some whole cinnamon, slic’t ginger, a sprig of rosemary, sugar, and a clove or two, being well stewed and cold, strain them with rose-water, and sugar.

This mixture was used as a filling for open pies, and possibly appeared on Stuart tables in company with others of different colours, for May, a writer with a great eye for drama and decorative touches (sprigs of gilded rosemary ornamenting creams, leaves of a kind of clotted cream made into a frilly cabbage shape), gives
recipes also for yellow, white, green and red tart stuff, all made from fruit, the red ones consisting of quinces, pippins, cherries, raspberries, barberries, red currants, red gooseberries or damsons. In effect, most of May’s fruit mixtures were jams, although many were made from dried or preserved fruit – apricots, quinces, nectarines, peaches and plums.

In Turin recently I saw and bought something which I think would have pleased Robert May: black sugared fruit. They were walnuts. Gathered green, they turn black and soft when preserved. Sugar-dusted and clove-scented nuggets of onyx, these candied walnuts are a speciality unique to one and one only of the confectioners’ shops for which Turin is famous.

The Spectator
, 4 October 1963

Erbaggi Mantovani: Vegetables of Mantua

Bartolomeo Stefani’s
L’arte di ben cucinare
first appeared in Mantua in 1662. Stefani, who was Bolognese by birth, had trained with his uncle, a master cook working in Venice. At the time his book was written and published Stefani was chief cook to the ducal house of Gonzaga in Mantua. The family’s glory and prosperity had long since departed, but that they were still able on occasion to entertain on a splendid scale can be seen from descriptions of some of the state banquets included by Stefani in the
Nuova Aggiunta
or
New Additions
to the third edition of his work which appeared in 1671. One such occasion was the visit in November 1655 of Queen Christina of Sweden when, Stefani says, he personally served all the ceremonial and ornamental cold dishes and presented the numerous and grandiose
trionfi
of sugar work and also of pleated linen. On the whole, however, the Gonzaga in Stefani’s day seem to have eaten quite frugally, and few of his recipes are for rich or complex dishes. Compared indeed to the styles of cooking described in contemporary French and English works such as Robert May’s
Accomplisht Cook
of 1660 and La Varenne’s
Le Cuisinier François
of 1651, Stefani’s is almost modern, distinguished particularly by many interesting vegetable dishes and a number of unusual sauces and relishes in which fruit plays an important part.

The Italian love of both vegetables and fruit and their skill in growing them is of course apparent in all their cookery manuals from the days of Apicius to the publication in 1570 of Scappi’s magisterial
Opera
, and in all those stewards’ handbooks which were such a notable feature of Italian publishing from the second half of the sixteenth century right up to the end of the seventeenth. But in Stefani’s work a new, and intensely personal, approach is evident. He picks and chooses his ingredients and his words with equal care, puts them together thoughtfully, weighs and specifies his quantities, explains his methods clearly. He loves his work and is proud of his profession. Altogether he is making a great effort to fulfil the promise carried in his title of ‘instructing the less expert’ in the art of good cooking. ‘This little book,’ he says in his address to the readers, ‘does not come from an academy but from a kitchen.’ It certainly reads as though he had been writing close to the cooking pots and the fire, the spice boxes and the knives, the scales and the strainers. That ever-present sound of all kitchens of his day, of weighty pestle pounding in huge mortar is still in his ears as he composes his book. In seventeenth-century Italy that quality is uncommon. Since 1570 Scappi’s great work had stood alone in dealing directly with practical cookery, and in having been written by a practising cook. Physicians, chemists, scientists, agricultural and horticultural experts, and above all the stewards and professional carvers had all had their say on household and domestic matters, some of them at considerable length. But among them all none since Domenico Romoli, author of
La Singolare Dottrina
, a work first published in 1560 and reprinted in 1570, appear to have personally come to grips with the realities of the kitchen proper as distinct from the work of the Credenza or Pantry, in which the salads and cold dishes, the desserts and fruit were prepared.

Of the following brief selection of vegetable recipes from Stefani’s
L’Arte di ben cucinare
, the
minestra d’erba brusca
is from the
Additions
to the 1671 edition, all the others having already appeared in the original 1662 edition.

MINESTRA DI FINOCCHIO

(a dish of fennel)

Take well cleaned fennel and wash it in cold water, and having first cooked it in a vegetable broth and cut it into mouthfuls, you are to put it in a glazed vessel with a little capon broth, and when
hot put in a few gooseberries (
uva spina
), a glass of cream, two ounces (60 g) of pine nuts steeped in rosewater, crushed in the mortar, and thicken the sauce with four egg yolks beaten with lemon juice, and under the fennel in the dish put slices of bread fried in butter; thus you may make a most delicate minestra, serving it hot, powdered with cinnamon.

MINESTRA D’ERBA BRUSCA E DI BORAGGIO E CIME DI FINOCCHIO E CIME DI BIETA

(minestra of sorrel, borage, fennel shoots and beet shoots)

Take these four varieties of herbs well cleaned and washed in plenty of water; you mince them all very small, in quantities which you must judge by your own eye, knowing how much minestra you need to make, and when they are minced you put them in a two-handled soup pot (
pignatta
), adding capon broth, or else beef broth, enough to cover the herbs by half, not to rise above them; put the
pignatta
over a charcoal fire and as soon as it boils the broth reaches perfection.

To season the minestra you take fresh eggs, grated cheese in proportion, and cook as already instructed; if you like to add asparagus tips in the season, you may put them in, but first having cooked them in water, then plunged them in fresh cold water, so that they lose that particular odour which they give the water. There are many cooks who first cook the fresh herbs in the same way, thereby throwing away the best part, for they throw away the first juices given out by the herbs, leaving them with less aroma and less goodness.

ZUCCHI TENERE, O ZUCCOLI DA FRIGGERE

( young tender marrows, or small marrows for frying)

Take the marrows, free of skin and cut in slices, steeped and softened with salt, and well drained, arrange the slices one on top of the other, put a weight on them so that the moisture is pressed out, and carefully flour them. Put these slices in a frying pan with clarified butter, when they are cooked take them from the pan and prepare the following sauce.

Take a little basil, a leaf or two of sage (
erba amara
), a few fennel seeds, all well pounded in the mortar, and for every pound of
zucchi
, take four ounces (125 g) of soft cheese, pound it well
in the mortar with the other ingredients, then allay it with the juice of verjuice grapes, the juice to be first diluted with water; add nothing else, but if the juice has not been diluted you may add two ounces (60 g) of sugar with four yolks of fresh eggs well beaten, put all in a
cazzetta
(a water bath) on the fire with three ounces (90 g) of butter, stirring with a wooden spoon, and when you perceive that it has cooked into a thickened broth, then cover the dish of marrows with this sauce and serve it cold with powdered cinnamon.