The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (36 page)

Honouring this ancient autumn rite of pairing pears with pecorino, I offer two dishes: the first is simple yet unexpectedly intriguing, a dish to be found within the text; the second is a dish I want you to have because it was Miranda's favourite. In fact, when the season came around, she would begin to ask for it – sometimes as subtly as gesturing her chin toward the basket of pears sitting on my kitchen table, other times saying outright, ‘
Non è ora di fare la crostata?
Isn't it time to make the tart?' The delicious thing has never had any other name but that – ‘the tart'. More than once it composed the whole of a lunch between Miranda and me. Nothing but ‘the tart' and some wine.

We'd begin delicately enough, cutting modest little wedges for one another. The devouring underway, we'd move the knife to a wider angle for the second cutting, wider yet for the third, until only a small desolate slice sat there in the tin. For the sake of compassion, we'd put our forks to it without the bother of lifting it to our plates. The main deed done, we'd press a finger to the crumbs, pour a last glass of wine.

The already tired fashion of transforming sweet dishes into savoury ones and vice versa is sometimes stretched to the absurd. But once in a while the idea seems valid. Case in point, trembling little moulds of cheese and cream which can be served as part of an
antipasto
(before the meal) or the
finepasto
(the end of the meal). Here we almost always have access to very young, still soft and creamy pecorino. Barring that availability, panna cotta made with grated, aged pecorino (or Parmigiano) is a lovely dish to add to one's ‘easy and elegant' repertoire.

 

THE METHOD

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F.

Cut the cold butter into six equal pieces and insert a piece into the hollow of each pear. Massage each pear with the oil then wrap each one with a slice of pancetta beginning at its base and securing it at the stem end with a toothpick. In a shallow metal or ceramic flameproof roasting dish just large enough to hold the fruit comfortably, set the pears close together. Give a few generous turns of the pepper grinder over the fruit, pinches of sea salt rubbed between the palms over all. Now, into the bottom of the dish pour a cup of the wine and place it on the middle rack of the preheated oven. Reserve the remaining wine.

At 10-minute intervals, baste the pears with the wine in the dish and the liquid which will be accumulating as the heat coaxes juices from the pears. At each basting, add a tablespoon or two of the reserved wine. Depending upon the ripeness of the pears, roasting time will vary from 40 to 60 minutes. The pears are roasted properly when the pancetta is crisped and the point of a sharp knife sinks easily into their flesh. Do not overcook or the fruit will begin to collapse into a still delicious but less lovely result. With a slotted spoon, carefully remove the roasted pears to an oven-proof dish deep enough to hold escaping juices. Turn off the oven but place the fruit in there to keep warm.

Place the original roasting dish directly over a medium – high heat and add what may be left of the reserved wine. Allow the juices to distil and reduce until the sauce is thick but still pourable.

While the sauce is reducing, unmould a panna cotta (recipe follows) onto each of six plates, placing a pear by its side. Nap the panna cotta with the red wine sauce leaving the pear to stand as it is and serve. The goal is to get the dishes to the table while the panna cotta is still cold, the sauce still hot, and the pear at a lovely temperature somewhere in between.

 

THE METHOD

Pour the Marsala or sherry into a small bowl and sprinkle the gelatine powder over it. Let the mixture stand, without stirring, for 5 minutes, allowing the gelatine to absorb the wine. Now give the mixture a stir.

Meanwhile, over a medium heat, warm the cream and the cheese in a large, deep and heavy-bottomed saucepan, stirring often. Watch carefully and beware overspill since, as the mixture approaches the boil, the volume of the cream will expand and rise quickly. Remove from the heat. Add the softened gelatine to the cream and stir for a full minute to be certain that it has fully dissolved in the hot, hot cream. Quickly pour the mixture into six individual moulds, preferably metal if the plan is to unmould them or into ceramic ramekins if the plan is to serve the savoury pudding in its dish.

Allow the panna cotta to cool to room temperature, then cover each mould tightly with plastic wrap, place the six puddings on a platter and store in the refrigerator overnight (4 or 5 hours is sufficient to gel the puddings but the additional resting time allows the cheese/wine flavours to ripen). Take care to place the platter distant from foods which would not benefit from proximity to the whiff of pecorino such as desserts, most especially those made with chocolate.

A beautiful thing to see with the roasted pears standing up to their middles in a golden cream, ‘the tart' is lush yet rustic with its medieval perfumes of honey and just-cracked pepper and can be served as a
finepasto
, supplanting the fruit and cheese course or, better yet, instead of dessert.

 

THE METHOD

Pulse the flour, pecorino, pepper, salt and brown sugar two or three times in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. With the machine running, pour the cold wine in through the feed tube all at once and process for 4 or 5 seconds, only until the components just begin to hold together and form a dough.

Turn the mixture out onto a large sheet of plastic wrap, gathering up the errant bits and gently pressing it all into a mass. Enclose the dough in the plastic, cover the plastic with a clean kitchen towel and leave it to rest in a cool place or in the refrigerator for up to 30 minutes. Roll out the rested dough to a thinness of 5 millimetres. Transfer the rolled pastry into a buttered, 25 centimetre loose-bottomed tart pan, fitting it evenly and trimming the excess. Cover the pastry with plastic wrap and place it in the freezer for 20 minutes or in the refrigerator for an hour. Preheat the oven to 220°C/425°F.

Remove the plastic wrap from the chilled pastry shell, line it with a sheet of baking paper and fill it with dried beans (or stones gathered along the Tiber and kept for this purpose) and bake it for 10 minutes before lowering the oven's temperature to 200°C/400°F and baking the pastry for 8 minutes more or until it begins to firm and take on a pale golden colour. Remove the partially baked pastry from the oven, remove the baking paper and weight and leave to cool completely.

 

THE METHOD

In the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade, process all the components to a thick creamy mass. Cover and set aside.

 

 

THE METHOD

Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F.

In a spice grinder or in a mortar with a pestle, grind the cinnamon, cloves, allspice berries and peppercorns to a fine powder. Cut a very thin slice from the bottom of each pear to prevent wobbling during the roasting, core them from their bottoms with an apple corer and stripe-peel them vertically (a strip of skin removed, a strip left intact and so on around the belly of the pear) with a vegetable peeler. Leave the stems intact. Rub each pear with the cut lemon. Place generous pinches of the spice powder inside the cavity of each pear and position them, upright and nearly touching, in a ceramic or metal roasting dish, just large enough to hold them. Warm the honey and paint each pear with it. Pour the wine into the bottom of the dish and roast the pears for 15 minutes, or just until a thin, sharp knife easily penetrates their flesh. The fruit suffers if roasted to a state of collapse. Remove the pears from the oven and baste them several times with the winey juices. Pour any remaining juices from the roasting dish into a small saucepan. Add the last doses of honey and wine and warm them together. This potion will be used as a final gloss for the pears once the tart has been baked. Meanwhile, allow the pears to cool.

ASSEMBLING THE TART

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F.

Spread the pecorino filling over the cooled pastry. Carefully position the pears over the filling and bake the tart for 15 minutes, or until the filling begins to take on a bronze skin and the pastry has crisped. Remove the tart from the oven and paint the pears with the reserved wine and honey mixture. Permit the tart to cool for 10 minutes before unmoulding it. Serve it warm or at room temperature. Present the tart with tiny glasses of the same ambered wine used in its making.