The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (38 page)

Allow the dough to rise until doubled. Time required depends upon the atmospheric conditions in your kitchen, the quality of your flour and the will of Destiny. The combination of yeast and wine rather than yeast and water causes dough to rise somewhat more rapidly (while giving the eventual bread a delicate crumb and an almost imperceptible sourdough flavour) so the dough may want only 30 minutes to double.

Deflate the dough with a single deft punch, place it on a large sheet of baking paper and place the baking paper on a baking tray. Flatten the dough into a free-form circle about 1 centimetre thick. Press the small bunches of grapes or single grapes pulled from their stems over the dough. Leave a 3 centimetre border of dough around the edges grape-free. Evenly pour on the remaining perfumed oil, sprinkle the bread with the caster sugar and grind pepper over the whole with an un-shy hand. Cover lightly with a clean kitchen towel and allow to rise for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F. Bake the flatbread for 30–35 minutes or a bit longer, until the edges are golden and swollen and the grapeskins have begun to burst. Cool the bread on the baking tray for 5 minutes then transfer it to a wire rack for further cooling. Best served warm, it can be baked several hours in advance of supper then very gently reheated at about 100°C/200°F.

I won't apologise for setting down here yet another ‘androgynous' recipe which serves just as magnificently with drinks before supper as it does passed about with a last glass of wine instead of dessert. Less will I wince in telling you again of the glorious harmonies struck by the mixing of rosemary and anise. My reach is toward authenticity rather than variety for variety's sake. If you make this once, you'll make it forever. It's almost too simple, wants five minutes to mix and pat into its tin, less than half an hour in the oven. It's meant to be broken rather than cut, passed about the table or sent hand to hand among a small group standing in a meadow to watch the sunset. If stored in an airtight metal tin, it keeps longer than most love affairs. You'll give it your own name –
Ginuzza
is nothing more nor less than the diminutive of a friend who's name is Gina Maria and who is inordinately fond of the thing.

 

THE METHOD

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F. Smear the 1 tbsp of softened unsalted butter over the bottom and sides of a 30 centimetre metal cake tin. Set aside. In a medium bowl, cream 185 grams of softened butter with 25 grams of dark brown sugar and the icing sugar until smooth. A beater is hardly necessary. In another medium bowl, combine with your hands the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, fine sea salt, anise seeds and the 2 tbsp of chopped rosemary leaves. Add the dry mix to the butter/sugar mixture and, with the fingertips, combine the elements into a mass. Turn the mass out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead three or four times, just to further render it a more cohesive dough. Lightly pat the dough into the buttered tin, knuckling and pressing it to evenness.

In a cup, combine the remaining 40 grams of dark brown sugar, the remaining 2 tbsp chopped rosemary with the sea salt flakes or the pounded coarse sea salt and sprinkle the mixture evenly over the cake. Knuckle the surface one last time so that the herb/sugar/salt is ‘embedded' into the dough. Bake the cake on the middle shelf of the oven for 20 minutes or until the cake has taken on a pale but distinctly gold colour. Don't underbake. Let the cake cool in its tin for 10 minutes then turn it out onto a wire rack to cool completely at which time it will be ready to serve or to store. I prefer to divide the dose of dough into two 20 centimetre tins only because the cake is thinner, crisper, lighter that way.

As written in the narrative, Miranda kept a five-litre jug of this ‘violently' herbed oil in her pantry and used it as a marinade for meats and vegetables to be grilled over her fire or to paint same after they'd been wood-charred. She smeared it over hot roasted bread to bring forth a rather unusual sort of bruschetta. She always claimed it was the only substance better than grappa to soothe bodily wounds and bruises.

It would hardly be worth the trouble to concoct less than two litres of this at a time. Use only the most beautiful fresh sage and rosemary and only white, crisp, juicy garlic. If the purple variety can be found and it, too, is crisp and juicy and with no green heart, grab it (promise yourself to avoid the obese, acidic heads of what is sometimes referred to as elephant garlic save, perhaps, to feed it to the animal whose name it bears).

Wild fennel flowers are not readily available in even the smartest little food shops. If you live near a river, it's likely that wild fennel will be growing, here and there, along its banks. A tall, very tall stalk with a frothy yellow-flowered head, it is unmistakeable. Gather it by cutting the stalk rather than pulling it by its roots. With heavy string, tie the stalks in bunches of six or seven and suspend them, upside down, in a cool airy place to dry. A process which sometimes asks several months. The dried stalks can be used as a bed for roasting meat or fish while the dried heads, rubbed between the palms, yield a most astonishingly perfumed herb – delicate, assertive, lingering. Substitute good old fennel seed if all this foraging by a river is not part of your plan.

 

THE METHOD

Stuff the sage branches (without tearing off the leaves), the rosemary branches (without stripping them of their leaves), the fennel flowers or seeds and the chillies (uncrushed) into the 2 litres of oil. Slap the heads of garlic with the flat of a knife and scrape the smashed, unpeeled cloves into the oil. Cork the oil, shake it, put it to rest in a cool, dark place. Give it a shake two or three times a day and in two weeks, it will be ready to use. As time passes, the
violenza
will become more so.

Note: One could scald the oil before adding the herbs but, according to Miranda, the result is far more pure and ‘fresh' if time rather than heat ripens the various essences.

I'd been making a version of this dish for years and years before I came to live in Italy, but when I tried to build it with the local, watery-fleshed, pimply, green-skinned things called
Zucca Invernale
, the result was less than good. It was in the Lombard city of Mantua where I first found small, green-skinned squash whose flesh most resembled the native American pumpkin. One October Saturday morning there, we filled the boot of our car with twenty-two squash, having been assured by the farmer that, if stored in a cool place, they would stay firm and fine until Easter. He was right. I stuffed and roasted and scooped and fed the Thursday Night tribe on them until Miranda finally took a mallet to the few which remained by February, roasted the pieces, mixed the flesh with white wine vinegar, crushed mustard seeds, mustard oil (bought here in the pharmacy) and sugar to make
la mostarda di zucca
, a luscious condiment (typical of the city of Cremona in the region of Lombardy) through which we dragged shards of pecorino and skated crusts of bread at the finish of many suppers.

 

THE METHOD

In a medium sauté pan, melt 45 grams of unsalted butter and saute the onions, reserved pumpkin flesh (finely diced) and mushrooms until the mass softens and the mushrooms give up their juices (if using dried mushrooms, strain the soaking liquid and add it, at this point, to the sauté pan). Add the sea salt and give the pepper grinder three or four good turns.

In a large bowl combine all other elements save the bread and remaining butter. Beat the mass with a wooden spoon, stir in the onion, pumpkin and mushroom mixture. Melt 60 grams of butter in a sauté pan and in it brown the bread, tossing the pieces about until they are crisp and golden.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F. Place the readied pumpkin or squash in a large, heavy baking dish or on a baking tray. Spoon one-third of the cheese mixture into the pumpkin, add half the crisped bread, another third of the cheese, the remaining bread, ending with the remaining cheese mixture. Replace the pumpkin's hat and roast it in the oven for 1½ hours or longer – until the pumpkin's flesh is very soft when pierced with the tip of a sharp knife. Beware not to over-roast it to the point of collapse. The natural sugars in the pumpkin will caramelise and melt into the stuffing. It's least perilous to serve the pumpkin in it's roasting dish or on its baking tray, though it can be transferred to a warmed deep platter with the aid of two wide spatulas. In either case, a few autumn leaves, branches of bittersweet (or
bacche
as the wild orange berries are known here) would not be out of place. Most importantly, get it to the table quickly. Into warmed soup plates, spoon out the stuffing, scraping the spoon along the wall of the pumpkin shell for some of the good caramelised flesh.