23 December. I want to make a risotto ai porcini (wild mushroom risotto) over Christmas for which I need some good beef stock, brodo in Italian. I go up to the bottega, the village shop which is also a butcher shop, and tell Eugenia that I want to make brodo. She asks for how many, ‘just you?’ No, maybe three people and I want to put some in the freezer. She tells me I need some muscolo (shin of beef) and some costine di posteriore di pancia (well, bottom end of the breast of beef). If she had a chicken leg, that would be good too, but she doesn’t have one today. Altogether she gives me 800 g of beef plus three small pieces of beef marrow bone. I’ve made beef stock hundreds of times, but I ask her anyway what else she puts in. ‘Odori, un piccolo pomodoro fresco e sale’. Odori is a useful word to know. According to the dictionary, they are aromatic herbs used to season food, but that’s not how the word is used here. Here it invariably means the vegetables that form the basis of most soups, stocks and sauces: onion, carrot and celery, sometimes parsley too. Cinzia, who has the fruit and vegetable stall at the Fornoli market, always makes a present to her customers of a carrot, a stick of celery and a bunch of parsley. For my quantity of brodo, Eugenia suggests one medium onion, two small carrots, and a stick of celery. She turns her nose up at parsley. From the two tomatoes I pick out, she selects the smaller. Back home, I peel the onion and carrots, wash the celery and tomato, fling them along with the meat into a soup pot, cover them with ample cold water and bring it to a very, very gentle simmer — just the occasional bubble. Just as it’s starting to simmer, I skim off the scum (coagulated protein from the meat) several times until it stops rising to the surface. Then I add a little salt and a few peppercorns. I put on the lid propped open with a wooden spoon laid at a tangent across the edge of the pot (a trick I learned from Stefano, who is one of the cooking teachers I use for my clients), but be careful it isn’t anywhere near the flame or it will catch fire (sorry, health and safety). After 3 hours or so, the meat is so soft you can eat it with a spoon and the brodo is a clear amber colour. I strain off the broth, tasting it and the two different cuts of beef. The flavour of the shin is a little more forceful; the breast is softer and fattier which lends its own distinctive taste. Yummy! Such good pure pastel flavours that I’m tempted to drink the broth and eat all the meat right then and there standing at the kitchen counter. But when I was in the shop, I also asked Eugenia what she does with the boiled beef. Daniela, a customer in the shop, offered her views. She makes it into a salad with raw diced winter vegetables and mayonnaise. Eugenia concurs. But I don’t feel like a cold salad when it’s cold outside. What else would they suggest? Polpette (meatballs). Eugenia’s husband Renato can’t bear to stay out of this discussion any longer. He has an apt saying for every situation. In this case: ‘Just surely as psalms are followed by Gloria patri, all leftovers turn into polpette’. Eugenia describes hers. She grinds or chops the meat along with a slice of mortadella, adds some leftover mashed potato or day old bread soaked in water and squeezed out, a couple of small handfuls of grated parmigiano (or one each of parmigiano and pecorino), two eggs, salt and pepper — actually, she realises as she’s speaking, it’s the same as the filling for tortelli (meat-filled pasta pillows) without the Swiss chard. She uses the mixture to make balls about the size of walnuts and flattens them a little, dips them in flour or dry bread crumbs and fries them in vegetable oil. I also add a little finely chopped garlic and some fresh thyme. I use dry bread crumbs because I love the crunchy exterior. Almost forgot to take the photo before they were all gone. Gloria Eugenia!
0 Comments
It was a rabbit. Renato cut it into pieces for cooking in umido (stewed) and showed me the little wedge of white tissue he removed from behind each knee. He smelled it. No scent, but when cooked it would give the rabbit the ‘dirty’ flavour people didn’t like. Next I turned to Eugenia, Renato’s wife and a good butcher in her own right, to check the recipe. The usual garlic, rosemary, white wine and tomatoes? That’s it, then add porcini, already sliced and sautéed with garlic and nepitella (calamint), at the end of the cooking to season it. She wanted me to understand that people don’t usually add porcini to rabbit these days, but they used to so it’s OK to do it. Every recipe needs authenticating by the past.
On the way back from a cooking lesson I’d arranged for clients, I’m crawling along at a Slow Food snail’s pace (no doubt infuriating the rush-hour drivers behind me) when I spy the little wooden hut I’m searching for. The hut — a kind of mini-barn — shelters a machine that dispenses unpasteurised milk almost straight from the cow and is part of an Italian rural development programme to shorten the supply chain and put consumers’ money directly into the pockets of farmers. The farmer tests every batch of milk with the lab equipment in his barn. Health and safety officials also check the milk regularly. There’s a website where you can find all the ‘mechanical cows’ in Italy. Here are the ones near me. A crowd of customers is gathered round, each hugging one or more empty glass bottles. It looks like happy hour at a bar, but as I get closer, I realise they’re waiting for the young farmer to clean and refill the ‘mechanical cow’. The landscape being more industrial than pastoral in this part of the Capannori, I ask the farmer how far away his farm is. He pulls me a few steps to one side and points through a gap in the buildings to his cow barn, about half a kilometre from us. Not many food miles required to fill the machine. Sensing a captive audience, he signals me over to his milk truck and opens the side door to reveal a secret cargo… Lying on the back seat is a large bunch of stringa. His own produce he proudly explains, harvested that afternoon for a customer who will be arriving any moment, so he regrets he can’t sell me any. ‘Stringa’ means ‘shoelace’ and refers to a small diameter green bean, grown only in the Lucca plain and nearby Versilia, that reaches 70–80 cm in length — more a bootlace, really. I explain that I organise gastronomic tours to visit small producers and ask whether I could bring some guests by to see his farm. He suggests I telephone next time I’m passing and he’ll show me around. He returns to his work, now filling the bottle dispenser with new glass bottles, for new customers or those who have forgotten theirs at home. By now the crowd has dispersed and I fill my own bottle. The milk costs 1 euro a litre and, for small consumers, you can buy it in units of 100ml, rather than having to buy a whole litre at once. It tastes intensely of milk, unlike the white liquid one buys at the supermarket, which costs €1,40. I say arrivederci, but he’s loath to lose a sympathetic ear. He looks indecisive, then makes up his mind, goes to the truck and steals a large handful of stringa from the bunch on the seat. ‘Here’, he says, ‘You know how to cook them, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, stew them with onions, garlic and tomato.’ ‘They’re delicious with rabbit, but only with my grandmother’s.’ He reminisces, ‘When I was a boy, I refused to eat rabbit if my mother bought it from the butcher. It didn’t have any flavour compared to my nonna’s. But she’s gone now, and I don’t have time to keep chickens and rabbits’, he continues wistfully. I promise to return soon, and bear my booty home to stew my stringa.
Last Thursday Cristina, who owns the restaurant the Antico Uliveto in Pozzi di Seravezza, and I walked up to the high pastures of the Alpi Apuane in northern Tuscany to visit a couple who are among the very few who still take their flock of sheep up to the mountain tops in summer. They live in a house powered only by a single solar panel and cook over an open fire in the large kitchen fireplace. Our lunch was composed almost entirely of their own produce. It included a porcupine that had been eating their squashes and melons and which Siria, the wife, had made into a delicious stew with their own tomatoes and a few olives brought up from the valley. When we arrived she was just beginning to fry some of the potatoes they grow, and soon had a huge pot of water hanging from a hook over the fire. As soon as it boiled, she added handfuls of maize flour (she apologised for it’s being last year’s — they’ve harvested this year’s maize but haven’t been down to have it ground) and we took turns stirring until it thickened into a soft polenta. It didn’t matter at all about it’s being a year old; it was Maranino maize and tasted like the corn it came from, unlike the tasteless polenta flour you can buy in a supermarket, or even most Italian delicatessens. We washed it all down with a very drinkable red wine made by the husband Pacifico. The meal ended with Siria’s pecorino cheese and sweet juicy plums from their orchard. After a cup of coffee and walnut liqueur (nocino), also made by them, Pacifico took us to see La Fannia, a beech tree at the top of the ridge that is said to be over 500 years old, and an abandoned silver mine, now the refuge of some rare red-bellied salamanders. We walked down as the sun set over the sea at Forte dei Marmi lighting up Monte Forato behind us. A day with Siria and Pacifico will definitely be on offer to gastronomic tour guests next summer.
September 2017: Since I wrote this blog, Siria and Pacifico decided they didn’t want visitors disturbing their peace. I don’t blame them, but it’s a loss to us. |
Email Subscription
Click to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. AuthorErica Jarman Categories
All
Archives
October 2023
|