Made in Italy: Food and Stories

Made in Italy: Food and Stories Giorgio Locatelli ???? HarperCollins Made In Italy Food & Stories Giorgio Locatelli with Sheila Keating Photographs by Dan Lepard Fourth Estate London To Plaxy Table of Contents Cover Page (#u96aa69e7-10d9-544b-8ebb-7dbc3f5f013a) Title Page (#uc08ea398-f637-5308-8956-91314aa8332f) Dedication (#u2dccdb47-37a9-5bd6-8a4f-f92aef61b628) La Convivialit? (#u5dbec7dd-0316-53ed-ab6b-4a084f67e84f) ?You?ll never be a chef, Locatelli!? (#uc3419bdb-c48c-5eb7-b557-d3b2cf728086) Food, love and life? (#u8e9c76e8-b431-5e82-a75a-eed05a7006a6) Antipasti Starters (#u89864c06-3a89-5364-a857-bf022ed66c0e) Pellegrino Artusi (#u6d4c96e7-1053-584e-9cfb-8b0b9296be39) The traditional Italian meal (#u70963344-4cac-5548-b4be-51cf0176d532) Italian food today (#ua748ce3c-8500-5aa5-b0d2-6df2ddb3dd59) Reinterpreting the classics (#ua0bbc75c-583b-5a10-93aa-8374df3aa0ae) Insalate e condimenti Salads and dressings (#u8abeaa3c-e94f-5909-a843-b7180cac547d) Olio d?oliva Olive oil (#uc3fdaa5d-0e2f-5ccd-b241-a6bf33c09879) Aceto Vinegar (#uc540eead-cefc-5537-80f0-919516b60277) Dressings (#ub16e24e4-af70-5dab-b1a2-fa615d2aee16) Giorgio?s vinaigrette (#u6a35cfde-36d8-50dd-a915-157eaaf57b9b) Aspretto di zafferano Saffron vinaigrette (#u079246e4-05a4-5c9c-b0f6-d43bf5aa5e7f) Condimento allo scalogno Shallot vinaigrette (#u0b95c5f8-80b4-5707-b7ab-30aead5c0335) Condimento all?aceto balsamico Balsamic vinaigrette (#ufa5dcadd-5525-5785-a8e4-910e145b3bfd) Olio e limone Oil and lemon dressing (#u039a18fd-c660-5446-950d-893766e9c59d) Maionese Mayonnaise (#u794c7662-3185-52e6-a1c7-769dd60c108f) Seasoning (#ucce8f5b0-b21b-58f5-8483-4521221c3504) Prezzemolo e aglio Parsley and garlic (#udbb9692c-a209-55db-9199-3d5a89b44d2c) Caponata (#u41720d7b-8c1d-5dea-a848-adeb769ca788) Deep-frying (#u58f7fb52-deda-5ae2-a38a-9ee015ccea88) Insalata di radicchio, prataioli e gorgonzola piccante/dolce Radicchio salad with button mushrooms and Gorgonzola dressing (#u0da36883-e952-512f-b0d6-90117f931b9c) Insalata di porcini alla griglia Chargrilled cep salad (#u1486ed30-d14d-5744-9094-5241695526eb) Acciughe Anchovies (#u2a8e5842-de54-51ca-8d79-48d369953328) Insalata di puntarelle, capperi e acciughe Puntarelle salad with capers and anchovies (#udfadc626-302d-574b-8298-0f7443cd1ff0) Capperi Capers (#u33d73782-135c-58a4-8cbf-d578da418f88) Insalata di endivia e Ovinfort Chicory with Ovinfort cheese (#u0860ac82-cc92-5cb3-af0e-acf96c69d914) Carciofi Globe artichokes (#u76074895-32a0-5f36-a727-234eb4d1279f) Insalata di carciofi alla Parmigiana Artichoke salad with Parmesan (#ucf23351b-eb7f-56be-8049-e712cc81fc9b) Insalata di fagiolini, cipolle rosse e Parmigiano Green bean salad with roast red onion and Parmesan (#u9e8535f2-53c9-5e50-b649-ce2309086b3a) Insalata di fagiolini gialli, patate e tartufo Yellow bean, potato and black truffle salad (#ude8e5b05-797f-53e1-b982-ffab8a5c037a) Insalata di asparagi e Parmigiano Asparagus salad with Parmesan (#uf8baed35-019e-5497-893e-47c0cd72f892) Insalata di cardi alla Fontina Swiss chard envelopes with Fontina (#u429e2608-2e1d-5a43-9e3a-1a8024c0ca28) Olive Olives (#u3f609400-30ed-55ea-a811-d0bc8b6bf698) Accompaniments for salumi Zucchine all?olio Grilled courgettes in olive oil (#ubd282c2a-b818-569f-8b1d-03955c760c9e) Sottaceti Pickled vegetables (#ufeb09c4f-4ee3-597d-9799-4cd820eb7f00) Cipolline all?aceto balsamico Baby onions in balsamic vinegar (#ua40346dd-46e1-5077-98cc-690c43b3bfd6) Carciofi Artichokes (#ube5941ea-b3ae-515f-a11d-28e13342ccdc) Peperoni Peppers (#u69de914b-42e7-5808-b235-019d282f6276) Barbabietole Beetroot (#u0a1113e5-7013-5f1a-939b-93c9ed9cee2f) Melanzane Aubergine (#u7f7f41a4-f130-5a81-ba8d-2caf6f91b325) Finferli Girolle mushrooms (#u010854de-749d-52ca-9640-3ae7c1d53a94) Mozzarella and Burrata ?Pearly-white treasure? (#u14349c5d-ec30-5630-83f4-f2a867dd132e) Burrata (#u4c714dad-ea17-5699-8abe-e4e1c229dc56) Seafood antipasti (#u4e2e1b5d-3859-51de-b0ec-fe23b196440d) Sgombro all?aspretto di zafferano Mackerel with saffron vinaigrette (#u3bcaa47c-311d-5357-b1d7-6ecbabc5bdc4) Sardine alla rivierasca Fried stuffed sardines (#u0603df3d-f8bb-5587-94f2-73a85089fb82) Carpione di pesce persico Escabeche of perch (#u2407645d-4555-52c3-ba7a-6e0e316b525f) Insalata di polpo e patate novelle Octopus salad with new potatoes (#u8250ca3d-5cad-512a-a7b1-636d196d80b7) Carpaccio di polpo Octopus carpaccio (#u24647542-38f9-5dfc-add5-77d5f347eb35) Calamari Squid (#ua0d2ae1b-3454-5813-893a-3203c127a647) Calamari ripieni alla griglia Chargrilled stuffed squid with tomato (#u15954e33-5074-5a06-8b98-bb33e2b7b7bc) Insalata di seppia alla griglia Chargrilled cuttlefish salad (#u3348912b-e49d-5352-a18f-2115b58f0c8e) Gamberi e borlotti Prawns with fresh borlotti beans (#u0949df63-b9bb-57ba-8be3-1eeff95743c1) Capesante all?aspretto di zafferano Pan-fried scallops with saffron vinaigrette (#uc6ced123-5f7a-58af-b50e-239c3990f97c) Razza al balsamico Skate wing with aged balsamic vinegar (#uf7b863bf-abb2-5130-8ad2-576f010f4523) Insalata di borlotti, tonno e cipolle rosse Tuna salad with borlotti beans and red onion (#u88e21797-4f97-5a5a-ab30-46b6e33fa302) Bottarga (#u3b9728de-8286-59be-8299-84f3b498d152) Insalata di ravanelli e bottarga di muggine Grey mullet roe and radish salad (#u90991a44-e64a-5994-9d38-87bdf314f4a2) Salumi Cured meats (#u78cc4ff8-e090-5591-9b28-182df6d43812) Salami (#udda0248c-a1c6-5c4c-aff7-cb73768edc54) Prosciutto (#ua4f30318-7136-58a8-89a7-294195efcf56) Slicing and serving salumi (#ucfd5e3e5-5964-52e1-b1af-96725a5ce5ba) Prosciutto e fichi Parma ham and figs (#u98763531-6548-5797-a6e2-d088a8d38fd1) Bresaola di cervo e sedano di Verona Cured venison with celeriac and black truffle (#uafa853ce-fd7e-5e93-b3aa-95b9df2f1a3e) Bresaola di manzo al caprino Thinly sliced cured beef with goats? cheese dressing (#u2c20002f-8aca-5c52-b266-0ef6b6ae5d34) Carpaccio di manzo Beef carpaccio (#udca5f2fb-9f27-5d4d-b6d3-415bbf118560) Sformato di patate, pancetta e Taleggio Layered potatoes and pancetta with cheese sauce (#u44cfb76c-045a-5e93-9656-296217e36b71) Mondeghini Stuffed cabbage (#udeefa75f-a65f-54ec-b4c2-108ee93c6326) Lingua di manzo in salsa verde Ox tongue with green sauce (#u05ccafad-d11e-5a9a-aff9-a0cab2a53b81) Testina di vitello Calf?s head salad (#u9679cc96-2061-51ba-b719-abf2a98f094e) Insalata di piedino di vitello Calves? foot salad (#u070d70bf-8706-5c33-90e6-9425497b1db8) Pane Bread (#ufbe66aa8-ee09-59cb-ba59-1cf3f6d5756f) The flour (#u545381c6-c6fc-5eac-a744-a27d641c303f) The colomba (#u544ea83c-e387-5748-ba3a-e28d1d8b3635) Baking (#uebc0896a-4dd6-5211-bca3-890c11cf839e) Yeast (#u7de661de-7636-5737-b9e6-257e344028bb) Water (#ua8e66f0a-9bf4-5234-8404-46b79d7b1c18) Parmesan grissini (#ubce117fc-f87f-5708-9c53-4e705aa812fa) Pizzette (#uf2014893-3b42-5b0b-8f94-501f9d65876c) Schiaccata di San Zenone (#u5d708fa9-e518-5fb8-8305-f147010941be) Focaccia classica (#ue3ffbc58-5478-514b-94e1-4425ee40cdf9) A more complex focaccia (#ubbfd8e06-9c3b-5f71-a5e2-a2d63479d60e) Flavoured bread (#u5b0d78cf-728e-5ffd-aee4-374b53dfb6ec) Flavourings All?aglio Confit garlic (#litres_trial_promo) Alle melanzane Aubergine (#litres_trial_promo) Al pomodoro secco e salvia Sun-dried tomato and sage (#litres_trial_promo) Al grano saraceno, patate e verze Cabbage, potato and buckwheat (#litres_trial_promo) The biga (#litres_trial_promo) Pane di mais Polenta bread (#litres_trial_promo) Pane di zucca e uva Pumpkin and raisin bread (#litres_trial_promo) Pan tramvai Raisin bread (#litres_trial_promo) Pane al farro Spelt bread (#litres_trial_promo) Like grandmother, like grandson (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa Soup (#litres_trial_promo) Old Italian proverb (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa di cannolicchi e fregola Razor clam and fregola soup (#litres_trial_promo) Minestrone alla genovese Minestrone verde with pesto (#litres_trial_promo) Minestrone agli scampi Minestrone with langoustines (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa di pesce Fish soup (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa fredda di pomodoro Chilled tomato soup (#litres_trial_promo) Aglio Garlic (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa all?aglio novello New season?s garlic soup (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa di lenticchie Lentil soup (#litres_trial_promo) Fagioli Beans (#litres_trial_promo) Soaking and Cooking Beans (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa di borlotti e farro Borlotti bean soup with spelt (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa di cannellini Cannellini bean soup (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa di ceci e pancetta Chickpea soup with pancetta (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa di broccoli e gnocchetti di ricotta Broccoli soup with ricotta cheese dumplings (#litres_trial_promo) Tortellini in brodo Chicken parcels in clear broth (#litres_trial_promo) The great escapist (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth David, Italian Food, 1954 (#litres_trial_promo) Riso The rice (#litres_trial_promo) Brodo The stock (#litres_trial_promo) The technique (#litres_trial_promo) Ideal proportions (#litres_trial_promo) The cheese (#litres_trial_promo) Parmigiano Reggiano Parmesan (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto alla lodigiana Classic risotto with grana cheese (#litres_trial_promo) Making the soffritto (#litres_trial_promo) The tostatura ? ?toasting? the rice (#litres_trial_promo) Adding the stock (#litres_trial_promo) Resting (#litres_trial_promo) The mantecatura (#litres_trial_promo) Tartufi bianchi White truffles (#litres_trial_promo) Tartufo nero Black truffles (#litres_trial_promo) Truffle oil (#litres_trial_promo) Preparing truffles (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto al tartufo bianco White truffle risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Zafferano Saffron (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto allo zafferano Saffron risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto agli asparagi Asparagus risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto alle ortiche Nettle risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Ceps Porcini (#litres_trial_promo) Buying and preparing porcini (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto ai porcini Cep risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto ai carciofi Artichoke risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto alla zucca e noce moscata Pumpkin and nutmeg risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto al Barolo e Castelmagno Risotto with Barolo wine and Castelmagno cheese (#litres_trial_promo) Risotti di pesce Seafood risotti (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto alle vongole Clam risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto alle code di gamberi Prawn risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto agli scampi Langoustine risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto al Prosecco con capesante Prosecco risotto with scallops (#litres_trial_promo) Risotti di carne Risotti with sausage and game (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto luganiga e piselli Risotto with sausage and peas (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto alle quaglie Quail risotto (#litres_trial_promo) Risotto another day (#litres_trial_promo) Arancini (#litres_trial_promo) Brodi Stocks (#litres_trial_promo) Chicken stock (#litres_trial_promo) Veal stock (#litres_trial_promo) Pork, lamb and venison stock (#litres_trial_promo) Fish stock (#litres_trial_promo) Vegetable stock (#litres_trial_promo) Soho nights (#litres_trial_promo) Pasta (#litres_trial_promo) ?Everything you see I owe to spaghetti? Sophia Loren (#litres_trial_promo) Marco Polo? (#litres_trial_promo) More than macaroni (#litres_trial_promo) A pasta for every sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Fresh or dried (#litres_trial_promo) A plate of pasta? (#litres_trial_promo) Dried pasta (#litres_trial_promo) The soul of the pasta (#litres_trial_promo) Six minutes of your life? (#litres_trial_promo) The formula (#litres_trial_promo) Dried pasta: long (#litres_trial_promo) Dried pasta: short tubes (#litres_trial_promo) Dried pasta: shapes (#litres_trial_promo) Spaghetti al crudo Spaghetti with tomatoes, olives, capers and anchovies (#litres_trial_promo) Spaghetti al polpo Spaghetti with octopus (#litres_trial_promo) Pomodori Tomatoes (#litres_trial_promo) Linguine al pesto Linguine with pesto (#litres_trial_promo) Pesto (#litres_trial_promo) Pesto (#litres_trial_promo) Linguine all? aragosta Linguine with lobster (#litres_trial_promo) Linguine agli scampi Linguine with langoustine (#litres_trial_promo) Linguine alle vongole Linguine with clams (#litres_trial_promo) Linguine alla bottarga Linguine with bottarga (#litres_trial_promo) Linguine con sardine e finocchietto selvatico Linguine with sardine and wild fennel (#litres_trial_promo) Peperoncino Chilli (#litres_trial_promo) Orecchiette alle cime di rapa e peperoncino Orecchiette with turnip tops and chilli (#litres_trial_promo) Orecchiette con piselli, pancetta e tartufo nero Orecchiette with peas, pancetta and black truffle (#litres_trial_promo) Malloreddus al pomodoro e ricotta salata Sardinian-style pasta with tomato and mature ricotta (#litres_trial_promo) Homemade walnut paste (#litres_trial_promo) Garganelli in salsa noci Tubular pasta with walnut sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Garganelli pesto e pomodoro Tubular pasta with tomato and pesto sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Garganelli con triglia e olive nere Tubular pasta with red mullet and black olives (#litres_trial_promo) Fresh egg pasta (#litres_trial_promo) Making the pasta (#litres_trial_promo) Rolling the pasta (#litres_trial_promo) Egg pasta: long (#litres_trial_promo) Egg pasta: short (#litres_trial_promo) Egg pasta: flat (#litres_trial_promo) Egg pasta: filled (#litres_trial_promo) Pappardelle alle fave e rucola Pappardelle with broad beans and rocket (#litres_trial_promo) Pappardelle ai fegatini di pollo e salvia Pappardelle with chicken liver and sage (#litres_trial_promo) Pappardelle ai porcini Pappardelle with ceps (#litres_trial_promo) Tagliatelle alle sarde in saor Tagliatelle with marinated sardines (#litres_trial_promo) Tagliatelle di castagne ai funghi selvatici Chestnut tagliatelle with wild mushrooms (#litres_trial_promo) Tagliolini alle zucchine e bottarga Fresh egg pasta with courgettes and fish roe (#litres_trial_promo) Tagliolini con cicoria Tagliolini with chicory (#litres_trial_promo) Pasta with rag? (#litres_trial_promo) Rag? alla bolognese (#litres_trial_promo) Rag? di maiale Pork rag? (#litres_trial_promo) Rag? di cervo Venison rag? (#litres_trial_promo) Rag? di cinghiale Wild boar rag? (#litres_trial_promo) Pasta al forno Baked pasta (#litres_trial_promo) Not only lasagne? (#litres_trial_promo) Fazzoletti alla purea di legumi e basilico Layered pasta with spring vegetables and basil pur?e (#litres_trial_promo) Filled pasta (#litres_trial_promo) Ravioli di patate e menta con peperoni Potato and mint parcels with pepper sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Ravioli di erbe con salsa di noci Herb ravioli with walnut sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Ravioli di patate e funghi selvatici New potato ravioli with wild mushrooms (#litres_trial_promo) Tordelli di cipolla rossa e salsa al Chianti Red onion parcels with Chianti sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Tordelli di zucca agli amaretti Pasta parcels with pumpkin and amaretti (#litres_trial_promo) Tordelli di melanzane e mozzarella Aubergine and mozzarella parcels (#litres_trial_promo) Malfatti di ricotta, melanzane e noci Ricotta parcels with aubergine and walnuts (#litres_trial_promo) Melanzane Aubergines (#litres_trial_promo) Ravioli di gamberi Prawn ravioli (#litres_trial_promo) Ravioli all?osso buco Veal shank ravioli (#litres_trial_promo) Ravioli di coda di manzo Oxtail parcels (#litres_trial_promo) Ravioli di fagiano Pheasant ravioli (#litres_trial_promo) Strozzapreti alle tre cipolle Pasta twists with onion (#litres_trial_promo) Spaghetti alla chitarra con polpettine di tonno Handmade spaghetti with balls of tuna (#litres_trial_promo) Potato gnocchi (#litres_trial_promo) Potato gnocchi dough (#litres_trial_promo) Gnocchi di patate al pepe nero e salsa al caprino Potato dumplings with black pepper and goats? cheese sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Gnocchi di patate pomodoro e rucola Potato dumplings with tomato and rocket (#litres_trial_promo) Gnocchi di patate al pesto Potato dumplings with pesto (#litres_trial_promo) Gnocchi di patate ai funghi porcini Potato dumplings with ceps (#litres_trial_promo) Gnocchi di patate con carciofi e Murazzano Potato dumplings with artichoke and Murazzano cheese (#litres_trial_promo) Gnocchetti di funghi al burro e salvia e tartufo nero Small mushroom dumplings with butter, sage and truffles (#litres_trial_promo) Paris (#litres_trial_promo) Pesce Fish (#litres_trial_promo) Anna Del Conte, Entertaining all?Italiana (#litres_trial_promo) What kind of fish? (#litres_trial_promo) The smell of the sea (#litres_trial_promo) A note on cooking fish (#litres_trial_promo) Parsley, sage, rosemary ? but not thyme (#litres_trial_promo) Branzino alla Vernaccia in crosta di pomodoro Sea bass with tomato crust and Vernaccia wine (#litres_trial_promo) Branzino in crosta di sale e erbe Sea bass in sea salt and herbs (#litres_trial_promo) Branzino al basilico Sea bass with basil potato pur?e (#litres_trial_promo) Trancio di tonno alla griglia Chargrilled tuna (#litres_trial_promo) Limone Lemons (#litres_trial_promo) Nasello in scabeccio Steamed hake with parsley and garlic (#litres_trial_promo) Sgombro alla griglia con crosta di erbe Chargrilled mackerel with herb crust (#litres_trial_promo) Anguilla Eel (#litres_trial_promo) Trancio di merluzzo con lenticchie Cod with lentils (#litres_trial_promo) San Pietro con patate e olive Fillet of John Dory with potato and olives (#litres_trial_promo) Coda di rospo in salsa di noci e agrodolce di capperi Monkfish with walnut and agrodolce (#litres_trial_promo) Trancio di rombo ai funghi porcini con pur? di patate Roasted turbot (or brill) with ceps and potato pur?e (#litres_trial_promo) Sogliola arrosto con patate, fagiolini e pesto Roast Dover sole with potatoes, beans and pesto sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Orata al balsamico Pan-fried sea bream with balsamic vinegar (#litres_trial_promo) Trancio di rombo liscio all?acquapazza Roast brill with green olives and cherry tomatoes (#litres_trial_promo) Filetti di passera al basilico con patate e olive Plaice with basil, potatoes and olives (#litres_trial_promo) Pangrattato Breadcrumbs (#litres_trial_promo) Filetti di passera con castelfranco finocchi e bagna c??da Roast fillet of plaice with fennel and anchovy sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Sardine con panzanella Sardines with bread salad (#litres_trial_promo) Paella on a motorbike? (#litres_trial_promo) Carne Meat (#litres_trial_promo) Matthew Fort, Eating Up Italy (#litres_trial_promo) Save the butchers (#litres_trial_promo) Nose to tail (#litres_trial_promo) Long and slow (#litres_trial_promo) Vitello Veal (#litres_trial_promo) La Chianina (#litres_trial_promo) The hunt (#litres_trial_promo) A note about cooking meat (#litres_trial_promo) Agnello primaverile alla griglia con peperonata e melanzane Chargrilled lamb with peppers and aubergine pur?e (#litres_trial_promo) Stufato di agnello con peperoni Lamb stew with peppers (#litres_trial_promo) Polenta (#litres_trial_promo) Filetto di manzo, spugnole e patate Beef fillet with morels and potatoes (#litres_trial_promo) Sottofiletto di manzo alla griglia con radicchio trevisano tardivo e polenta Chargrilled beef sirloin with trevisano and polenta (#litres_trial_promo) Radicchio/cicoria Chicory/endive (#litres_trial_promo) Filetto di cervo, porcini e crema fritta Loin of venison, ceps and fried pastry cream (#litres_trial_promo) Costoletta di vitello con carciofi e patate novelle Veal chop with artichoke and new potatoes (#litres_trial_promo) Scallopine (#litres_trial_promo) Paillard di pollo con spinaci Chargrilled chicken breast with spinach (#litres_trial_promo) Pollastra bollita al tartufo nero di norcia, vegetali bolliti e salsa verde Poached chicken stuffed with black truffle, with boiled vegetables and salsa verde (#litres_trial_promo) Filetti di maiale con cavolo nero e fagioli Pork fillet with black cabbage and cannellini beans (#litres_trial_promo) Filetto di maiale con crosta di mostarda e borlotti Pork fillet with mustard crust and borlotti beans (#litres_trial_promo) Mostarda di Cremona Mustard fruits (#litres_trial_promo) Fegato di vitello al balsamico Calves? liver with balsamic vinegar (#litres_trial_promo) Rognone di vitello con lenticchie e carciofi Veal kidney with lentils and artichoke (#litres_trial_promo) Anatra con broccoli Duck breast with broccoli (#litres_trial_promo) Pernice con lenticchie e pur? di patate Partridge with lentils and potato pur?e (#litres_trial_promo) Piccione, tartufo nero e pur? d?aglio Roast pigeon, black truffle and garlic pur?e (#litres_trial_promo) Cervello Brains (#litres_trial_promo) Animelle di vitello in agrodolce Veal sweetbreads with sweet-and-sour sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Basic sauce for meat (#litres_trial_promo) London to stay (#litres_trial_promo) Dolci Desserts (#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth David, Italian Food, 1954 (#litres_trial_promo) Frutta Fruit (#litres_trial_promo) Torte e pasticceria Cakes and pastries (#litres_trial_promo) Frittelle (#litres_trial_promo) Festival time (#litres_trial_promo) Biscotti (#litres_trial_promo) The art of the pastry chef (#litres_trial_promo) Sorbetto di melone, fragole selvatiche, salsa all?arancio Wild strawberries with melon sorbet and orange sauce (#litres_trial_promo) Lasagne di fragole e mango Strawberry and mango lasagne (#litres_trial_promo) Dulce de leche caramel (#litres_trial_promo) Pere cotte al vino rosso e bianco Poached pears in red and white wine (#litres_trial_promo) Pere cotte e crude con zabaione a moscato Moscato zabaglione with confit and fresh pears (#litres_trial_promo) Pesche Peaches (#litres_trial_promo) Pesche sciroppate, semifreddo di menta e gelatina d?Amaretto Poached peaches with fresh mint nougat glace and Amaretto jelly (#litres_trial_promo) Macedonia di nespole e sanguinelle, gelatina di violetta e schiuma allo yogurt Blood orange and fresh loquat salad with violet jelly and yoghurt foam (#litres_trial_promo) Catalan cream foam with berries (#litres_trial_promo) Sorbetto di menta, frutto della passione e schiuma di cocco Mint sorbet, passion fruit jelly and coconut foam (#litres_trial_promo) Pasta frolla Sweet pastry (#litres_trial_promo) Torta di ciliege Cherry tart (#litres_trial_promo) Torta di pesche all?Amaretto Peach and Amaretto tart (#litres_trial_promo) Torta di mele Apple tart (#litres_trial_promo) Torta di limone e mascarpone Lemon and mascarpone tart (#litres_trial_promo) Ricotta (#litres_trial_promo) Torta di ricotta Ricotta tart (#litres_trial_promo) Cannoli di ricotta (#litres_trial_promo) Pastiera Napoletana Easter tart (#litres_trial_promo) Rusumada (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa di pomodoro dolce, gelatina di balsamica e sorbetto al basilico Sweet tomato soup, balsamic jelly and basil sorbet (#litres_trial_promo) Souffle di riso carnaroli al limone Carnaroli rice and lemon souffl? (#litres_trial_promo) Tiramisu with banana and liquorice ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelati e sorbetti Ice creams and sorbets (#litres_trial_promo) The science of ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) A note about the sugars (#litres_trial_promo) Sorbetto di melone Melon sorbet (#litres_trial_promo) Sorbetto di menta Mint sorbet (#litres_trial_promo) Sorbetto di basilico Basil sorbet (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato alla vaniglia Vanilla ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato al latte Milk ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato di crema Catalana Cr?me Catalan ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato al mascarpone Mascarpone ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato al timo limonato Lemon thyme ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato all?Amaretto Amaretto ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato al mirto Myrtle ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato al Limoncello Limoncello ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato al tartufo e miele Truffle honey ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato al caff? Coffee ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato alla liquirizia Liquorice ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato alle nocciole Hazelnut ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato al pistacchio Pistachio ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato al te Marco Polo tea ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato alla cannella Cinnamon ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Gelato al panettone Panettone ice cream (#litres_trial_promo) Panettone (#litres_trial_promo) Amaretti biscuits (#litres_trial_promo) Almond tuiles (#litres_trial_promo) Hazelnut tuiles (#litres_trial_promo) Frangipane crisps (#litres_trial_promo) Hazelnut crisps (#litres_trial_promo) Mandorle, nocciole, noci e castagne Almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts and chestnuts (#litres_trial_promo) Special sabl? biscuits (#litres_trial_promo) Salted special sabl? biscuits (#litres_trial_promo) Biscotti al latte Milk crisps (#litres_trial_promo) Lemon thyme caramel crisps (#litres_trial_promo) Le guarnizioni Garnishes (#litres_trial_promo) Apple crisps (#litres_trial_promo) Candied mint (#litres_trial_promo) Candied vanilla pods (#litres_trial_promo) Cioccolato Chocolate (#litres_trial_promo) Chocolate parfait and foam (#litres_trial_promo) Torta al cioccolato e mandorle Chocolate and almond tart (#litres_trial_promo) Zuppa di cioccolato e yogurt White chocolate and yoghurt soup (#litres_trial_promo) Saffron and chocolate fondant (#litres_trial_promo) Chocolate fondant with Bicerin di Gianduiotto (#litres_trial_promo) Sformato d?arancia e cioccolato, pannacotta all?acqua di rose Orange and chocolate sformato sponge with rose water pannacotta (#litres_trial_promo) Frittelle di cioccolato e banana Chocolate and banana beignets (#litres_trial_promo) Formaggi Cheese (#litres_trial_promo) This life (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Photos (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Giorgio Locatelli (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) La Convivialit? (#ulink_75708307-a578-5a7d-9408-62652b505746) I wanted to call this book Made of Italy, because that is what I am ? but I could as easily have called it La Convivialit? ? because that is the word I use most to explain the way Italians feel about food. For us the sign of welcome is to feed people. At the heart of all cooking, whether you are rich or poor, is the spirit of conviviality, the pleasure that comes from sharing a meal with others. And there is no enjoyment of food, without quality. The way I think about food is entirely in tune with the Slow Food movement, started in Italy back in 1986 by Carlo Petrini in defiance of the opening of a McDonalds outlet in the Piazza di Spagna in Roma. Now a world wide force, Slow Food champions local, traditional produce with real flavour, made by caring people with skill and wisdom, which is celebrated every two years ? with wonderful conviviality ? at the Salone del Gusto, the famous food fair in Torino. In the UK it is easy to blame supermarkets for clocking up air miles, for persuading us that we want fruit and vegetables that look perfect, but often have little flavour; for luring us on to diets of things that are salty, fatty, sugary and easy to eat; for packaging everything into convenient parcels so that we almost forget where our food comes from; and conditioning us to think that as long as our food is cheap, we are satisfied. But we have responsibilities too, and we have the power to change things. Of course I understand when you have kids you want to go to the supermarket, not traipse for miles trying to find a good butcher and fishmonger and green-grocer, and I?m not sitting here in my restaurant saying, you must do this and that, only remember that every time you pick up food in a supermarket, you are making a choice that has consequences. Where do you want to invest your money? In the profits of a supermarket, or in a farm rearing fantastic old breeds of pigs, or a small dairy making beautiful cheese? You will see the letters DOP (PDO in the UK) and IGP (PGI in the UK) throughout the book. DOP represents Denominazione di Origine Protetta or Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), and it appears alongside the specific name of a product such as Parmigiano Reggiano or prosciutto di Parma. What it tells you is that in order to earn the stamp of the DOP and be allowed to use this name, the food must be produced in a designated area, using particular methods. IGP represents Indicazione Geografica Protetta, or Protected Geographical Indication (PGI), which is similar, but states that at least one stage of production must occur in the traditional region, and doesn?t place as much emphasis on the method of production. Whenever you buy Italian produce, look out for these symbols. Salt should ideally be natural sea salt, and pepper freshly ground and black. Spend a little extra on good extra virgin olive oil and vinegar, and it will repay you a thousand times. And whenever possible buy whole chickens, and meat and fish on the bone, not portioned and wrapped in plastic. All recipes serve 4, unless otherwise stated ?You?ll never be a chef, Locatelli!? (#ulink_96f2a629-1052-5a7c-880e-9cc234e71458) ?Pass the prawns?the prawns?where are they?are they ready!? I had been helping with the cooking in my uncle?s restaurant since I was five years old, but now, at sixteen, and a few months into my first real job, I used to get picked on all the time by the head chef. Now he wanted the prawns and they weren?t ready. The water in the pan was almost boiling. It needed to be boiling, before I put in the prawns, but I panicked and put them in anyway. He saw it and shouted at me, ?You will never be a chef, Locatelli. You are an idiot,? and he sent me to clean the French beans. I couldn?t forget those words: ?You will never be a chef.? By the end of the day, I wanted to cry like a baby. I went home and my grandmother was waiting. ?What does he know?? she said. ?Who is he?? ?He is The Chef!? I told her. I would have run away, but as always my grandmother put everything into perspective, and she told me I had to go back and show him. So I went back. And I did show him. Food, love and life? (#ulink_0b231746-5fb5-5a33-9bff-fe8549d018b1) My first feelings for cooking came from my grandmother, Vincenzina. But my first understanding of the relationship between food, sex, wine and the excitement of life came together for me very early on, when I was growing up in the village of Corgeno on the shores of Lake Comabbio in Lombardia in the North of Italy ? long before I was suspended from cooking school for kissing girls on the college steps. My uncle Alfio and my auntie Louisa, with the help of my granddad, built our hotel and restaurant, La Cinzianella ? named after my cousin Cinzia ? on the shores of the lake, on the edge of the village of Corgeno in 1963. There were eight founding families in the village. The Caletti family, on my mother?s side, was one of them; and on my grandmother?s side, the Tamborini family, along with the Gnocchi family, who are our cousins, and who have a pastry shop in Gallarate, near Milano, in the hinterland, before the scenery changes from city to green and beautiful space, and where the speciality is gorgeous soft amaretti biscuits. The shop gave me my first taste of an industrial kitchen. I used to love going in there as a kid, because the ovens were so big you could walk into them. In the season running up to Christmas, over and above the other confectionery, they would make around 10,000 panettone (our Italian Christmas cake). It was fascinating to watch the people take the panettone from the ovens, and then, while they were still warm, hang them upside down in rows on big ladders in the finishing room, so that the dough could stretch and take on that characteristic light, airy texture. Years later, when I first started in the kitchens at the Savoy, I felt at home immediately, because I recognized that same sense of busy, busy people, working away in total concentration. Of course, everyone in Corgeno seems to be some sort of cousin, though none of us can remember exactly how we are related. Six generations of our families are buried in the village graveyard, and the names are etched many times into the war memorial outside the church with the two Roman towers, above the makeshift football pitch where we kids played every day after we had (or hadn?t) done our homework. Life in the North of Italy is very different from the way it is in the pretty Italy of the South ? the idyllic Italy, still a little wild, that you always see in movies. The South fulfils the Mediterranean expectation, whereas the North is the real heart of Europe. Historically we have been under many influences: Spanish, French, Austrian?at home we are only around 20 kilometres from Switzerland, and Milano is the most cosmopolitan city in Italy. In the North I don?t know anyone who hasn?t got a job and everyone comes to the North to find work ? the reverse of the way it is in England. The industrial North of Ferrari and Alessi can be more stark; but somehow I think it has a tougher, more impressive and real kind of beauty than the regions that the English love so much, like Toscano and Umbria. You might not think they are very far down the boot of Italy, but where I come from anything below Bologna is south. In the North, we are famous for designing and making things, things that work properly. Northern Italians always tell jokes against southern Italians, and vice versa. We like to say that, in Roma, if you have to dig a hole in the road it will take eight months; in the North everything will be fixed and running like clockwork in a day. And while most of Italy used to stop for a big break at lunchtime ? especially in the South, where it was too hot to work ? in Milano and around Lombardia it would be one hour only. The factory whistles would go at 12 noon ? the signal for the wives and mothers at home to put in the pasta ? and then the road would be full of bicycles and scooters and motorbikes, as everyone shot home to eat and then straight back to work. In the South, they are used to delicate foods like mozzarella and tomatoes and seafood. In the North, we are proud of our Parmigiano Reggiano and prosciutto di Parma and big warming dishes like polenta and risotto. And if we haven?t used our food to promote our area around the world as strongly as other regions, it is not because it is less important to us, but that we haven?t needed to, because we are known for other things. Corgeno is a place steeped in history, firstly because of its twin Roman towers and more recently because of its pocket resistance to fascism. On one of the old walls you can see the faded words of one of Mussolini?s slogans that still makes me angry every time I see it, with its call to the youth of Italy to put down their picks and shovels and take up arms. There are many stories in our village of the local men of the resistance who used to hide in the woods where the women would bring them food. One of them, my father?s brother, Nino, was shot on one of his trips, trying to help forty Jewish people to escape over the border into Switzerland. Below the village is La Cinzianella, only a few steps to the edge of the lake, which I love, especially in autumn, my favourite time of year. Almost tragic isn?t it, autumn? But so beautiful. Early in the morning, you can?t see the lake because it is hiding in a mauve mist, but when it rises the sky is bright blue and the trees around the lake, with their red and gold leaves, stand out clearly against it. And it is so quiet: all you can hear are the birds calling and scudding over the water ? and across the lake the faint buzz of motorbikes going at a hundred miles an hour across the superstrada, the straight towards Mercallo, and into the turn, as if they were on a race track. We are only forty-five minutes drive from the centre of Milano, and right next to the bigger and more famous Lago Maggiore, so now a lot of people from the city come for weekends; they have bought houses, and the village has grown. But when I was growing up, there were only about 2,000 people and everyone knew everyone else: who was just born, who died; it was all-important to our lives. I remember one of the first new families to move into Corgeno, from Sicilia ? the wife worked at la Cinzianella, and we nicknamed one of the kids Mandarino after the oranges that came from Sicilia. They spoke a dialect that sounded foreign to us, and the father was loud and dramatic when he talked; tragic, comical?so different from my father, who never raised his voice. Almost everything we ate and drank was produced locally. We even picked up the milk every evening from the window of the house of Napoleone, who kept a few cows. Each family had their own bottles and he would fill them up and leave them for us to collect ? in winter outside the window, in summer in the courtyard under a fountain. Later, when I was a young boy and I was working in restaurants abroad, when I came home for the holidays, people would always open their windows to lean out and say hello. They still do. Whenever we go to Corgeno, my wife Plaxy complains that it takes an hour to walk through the village, because someone will always shout, ?Hey, Giorgio? ? and it always seems to be an ex-girlfriend. I remember coming back home after one summer when I was a teenager. I stopped in at the tobacconist to buy cigarettes, and by the time I got to our house, my grandmother already knew that I had changed from Camel to Marlboro. That is how small our village was. My auntie, uncle and my father and mother all worked in the hotel and my uncle ran the restaurant where I worked, too, as soon I was big enough. Later we had a Michelin star, but then we just served good, honest Italian food and on Saturdays we did banqueting and wedding receptions in a big beautiful room at the top of the hotel, looking out over the lake. We used to feed around 180 people and when we were at our busiest, we would make 20 kilos of dough for the gnocchi and everyone, from the waiters to the women who did the rooms, would come into the kitchen to help shape them. In summer, our guests could sit out on the terrace under big umbrellas. If it was raining they gathered inside around a big table in the corridor, and no one ever complained. There are ten rooms in La Cinzianella, and we would send food to the rooms, too. Every Sunday a well-known gentleman from the village, Luciano, would come to the hotel in his Mercedes, with a woman called Rosetta. Everyone knew that his wife had been ill for a long time and that Rosetta was his mistress. So on Sundays his room would be ready for him from about two o?clock, and by six, six-thirty, he would call us and order a bottle of champagne. I remember my mother would put it on a tray and, of course, somebody had to take it up ? all of us young boys wanted to do it, because we wanted to catch a glimpse of Rosetta. I still remember her ? warm and round and womanly, like my auntie Maria Luisa, who was beautiful too, the nearest thing to royalty. Maria Luisa was the only one who had any power over me when I was wayward, and could tell me off without ever losing her temper, unlike my mother, who is quite a nervous woman. When my grandfather died, we sat down for our first meal all together without him, and we all expected that my father would take his place at the head of the table, but Maria Luisa came in and sat down in the place of my granddad and she has been there ever since. My auntie and Rosetta ? for me they represented sexuality, but all bound up with good food and wine and generosity, because by seven-thirty, showered and beautifully dressed, Rosetta and her gentleman friend would come down to eat dinner and we would welcome them warmly; we were part of their lives, and they were part of ours. There was a complicity between restaurateur and guest, which is one of the things I have tried to create in my own restaurant. Even in the heart of London, I feel we have a special bond with our customers. Eating is not just about fuelling up to get through the day; it is about conviviality, friendship and celebration. I like the fact that people come to us again and again for an anniversary, or a birthday. I want them to bring their kids, so I can take them into the kitchen, and they can help prepare the dessert for their mums and dads. I like to feel that I can come and sit down and chat with them in between cooking; and if I see them on the street one morning, I can invite them into the restaurant for coffee. Sometimes people who have eaten at Locanda, and before that at Zafferano, whom we have known for many years, come to see us after a husband or wife has died, or they have split up, because in a strange, poignant way, we have become part of their lives. For my wife, Plaxy, and for me that is so special; because this is our restaurant, an extension of our family; and everything that happens in it is personal to us. I know how important it is to have that intimacy, because the memories of our relationship with the local gentleman and Rosetta at La Cinzianella have stayed with me all my life. Antipasti Starters (#ulink_e077eab0-effc-5d54-843a-287de6201341) Pellegrino Artusi (#ulink_421dc545-ac27-5450-ad75-2f568ed78d7e) ?It is true that man does not live by bread alone; he must eat something with it.? Italians are very impatient people. We can?t sit for more than a minute in traffic and we hate to wait for our food. That is why we invented antipasti, which literally means ?before the meal [pasto]?. When I first came to England, I thought it so strange to see people at parties and weddings standing about having drinks before they ate. Italians just want to get around the table as soon as possible, so the bread can arrive. Not just bread ? we also want salami, prosciutto, maybe some marinated artichokes, some olives?We want to enjoy a glass of wine, to talk and argue, because everything we do in a day is a small drama and everyone has an opinion on it ? but we need to eat while we are discussing it. Once the antipasti are on the table, that is the signal to relax, get into the mood and interact, because you have to pass the plates and everyone is saying, ?Oh what is this?? and, ?Can I have some of that?? It is all about conviviality and sharing and generosity. A few miles from my home in Corgeno, in Lombardia, on the way to nowhere, is the village of Cuirone, with its pale, yellow-washed houses; a place that has hardly changed since I was a child. In the middle of the village is the Societa Mutuo Soccorso, the cooperative shop and restaurant with a bakery attached, where they make fantastic chestnut and pumpkin bread, as well as the big pane bianchi, which is the everyday bread. Inside the bakery, they have a basket that is full of drawstring bags, some gingham, some flowery. Each family makes their own bag, and the bakers know which bread they have, so in the morning when the loaves come out of the oven, the bags get filled up and delivered by scooter. At one time in our region of Italy, most of the villages had a cooperativa, run by the locals, where everyone could bring their produce to sell and where you could get a simple lunch for not much money. Everything you ate would be produced locally. You have to remember that Italy has only been a united country for not much more than a hundred years. Before that it was made up of different kingdoms, dukedoms, republics etc., each influenced by different neighbours and invading armies throughout its history. Also in Italy you have a massive geographical change from mountains to coastlines, from the colder North with its plains full of cows giving beef, and milk for cheese, to the hot South, on the same parallel as Africa, where they grow a profusion of lemons, tomatoes, capers and peppers. So in every region, town, and village, they have their own particular ingredients and style of cooking, which of course they will insist is absolutely the right way ? and that what everyone else does is wrong. In Corgeno, the cooperativa was next to my uncle?s restaurant, La Cinzianella, overlooking the lake, and when you turned twenty years old, you were asked to run it for the summer (the year my friends and I took charge we had a fantastic time). But now the space is rented out as a caf? and restaurant. In Cuirone, though, the cooperativa is still thriving, and sometimes, especially when I come home to visit, my Mum and Dad, and my aunts, uncles and cousins all meet up there for lunch at the weekend. Lunch is at 12.30, and 12.30 is what they mean, so you don?t dare be late. It?s a very simple place: a large room with a long bar down one side and wooden tables and chairs where the farmers and the old men of the village drink red wine and play cards. But the moment you sit down, big baskets of bread from the bakery arrive with bottles of local wine, and then the plates of antipasti: salami, prosciutto, lardo, carpaccio, local cheeses, artichokes, porcini. As one plate is taken away, more arrive, and so it goes on and on. Then, just when my wife Plaxy, especially, is thinking that there can?t be any more food, out comes a pasta dish ? maybe a baked lasagne ? and then a fruit dessert. The antipasti are based around simple produce, just like in people?s homes and most small restaurants. The members of the cooperativa bring whatever they have that is fresh that day, along with ingredients such as artichokes and mushrooms, prepared when they were in season, then preserved in big jars under vinegar or oil, or salamoia (brine). In Italy, things are done differently from in the UK, especially London, where you buy your food, eat it, and then buy some more. Most people in Italy still behave like they did in the old days, when you would always have a store cupboard full of dried or preserved foods because you never knew when there would be a war or some other disaster. In smarter restaurants, the kitchen would have the chance to show off a little more with the antipasti. In my uncle?s kitchen at La Cinzianella we really worked at our antipasti, bringing out some fantastic flavours, because we knew that this prelude to the meal said a lot about what you were trying to achieve with your food, and about the dishes that would follow. The slicing machine was right in the middle of the big dining room, so everyone could see the cured meats being freshly cut, and we would prepare seafood salads and roast vegetables. Imagine how I reacted the first time I went to a French restaurant and they sent out some canap?s before the meal ? those tiny, bite-sized things. I was shocked. I thought, ?If this is what the rest of the food is going to be like, forget it!? Italians don?t like to fiddle about with fancy morsels, they just want to welcome people by sharing what they have, however simple, in abundance. An Italian?s role in life is to feed people. A lot. We can?t help it. The traditional Italian meal (#ulink_57a2d5a7-c695-558d-844f-21705169b64a) In Italy the concept of the ?starter? ? individually plated dishes that you eat by yourself, just you ? is quite a modern thing. Only in the last twenty years or so have restaurants started putting them on the menu. Traditionally, after the antipasti the real ?starter? was the pasta course, or first plate (i primi piatti). Then came the second plate (i secondi piatti), which would be meat or fish, and, to finish, fruit or a dessert (i dolci). When I look at the books I have of old regional recipes, no mention is made of ?starters? as we think of them today. One of the books I love most is La Scienza in Cucina e l?Arte di Mangiar Bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well) by Pellegrino Artusi. All Italian cooks know about Artusi ? he was a great gourmet and one of the first writers to gather together recipes from all over Italy. He published the book himself back in 1891, in the days when Italian food was considered a bit vulgar in ?smart? society because the food of the royal courts was French. Artusi spent twenty years travelling around Italy and his knowledge of regional produce and cooking was remarkable. His stories are full of beautiful descriptions and witty comments, sometimes using old Italian words that I have to look up. I keep his book in my office in the kitchen at Locanda to research ingredients and old recipes. But even Artusi has only a short section on ?appetisers?, which is really just an acknowledgement of the moment before the meal when you show off your capacity to bring out food of a high quality. (Interestingly, he says that in Toscana they did things differently from other regions and served these ?delicious trifles? after the pasta, not before.) Artusi talks about various cured meats, caviar and mosciame (salted and air-dried tuna), but the only ?recipes? he gives for appetisers are a selection of crostini: fried bread topped with ingredients such as capers, chicken livers and sage, or woodcock and anchovies. Traditionally, the kind of antipasti you ate was determined by where you lived. Around the coast there would obviously be more seafood, while inland there were cured meats. Every region would have different breads to serve with the antipasti: light, airy breads in the North, white unsalted bread in Toscana and enormous country loaves made with harder flour in the South ? fantastic for bruschetta, which these days has become rather elevated in restaurants, but is really just chargrilled stale bread with a bit of garlic and tomato rubbed over it and some oil drizzled on top. Even now, food in Italy is very regional, but after the Second World War, when everything became more abundant and people began to travel more, some chefs started to be a little inventive and borrow ideas for their antipasti from other regions, and from the street food you see cooked in cities such as Napoli by vendors with gas burners on trolleys: arancini (rice balls), crocchette (mashed potato croquettes), panzerotti (little pasties filled with meat, cheese, tomatoes or anchovies, then deep-fried), mozzarella in carrozza (mozzarella ?in a carriage? ? deep-fried between slices of bread), and frittelle (fritters filled with artichokes, mushrooms or prawns). Italian food today (#ulink_2499e3c2-e87f-5efb-bd67-0901e4c7e2e4) Nowadays in Italy ? in the cities at least ? like everywhere else in the world, the way people want to eat is changing, though perhaps a little more slowly than everywhere else. Not everyone wants a meal of several courses any more. They want to be more relaxed, so you can order just a bowl of pasta and nobody thinks anything of it. And there are now city bars serving only antipasti, where you make yourself up a plate of whatever you want, and that?s all you have. Then there are the newer, smarter restaurants, which try really hard to make their starters more imaginative than a plate of carpaccio or an insalata caprese (tomatoes and mozzarella). As for me, I am an Italian chef who has cooked in Paris and come of age in London, and inventive starters are what people expect from me. I might have in the kitchen a salami that is so beautiful it makes you cry, but I can?t just slice it and put it out with some artichokes and bread. I have to present it in a more sophisticated way. We must include such starters in the restaurant, but we can?t lose the pasta course, so the modern Italian menu usually has four sections: starters, pasta, main courses and dessert, which I know can seem daunting. Sometimes customers say, ?What should I do? Do I have to have a starter, then pasta and a main course after that? Or can I have just pasta and a dessert?? Of course, you can do what you like; we just try to give a selection of everything an Italian would want to be offered, so you can eat as few or as many courses as you want. However sophisticated our menu may be at Locanda, it always has its roots in classic regional Italian cooking. Sure, some of our favourite starters have come about, like all good dishes, from getting excited about a particular ingredient that comes into the kitchen, but many of them are simply our interpretation of the traditional elements of the antipasti misti ? the artichokes, porcini and cured meats with which I and most of my kitchen staff have grown up. We look at them, rethink them and work at representing them in more imaginative or surprising ways. The key is always to concentrate on just a few flavours. I think it is terrible to eat out in a restaurant and not remember afterwards what you had because there were too many tastes happening at once on your plate. It is better to buy primary ingredients that have their own fantastic flavour and then you have to do less with them. One of the great things that has happened since I came to this country is the revolution in the quality of ingredients. When the first Italian immigrants came to the UK and set up their restaurants, they brought what they could over from Italy and created a limited Italian kitchen, making Anglo-Italian dishes that catered for British tastes. Then when people began to be more interested in the genuine food of Italy, and were prepared to pay for real Parmigiano Reggiano and prosciutto di Parma and mozzarella di bufala, the best quality food began to be imported, and producers in this country began to think, ?We can do this, too.? So now there is a wonderful mix of high quality Italian and British produce that you can use in your antipasti. Reinterpreting the classics (#ulink_8dd6b7b8-1dc5-5557-a0ce-c76bfd9fc47d) Very little of the traditional antipasti misti involves hot food ? just a few deep-fried dishes, such as courgette flowers or squid, or the panzerotti and frittelle I mentioned earlier. Personally, I don?t like to eat too many fried foods at the start of a meal. So, instead, for our hot starters at the restaurant we look to the kind of main dishes that every Italian knows ? great classics with brilliant flavours, such as sardines baked in breadcrumbs, or pig?s trotters ? then we refine them and scale them down into starters. We play a bit of a game with the presentation, or make them easier for people to eat in a restaurant environment. Sometimes, when I see some of our famous customers thoroughly enjoying a starter of gnocchi fritti with culatello, it makes me smile to see something that you would find in any antipasti bar in Italy being celebrated in such a way, when I am only playing around with an idea that was worked out hundreds of years ago in Mantova. But perhaps that is the magic of a restaurant like Locanda ? with a little imagination, the essential flavours and combinations of ingredients that have stayed in people?s hearts and minds for centuries can be elevated into something glamorous. What we do in the restaurant and what we do at home, however, are two different things. At home, the idea is to keep things simple. But if you can approach cooking for family and friends with a little of the organisation we need in a professional kitchen, you will enjoy a good meal as well, instead of being in the kitchen with smoke everywhere, and your hair standing on end, so when someone comes in and says, ?How are you??, you want to scream. Use this chapter more as a source of inspiration than as a series of recipes. You don?t have to serve the dishes as individual starters, as we do in the restaurant. If you are having friends round, use the idea of shared antipasti to your advantage. Buy some good prosciutto, salami or mozzarella, which need nothing doing to them, then choose a few of the recipes and dedicate your time to working on them, doubling the quantities if necessary, so you can serve everything on big plates to hand round. You can make your dessert in advance too, so you have only a main course to cook, which can be as simple as you like. It is my job to stay in the kitchen and cook for people. Your job is to make life as easy as possible, so when your friends arrive you can just put everything down on the table and sit and have a drink and talk with them. Insalate e condimenti Salads and dressings (#ulink_329e3cc2-5f63-526a-9364-70373eb8def3) At home in Corgeno I don?t remember my grandmother ever making a salad that was a dish in its own right, or had any sophistication, but salads have become an important part of the way we eat now. As with all our dishes in the restaurant, we look to classic Italian combinations of ingredients and flavours for our inspiration. What is exciting is to play with whatever is in season and what is good from the market: porcini mushrooms in autumn, root vegetables in winter, asparagus in spring, tomatoes in summer. Like any other dish, a good salad needs structure ? different textures, such as something soft, something with a little crunch. Throw in some pomegranate seeds and people think you have done something fantastic. Italians often find it difficult to put fruit in salad, but a chef who has been a real inspiration to me is David Thompson at Nahm, such a clever man ? I really like what he does with Thai food. I came up with the idea of putting pomegranate into a winter salad after eating at Nahm, and having a brilliant salty-sweet warm salad, layered up with leaves and peanuts and fruit such as mango and papaya ? almost like a lasagne. When we eat, we experience taste sensations in different parts of the mouth: sweet, sour, salty, bitter ? and the most recently recognized, umami. Think about balancing ingredients that satisfy all these tastes, so that when you eat the salad it fills your whole mouth with flavour. A tomato can give sweetness; maybe you want something peppery, like rocket, or something aniseed, like raw fennel, which is so underused in salads in the UK. And remember that salad leaves all have different flavours and textures, so it is good to include a mixture. I don?t like to see ready-prepared salads and vegetables in supermarkets, though ? all those bags of mixed leaves, looking perfect thanks to a little cocktail of pesticides and kept going in their ?modified-atmosphere? bags, alongside packets of ready-podded peas, and beans with their tops and tails cut off. Vegetables and leaves begin to lose some of their nutrients, especially vitamin C, the moment they are plucked or cut up, so who knows what value is left in pre-packaged ones by the time they reach your plate? I know not many of us are lucky enough to do what my grandmother did and just go out into the garden and pick a few heads of this and a head of that, depending on what my grandfather had planted. But I would far rather buy a variety of different salads in their entirety at a farmers? market, from someone I know doesn?t use chemicals, and mix them myself. What I get especially mad about are those bags of Cos lettuce with their little packets of ingredients ready to make Caesar salad. If you simply buy a head of lettuce, make up a vinaigrette and grate in some cheese, you achieve double the quality at half the price. If you are serving salad leaves with hot ingredients ? for example, seared scallops or grilled porcini mushrooms ? try to use the more robust leaves, such as wild rocket, which will not ?cook? and wilt too quickly. And if you are serving your salad on individual plates and want it to look good, arrange the heavier ingredients on the plates first, then the lighter ones, such as leaves, on top. Finally, you need careful seasoning and a good vinaigrette or other dressing to pull all the different elements together. Again, I love the way Thai people make dressings out of crushed peanuts, fish sauce and lime juice to bring everything together. That is what we are aiming at ? to transform an assembly of ingredients into something exciting. Olio d?oliva Olive oil (#ulink_58b30069-a9bb-52c8-87ea-c108fc8ab72d) ?Liquid gold? In Italy, olive oil is still considered something you buy from someone you know, either direct from a small local producer, or via a shop that will probably only stock a few oils, mostly local. The bigger national companies often export more of their oil around the world than they sell at home in Italy. Margherita, my daughter, asked me one day why, when Noah sent one of the doves out from the ark, it flew back with an olive branch in its beak; and I explained to her that the olive ? and the oil that is pressed from it ? has always been seen as the fruit of peace, and often prosperity. Olive oil has been made since around 5,000BC, first in ancient Greece and then in countries like Israel and Egypt, eventually being introduced to Italy by the Greeks around the eighth century BC. The Romans planted olive trees everywhere throughout their empire. It seems strange that something that has been made and used since ancient times should almost have been re-invented, at least outside of the Mediterranean countries, over the last twenty years or so, since everyone started talking about its health-giving properties. Good extra-virgin olive oil is rich in antioxidants that can help fight bad cholesterol and prevent heart attacks and cancer. Even in ancient times, however, people understood that olive oil had special properties, that it was good for the body, and in some cultures it has an almost mythical significance. Homer called it ?liquid gold?; and it was considered so precious that champion athletes at the Olympic Games were presented with it instead of medals. Olive branches were even found in Tutankhamun?s tomb, and Roman gladiators used oil on their wounded bodies. And as far back as 70AD, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote that ?olive oil and wine are two liquids good for the human body?. The highest grade of oil, extra-virgin, firstly means that it is ?virgin? olive oil, that is, the liquid from the fruit is extracted purely by cold pressing ? with no heat or chemicals used. Then, to be ?extra-virgin? and therefore the best quality, the oil must have less than 1 per cent oleic acidity ? a higher percentage than this would suggest that the acids had been released because the fruit was damaged or had been roughly handled. If an oil is just labelled ?olive oil?, it will be a blend of inferior oil that has been refined, probably using chemical treatment, and virgin oil. When I was growing up in Lombardia we used very little olive oil, except in salads and minestrone, and what we had was the light gold, fruity, quite delicate oil from Liguria, made from Taggiasca olives, which I still love. There is also a beautiful, sophisticated oil from the Lombardia shores of Lago di Garda, which we use in Locanda. It is made right on the northern limits of where olives can grow and now has its own DOP (this means Denominazione di Origine Protetta, or Protected Designation of Origin, and any producers who want to use its symbol must meet strict criteria). In our house in Corgeno, if an olive oil was peppery it was considered a defect, whereas in Britain, since everyone fell in love with Toscana, the deep green, peppery, often prickly oils that characterize that region are more fashionable. When I first came to London, Antony Worrall Thompson was the man at M?nage ? Trois ? and one of the first to serve little bowls of olive oil with the bread, instead of butter. His idea of oil was the more peppery the better. Then, when the River Cafe opened, Tuscan oil became even more popular. I remember when I was working at the Savoy; I took a bottle of River Cafe oil home to Corgeno. My dad tasted it and said, ?Take it back to England!? Peppery oil has its place, of course, but not for everything: if you steam a delicate fish, like sole, the sweetness of the fish juices can make a strong oil taste almost rancid. And if you use a peppery oil with an equally hot leaf, the two will just clash. When I cook a dish from a particular area, I like to try the oil that comes from there too; as with all Italian food, local produce ? even the oil ? determines the flavours. In general, olives that have had more exposure to the sun and more dramatic variation in temperature between day and night give more peppery oils; whereas in more temperate areas, the oil is lighter. Even within a region, though, the character can vary dramatically, and from producer to producer, as so much depends on the variety of the fruit, the altitude at which it is grown, the time of harvest and the care taken in handling the olives. For example, Tuscan oils made from olives grown around the coast, which really soak in the sun, have a different character to those grown in the Chianti hills, which are picked when only just ripe, before the frost, and so can produce young, herbaceous, almost prickly oils. Umbria can make oil that is sweet and fruity, or spicy; Marche and Abruzzo tend to make oils that are similar to Tuscan ones, whereas the ones from Puglia (the biggest production area), Calabria and Sicilia are mostly intense, but they might be almondy or very green and grassy. In Sicilia there is also a rare and beautiful oil made from the Minuta olive, which is unusual for the island in that it is delicate and fruity. I?m not suggesting you have a kitchen full of bottles, sitting around waiting to turn rancid, but it is good to taste a few different good quality oils from various regions and get to know the flavours that you like. Read the labels carefully first. Just because an oil is bottled in Italy doesn?t mean that the olives have been grown there, too. It hurts my heart to say it, but there is a big scam where olive oil is concerned. We sell millions of litres a year, but we don?t grow nearly enough olives for that. Instead, a poor farmer in somewhere like Spain or North Africa sends his olives to Italy, because the oil is worth more if it says on the bottle that it was ?produced? in Italy. That, to me, is completely wrong, because I believe first of all that an oil should have something of the character of the region it comes from, just as a wine should represent its ?terroir?. And secondly, how much quality of the olives is lost in the transportation? If the farmer had pressed his olives there and then in his own country, I believe it would be better oil. Because of such problems, scientists are developing amazing tests that use infrared spectroscopy to detect the geographic origin of the oil and could be used in the future to prevent cheating, and the EC has tightened up the laws, so that if the olives are not grown in Italy, this should be declared on the label. Also, if a producer wants to say that his oil comes from a particular region, he must meet the strict criteria of the DOP or Indicazione Geografica Protetta (Protected Geographical Indication or PGI), which is awarded to food where at least one stage of production occurs in the traditional region, but doesn?t specify particular production methods. However, if you want to be sure what you are buying is good quality, look for bottles that state that the oil has been made from olives grown, preferably handpicked, pressed and bottled on the same estate. Such oils are now being regarded almost like fine wines and, on the best estates, the olives will have been picked at just the right moment, to give the maximum flavour and the optimum level of health-giving polyphenols. They may cost you ?15 a bottle, but what is that really ? 20p per tablespoon? Not that much to pay for something so good for you, that gives so much pleasure and adds so much flavour to a dish. Think how much we pay for some bottled waters, when very little has been proved about their health-giving properties in comparison with olive oil. When you taste an oil, do so like wine: pour some into a spoon or glass and check the aroma first; there should be a connection with the fruit there, rather than just an oiliness. Then taste, holding the oil in your mouth until you really experience the flavours. What happens to the fruit on the tree and during the pressing is only part of the story. Just as important is the way it is bottled, and the way we the consumers store the oil, which must be away from heat, light and air, otherwise it will quickly lose its particularity, and its health-giving properties will begin to deteriorate. I only fully understood this from talking to Armando Manni, who makes the most expensive, but probably most healthy oil in the world, high up on Mount Amiata in Toscana. His oil has levels of polyphenols that can reach 450mg per litre, compared to 100-250mg in other high quality oils. It is truly beautiful, but most special because, in order to keep the oil as ?alive? and valuable to the health as the day it was bottled, instead of using clear glass to show off the colour of the oil he uses dark ultraviolet-resistant glass, and only tiny 100ml bottles. So when they are opened the oil won?t deteriorate as quickly as it would in big bottles. He also treats the oil like wine in that he puts in a layer of inert gas to help prevent oxidisation, before corking the bottles with a synthetic stopper, rather than cork, which he believes can contaminate the oil. Cooking with olive oil The last thing to know about the best extra-virgin olive oil is not to use it for frying. For a start, when it is heated to a high temperature it burns easily, changes flavour and the polyphenols begin to lose their properties. Use a lesser olive oil, or even a vegetable, sunflower, or other interesting oil, and keep your extra-virgin oil for making dressings, or drizzling over fish or pasta, so that it has the maximum impact. Aceto Vinegar (#ulink_392fed0c-a25d-5db6-9550-414e0fb1cdc8) ?A big, big difference to every salad you eat? As with olive oil, the flavour of vinegar and how much you use of it is quite a subjective thing ? if you were to eat a salad dressed the way my mother likes it, you might spit it out, because she loves the flavour of vinegar to come through really strongly. At home in Italy, there will always be one bowl of salad on the table just for her, and a big one for everyone else. I use very little white wine vinegar; I prefer red wine vinegar, and what I actually like most of all is not officially classed as vinegar in Italy (which by law must have 6 per cent alcohol per volume) but is known as condimento morbido (morbido means ?soft?). This is brewed in the same way as vinegar but is filtered through wood chips, which smooths it out and takes away some of the sharpness, leaving a ?condiment? with lower acidity and alcohol ? only 3 per cent. When we talk about good wine we often think of there being great merit if the production is small and intimate, but with wine vinegar, providing you begin with good grapes, there is no such advantage. You can make millions of litres and still have the same quality; it is like brewing beer. However, you can usually be sure that if you buy vinegar from a producer who makes good wine, the vinegar will also be good quality. People tend to think that it isn?t worth spending a few more pounds on a bottle of good vinegar. But, like I always say when people complain about the price of good olive oil, if you think about how little you use at a time, you are only talking about a few pence, which will make a big, big difference to every salad you eat. And the vinegar isn?t going to go off, unless you actually put it in the sun with the top off and let it evaporate. Balsamic vinegar, which comes from Modena and the surrounding region of Reggio Emilia, is something completely different, which I use only occasionally and sparingly. As far back as 1046, a visiting German Emperor, Henry II, wrote about a special vinegar which ?flowed in the most perfect manner?, and it has been eulogised ever since as a mysterious, precious elixir. Originally, it was taken as a tonic as much as it was used in cooking ? balsamic actually means ?health-giving?. However, it remained something of a local secret, made in small quantities that you used when a guest came to visit, or at Christmas, but not every day. In Lombardia, I never saw balsamic vinegar until I was about sixteen and started working in restaurants. We didn?t even have any in the kitchen at La Cinzianella. Then, like sun-dried tomatoes, balsamic vinegar suddenly became fashionable all over the world, and people fell in love with it, using it for everything. Because the traditional production in and around Modena was so small, people began manufacturing it commercially to meet the demand ? so now there is great confusion about what is the authentic vinegar, and what is just an industrial product that resembles it. In America, especially, there are even balsamic ?sauces?, ?glazes? and ?creams? that you can buy in squeezy bottles, like ketchup. Unlike other vinegars, true balsamic vinegar is made not from wine but from the must of the Trebbiano grape that has been cooked slowly to concentrate it. This is blended with aged wine vinegar, then matured for at least twelve years in a series or family (?acetaia?) of barrels, which range downward in size, and are made from different woods (typically oak, cherry, chestnut, mulberry, ash and juniper), so that each adds its own character. Each year, as some of the vinegar evaporates, the smallest barrel is topped up with liquid decanted from the next smallest one, and so on, until finally, the last and largest barrel is topped up with freshly cooked must from the new grape harvest. It is a continuous complex, serious art, which produces a naturally thick, syrupy vinegar with a taste that should have a perfect balance of sweetness and acidity. (The barrels are traditionally stored in attics under the rooftops, where the heat of summer and then the cold of winter are intensified, as this naturally prompts the processes of fermentation and oxidization.) In 1980 a controlled denomination of origin for the vinegar was set up, and by law, for a vinegar to be called aceto balsamico tradizionale, it has to be produced according to these methods and approved by the Consortium of Producers of Traditional Balsamic Vinegar (Consorzio fra Produttori di Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Reggio Emilia). If you are a producer, you must send your vinegar to them; they taste it blind and, if it is good enough quality, and meets all the requirements, they bottle it in their special tulip-shaped bottles. They then mark it with different coloured stamps: red for up to 50 years, silver for a minimum of 50 years, and gold for a minimum of 75 years. Production of this balsamic vinegar is very limited, and for some of the people who supply their vinegar to the consorzio it is almost more of a hobby than a business: some will only make 100 or so bottles a year. We are talking about vinegars that cost up to ?100 a bottle, but when you taste the real thing, the experience is extraordinary. There is another category of balsamic vinegar that is either produced outside the designated region of Reggio Emilia, and so cannot be called ?tradizionale?, or is made by people who don?t want to deal with the consorzio ? maybe they have such a small production that it isn?t worth their while. Or sometimes, producers of ?tradizionale? also make other, high quality vinegars that haven?t been aged for so long. Such vinegars must be labelled condimento balsamic vinegar and although they can?t be called ?tradizionale? they are made using identical methods, so they can be fantastic quality, and are usually cheaper. I have stayed near Modena and seen people go to the local producers with their own bottles, which the guys fill up for them ? and it is beautiful vinegar ? but, of course, you have to rely on local knowledge to find out where to go. The big difficulty is over bottles that are just labelled ?aceto balsamico di Modena?. Ever since the world ?discovered? balsamic vinegar there has been a huge industrial production, which bears no relation to the true artisan product. The legal definition of this vinegar is very loose. Much of it is only white wine vinegar with caramel added. I could make it for you in a pot in the kitchen in 15 minutes ? but what an insult to the people who have been making beautiful vinegar in the proper way for hundreds of years. Some of it, though, has been made in a way that is similar to the traditional methods, using at least some cooked grape must, and aged in wood for at least a few years. So how to tell? Often ?aceto balsamico? vinegar comes in elegant bottles, sealed with wax, with beautiful labels that suggest ancient traditions, but it is important not to be distracted by the lyrical descriptions that the producers tend to use, and go straight to the ingredients list. The first thing to be listed should be the must of the grape, and there should be no mention of caramel, or any added flavourings. Look for a vinegar that says it has been aged in wooden barrels ? as ?aged in wood? can sometimes mean wood chips have been added as the vinegar ages. There is yet another type of vinegar, called vincotto (?cooked wine?), which is similar to balsamic, made in a serious way but without the ageing and complexity. They say vincotto has its roots in the old Roman tradition of pressing grapes that had been partly dried, then fermenting them to make raisin wine. It became something farmers would make as a sweet dressing for festivals, or as a tonic, but is now being produced commercially, using the Trebbiano grape in the North. As you move further south it is more likely to be made with the Negroamaro and the Black Malvasia, which are left to dry on the vine or on wooden frames before being ?cooked? and reduced for 24 hours. The syrup goes into small oak barrels with some of the ?mother? or ?starter? vinegar from their wine vinegar production, and it is then aged for four years. In the kitchen at Locanda we use various different balsamic vinegars, and also sometimes vincotto, but for the table we use only the ?tradizionale?, which we often dispense with great ceremony, using a syringe. It is very expensive but used sparingly it will last you a long time. I would say that if you can only afford to buy one bottle of it in your life, it is worth it, because only by tasting the true traditional vinegar can you begin to understand what balsamic vinegar is about. It is something I would like everyone around the world to experience, because then it can be used as a benchmark by which to judge other, less expensive, balsamic vinegars. Almost everyone likes the taste of a true balsamic vinegar, kids especially. At one time, the only way we could get my daughter Margherita to eat a green bean salad was to toss it in balsamic vinegar. It is like a natural flavour-enhancer. Good balsamic vinegar needs to be used very simply, though, with specific ingredients. Its combination of sweetness and acidity is at its best with salty, fatty things: so a few drops are perfect with Parmesan, especially the concentrated flavour of an aged cheese. A lovely thing to serve before dinner with an aperitif is just a sliver of Parmesan on a spoon with a drop of vinegar on top. Or sometimes, when we have held parties at Locanda, we have put out half a wheel of Grana Padano cheese, which is similar to Parmesan (see page 209), so that people can pick up small pieces, drizzle over some vinegar and eat it with a glass of Prosecco. I always keep a good bottle of balsamic vinegar at home and sometimes, if I go home late at night from the kitchen, that is all I have ? a big wedge of Parmesan with a little vinegar. Since both the cheese and the vinegar originate in the same region of Italy, there is an affinity there that comes with produce of the same land, and so the combination is very satisfying. Sometimes we make agnolotti with Parmesan, tossed in a little butter, with a couple of drops of balsamic vinegar added; and I love to serve balsamic vinegar with pork belly, or with calves? liver, in a simple sauce made with sultanas and nuts (see page 484). A little drop is amazing with plainly cooked wild salmon, and balsamic vinegar and strawberries is another famous combination. I don?t think balsamic vinegar works with bland food. With a cheese like mozzarella, the effect is wasted, and I wouldn?t usually use it to dress a leaf salad, as it loses its impact, unless you are using strongly flavoured leaves like chicory, radicchio or rocket. And I completely disapprove of serving bread with a bowl each of oil and balsamic vinegar ? oil yes, but if you dip good bread into balsamic vinegar, you ruin both things. For me it doesn?t work with complicated dishes either. If you were to spoon balsamic vinegar over an elaborate fish dish with lots of different elements, yes, it would add another level of flavour, but again it would be a waste of something special, that deserves to be treated with respect. Dressings (#ulink_3725ae01-5467-5fac-bd99-5dea10ed4f47) There is no real Italian equivalent for the word ?vinaigrette? because traditionally, when you went into a restaurant and ordered a salad, they would bring the oil and vinegar, and some salt to the table ? or if you wanted oil and lemon, you would just ask for olio e limone. Nowadays, if a salad comes ready-dressed, we just borrow the French term. Or we might use the word condimento, which can mean any kind of seasoning or flavouring as well as a dressing; or even aspretto ? from aspro meaning sour. We usually use this term when we create a dressing in which there is an element that we have made ourselves ? such as our saffron ?vinaigrette?, which we would call Aspretto di zafferano. When my brother, Roberto, and I were kids, we were sometimes taken to a local restaurant where dressing the salad was considered a bit of an art. Usually we didn?t want to eat salad at all; we just wanted to watch the waiter perform his ceremony at the table. He would take a silver spoon, put some salt into it, then pour in the vinegar and let the salt dissolve in it. Then he would drizzle a line of oil into the salad bowl and pour in the seasoned vinegar at the same time, so the two met in a stream. Finally, he would put in the leaves and toss everything together in front of us. The point is that dressing salad leaves should be done at the very last moment before serving, to preserve some crunchiness. Wash the leaves well, trying not to squeeze them, let them drain naturally in a colander, then finish off in a salad spinner. Dress the leaves very lightly so that the dressing just coats them, without drowning, and when you toss everything together, really lift up the leaves so that the dressing coats every single one. If you are dressing a more complex salad that includes other ingredients besides leaves, think about their consistency before you add the dressing. It is only the delicate leaves that need to be dressed at the last minute, so if, for example, you are making a rocket and tomato salad, the heavier, denser tomato will need more seasoning ? earlier ? than the rocket. What I would do is put the tomatoes in the salad bowl with some dressing, season them and leave them for ten minutes or so to soak up the flavours and release the juices that the salt will bring out. Then, at the last minute, I would throw in the rocket and toss everything together, adding a little more vinaigrette if necessary ? a lovely thing to do at the table. I can never understand why people buy ready-made vinaigrette in a bottle when there can hardly be anything simpler than mixing together some good oil and vinegar, seasoning it with a little salt (I also add some water, just to soften the dressing), putting it into a bottle with a cork in it and storing it in the fridge. That?s it. My children make vinaigrette at home without even thinking about it. So how can commercial manufacturers tell us that what they put in a bottle is better? Some of them seem to have invented a machine that leaves the dressing in a state of permanent emulsion, which people think must be a good thing. But all you have to do to emulsify a dressing is shake your bottle of oil and vinegar. There is, of course, no rule that says you must use olive oil for everything ? not even in an Italian kitchen would we be that partisan. Sometimes we use other oils, including walnut and hazelnut, to give a different taste to a salad. Just think about your flavours before you add a very distinctive-tasting oil, so that your ingredients and your dressing complement each other and you have no violent clashes. Giorgio?s vinaigrette (#ulink_8e4b7dbc-b0ff-52e1-ae1b-a03622db6ac6) The reason this is called Giorgio?s vinaigrette is not that I am doing anything special ? millions of people around the world make exactly the same thing. It just happened that when I was at Zafferano there was a young Algerian chef who could never remember which dressing was which, because we used several in our kitchen. We would shout to him, ?Vinaigrette!? and he would say, ?What does it look like?? Eventually he stuck a label on each bottle and he called this basic vinaigrette, with oil and vinegar, ?Giorgio?s vinaigrette? ? so the name has stuck. I like to mix the vinegar and oil in the ratio of one part to six, but the flavour of vinaigrette is a very subjective thing and everyone has their own ideas. Personally, I don?t like to use a strong Tuscan oil, nothing too peppery and strong for vinaigrette, and you might prefer to add more or less vinegar. It also depends on the quality of the vinegar and its alcohol level. Make up some vinaigrette, taste it and adjust it as you like. The important thing to remember is that if you try it neat, it will taste more powerful than when you mix it with a salad. So, either test it with some leaves, or do what I suggest to my chefs: take a little of the dressing on a spoon, put it into your mouth, then suck it in quickly ? it should be sharp enough to make you cough slightly, but not so strong that it really catches in your throat. Buy the best quality oil and vinegar you can afford, because you can?t put in flavour that isn?t already there. And make up a big bottle, so that you use it all the time. I would be a very happy man if every British family had a bottle of Giorgio?s homemade vinaigrette in the fridge. Put the salt into a bowl, then add the vinegar and leave for a minute so the salt dissolves. Whisk in the olive oil and the water until the vinaigrette emulsifies and thickens. Pour into a bottle, seal and store in the fridge, where it will keep for up to 6 months. It will separate out again into oil and vinegar, so before you use it, just shake the bottle. Makes about 375ml ? teaspoon sea salt 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar 300ml extra-virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons water Aspretto di zafferano Saffron vinaigrette (#ulink_29fdf089-3b58-5697-875d-a32debe0a49e) Makes about 750ml 500ml white wine 150ml white wine vinegar 1 level teaspoon saffron strands 1 tablespoon caster sugar 100ml extra-virgin olive oil Put the white wine, vinegar and saffron into a pan over a low heat and bring to the boil. Simmer until reduced by three-quarters, then remove from the heat, stir in the sugar until dissolved and leave to cool. Whisk in the oil. Store the vinaigrette in the fridge, where it will keep for up to 6 months in a screw-topped jar or bottle ? or a squeezy plastic one. Take it out of the fridge half an hour or so before you need it, and shake to emulsify before use. Condimento allo scalogno Shallot vinaigrette (#ulink_041b105e-4523-5364-b668-8dae8dde7a0f) Makes about 250ml 2 banana shallots or 4 ordinary shallots 75ml red wine vinegar 150ml extra-virgin olive oil salt and pepper Finely chop the shallots, then put them in a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Add the vinegar and leave to stand for 30 minutes. Whisk in the oil and use straight away. Condimento all?aceto balsamico Balsamic vinaigrette (#ulink_64eef775-2d68-5475-8880-23b25928e254) Makes about 350ml 1 teaspoon salt 250ml balsamic vinegar 100ml extra-virgin olive oil Put the salt into a bowl, then add the vinegar and leave for a minute so the salt dissolves. Whisk the oil into the vinegar. This will keep in the fridge for up to 6 months in a screw-topped jar or bottle ? or a squeezy plastic one. Take it out of the fridge half an hour or so before you need it, and shake to emulsify before use. Olio e limone Oil and lemon dressing (#ulink_e6db9412-75a7-5787-8b00-76a8f7874e37) Makes about 200ml pinch of salt 3 tablespoons lemon juice 150ml extra-virgin olive oil Put the salt into a screw-topped bottle or jar, then add the lemon juice and leave for a minute so the salt dissolves. Add the oil, put the top on, and shake well to emulsify. It is best to use this dressing immediately. Maionese Mayonnaise (#ulink_881c5a60-1eef-51cc-b6de-e14bccec0bc0) Makes about 600ml 1 egg yolk pinch of salt 1 teaspoon English mustard 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar 500ml vegetable oil juice of ? lemon Put the egg yolk in a mixing bowl and break it up a bit. Add the salt and mustard with half of the vinegar and whisk together for a couple of minutes (this is very important as it helps the mayonnaise to emulsify once you start to put in the oil). Slowly start to add the oil, whisking continuously, until it is completely incorporated. If it starts to get too thick, add the rest of the vinegar; and if is still too thick add a tablespoon of hot water ? just enough to loosen. When the oil is completely incorporated, add the lemon juice and adjust the seasoning to your taste ? add a little more vinegar or lemon juice if you like it a little more sharp. Seasoning (#ulink_1eab4d6b-d3f2-57ce-87c9-e7c55849024a) ?All about balance? At home, when I cook something that Plaxy regularly makes, my kids often say my version tastes different ? the reason, I think, is the seasoning. I was shocked the first time I saw chefs using salt in a restaurant kitchen because the proportions seemed enormous: handfuls were going into every pot, over meat, fish, vegetables. I remember going home to my grandmother and saying: ?They use so much more salt than you.? As a chef, you are taught to see salt in a different way. You have to think about how we taste our food; receiving different sensations in different parts of the mouth. If you under-season, you are taking away a whole layer of flavour; if you over-season, you block out all the other sensations. Salt can also help you experience sweet flavours in a more pronounced way. Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck in Bray does an experiment with a glass of tonic water ? if you keep adding salt a little at a time, it gets to the point where it tastes sweeter; then obviously if you carry on, the saltiness takes over. At Locanda, we do a tomato ?soup? for a dessert with basil ice cream. When we first made it, we served it with sweet sabl? biscuits, then we tried it with slightly salty biscuits, and the difference was amazing. Seasoning is all about balance; so you must be constantly tasting and adjusting. Of course, it is also true that taste is a subjective thing, and I would never be so precious as to get angry with anyone in the restaurant who wanted to add extra seasoning to their food, as some chefs famously have. I only hope that people taste first. These days everyone is rightly concerned about the quantity of salt that children, in particular, are eating, but most of the damage is done not when we cook fresh food, but by the salt we often unconsciously eat in processed food. Also, if you taste and season carefully as you are cooking, allowing the salt time to dissolve and do its job of flavouring properly, you will end up using far less than if you taste at the end, panic because everything is bland, and start seasoning crazily. Most chefs have cut back the quantity of salt in cooking over the years, and looked for different ways of amplifying tastes, for example bubbling up juices and sauces in the pan, so that they reduce and thicken, and the flavour intensifies. Also, we are constantly trying to find producers and farmers who value traditional methods and believe that flavour is more important than fast-grown, perfect-looking homogenous products that will please the supermarkets. So, when you have a carefully and slowly reared, properly hung piece of meat, a terrific vegetable that has not been forced under glass, or a fish straight from the boat, you don?t need to season heavily, or you will distort the essential flavours. On the other hand, everyone is crying, ?salt, salt, salt!? as if it is a demon, but we all need a certain amount of it for our bodies to function properly. We can take a lesson from the behaviour of animals in the wild whose trails will often lead to natural sources of salt, because it is essential for them to stay alive. I remember reading about the big apes, the ones that are so human that they look like us and have a ?wife? and family ? at certain times of the year they will head towards mountains which they know form natural rock salt and lick the salt. Because we are so used to refrigeration, we underestimate the importance that salt has played in our civilisation and politics. As well as keeping the body healthy, and flavouring food, when it was first discovered that you could use it to extract moisture from meat or fish, and therefore cure and preserve foods so you had something to eat all year round, it must have seemed a magical thing. No wonder whole communities were built around the production and trade of something so precious. In Italy, Venezia owes much of its splendour to its position at the centre of the salt trade (along with Genova). Roads were built especially to transport salt; wars were fought over it, taxes raised on it ? all of which Mark Kurlansky brings together in his brilliant book called Salt: A World History. The first proper salt works date back to 640BC, when one of the early Roman kings, Ancus Martius, built an enclosed basin at Ostia and let in seawater, which evaporated under the sun, leaving behind sea salt. The road that the salt travelled in order to be sold was called the Via Salaria, and the soldiers who protected it were often paid in salt, which is where the word ?salary? comes from. If someone didn?t do his job properly he was considered ?not worth his salt?. The word salami (pork preserved with salt) comes from the Latin ?sal? for salt, as does salad (it was used to describe the Roman way of adding salt to greens and herbs, perhaps to draw out bitter juices in the way that we do with aubergines, then dressing them with oil and vinegar). We have Parma ham because people in the region needed to preserve meat, and salt could be brought in from Venezia, with payment in either money or hams. Of course, there was a massive trade in smuggling in order to avoid paying the taxes that were levied on salt. The route the smugglers used is called La Via del Sale (the road of salt) and runs all the way from the Appeninos to Liguria. Nowadays part of the route is used for a fantastic endurance motorbike race, also called La Via del Sale. What we are talking about is natural sea or rock salt, very different from ?table salt?, which is bleached and refined, often has chemicals added and has a harshly salty flavour. I always thought what a great job it would be to spend your days skimming off the perfect little crystals at some natural saltpan, somewhere wild and beautiful. This is the kind of salt you can pack around a piece of meat or fish for baking in the way that has been done for thousands of years. (Originally, you would have dug a pit in the ground, put in the fish or meat in its salt crust, covered it over and built a fire over the top.) As it cooks, the salt crust becomes rock hard, sealing in all the moisture and juices, and gently seasoning at the same time, but without making the cooked meat or fish taste ?salty?. When Thomas Keller, the inspirational chef of the French Laundry in California, came to Locanda to eat, we got talking and he told me about the way he served foie gras with five different salts, including Dead Sea Salt and Jurassic Salt. When he went back to America he sent me some of the Jurassic Salt, which is mined in Utah. It is incredible to think that it comes from a geological layer underneath that of the dinosaurs. At one time most of North America was covered in shallow sea, which evaporated over millions of years, leaving behind the salt, then in the Jurassic era volcanoes erupted around the old seabed and sealed the salt inside volcanic ash. The salt comes in a pinkish block that you have to grate, and it has a flavour that is amazing; it almost has a fizzy character to it. We sprinkled it over some carpaccio and served it with nothing else but a piece of lemon and it was beautiful. When you are seasoning, it is important to remember that salt has the function of extracting moisture as well as flavouring. You need to season meat or fish before you start to cook it, because once the outside has been sealed, your salt and pepper won?t penetrate in the same way. However, once you season a piece of meat or fish with salt, it will start to ?sweat? out its juices, so if you do this too far ahead of cooking it the flesh will become tougher. The trick is to season your meat or fish with salt and pepper just before you cook it ? then, especially if you are cooking it over a high heat, the meat will be properly seasoned, and the salt and pepper will help form a nice ?crust? around the outside of the meat, while the juices will be sealed inside. With some dishes you also need to consider how much salt is contained in the ingredients you are cooking before you add any extra. I will only taste and season a risotto, for example, right at the end, because you are working with a lightly seasoned stock all the way through, which will intensify in flavour as it reduces, and then it will be finished with pecorino or Parmesan, which is also quite salty. And remember that when you cook beans or pulses in water, unlike other vegetables, they should only be seasoned at the end of cooking, as the salt will draw the moisture from their skins and toughen them up if you put it in at the beginning. At home, we always have a pot of sea salt crystals in the kitchen, which we keep away from the heat and moisture from the steam around the cooker, so that it keeps dry. Then we put a little of it into the grinder at a time. Always also use freshly ground black pepper, which has much more warmth and aroma and a cleaner taste than white pepper. As with all spices, the flavour is held in the volatile oils inside the peppercorns, which are quickly lost once they are released; so ready-ground pepper, especially if it is exposed to warmth or sunlight, will lose its potency very quickly. I hate big pepper grinders, not only because they remind me of the way many ?Italian? restaurants were when I first came to England, but because everyone fills them up and leaves them for years. I prefer small ones which you can fill with a couple of teaspoonfuls of freshly bought peppercorns on a regular basis. Prezzemolo e aglio Parsley and garlic (#ulink_7bf8b233-cdca-5193-a591-344df072bdda) ?Such an Italian flavour? Parsley and garlic?The mixture has such an Italian flavour. It has become a joke in our house that whenever I am wondering what to cook ? ?Shall I do this? Shall I do that?? ? Plaxy always tells me, ?Just do your parsley and garlic!? She knows that whatever I do, I will use them, and also that by the time I have stopped talking and finished chopping, I will have decided what I am going to cook. Every morning in the restaurant kitchen, one of our jobs is to chop parsley and garlic, ready to sprinkle into dishes whenever needed. We put the garlic cloves on a chopping board and squash them to a rough paste with the back of a knife. Then we put the parsley on top and chop it quite finely, so that the crushed garlic is chopped too. That way the garlic becomes almost a pulp, and it releases its flavours into the parsley and vice versa. By parsley, I mean flat-leaf parsley, not the curly sort that was once the only kind available in the UK. The first time I saw curly parsley, I thought it looked beautiful ? but then it was the nouvelle cuisine era. Now I can?t imagine cooking with anything else but the flat-leaf variety, which has a much more refined flavour ? though I have had a few discussions about the merits of curly parsley with Fergus Henderson of St John restaurant. A big champion of English food, and one of the few chefs I know who loves to use the curly variety, he persuaded me to try it chopped in a salad, and it wasn?t bad. Not bad at all. Caponata (#ulink_a43e2d21-7693-5f17-a90b-6836a4870ec3) Caponata is a Sicilian dish of aubergines and other vegetables, cut into cubes and deep-fried, then mixed with sultanas and pine nuts, and marinated in an agrodolce (sweet-and-sour) sauce. In some parts of Sicilia, it is traditional to mix in little pieces of dark bitter chocolate. Because it is such a Southern dish, I had never even tasted it until I started cooking at Olivo. Then, one day when we were looking for something sweet and sour as an accompaniment, I found the recipe in a book and I remember thinking: ?This will never work!? But we made it, the explosion of flavour was brilliant, and it has become one of my favourite things. You can pile caponata on chunks of bread, or serve it with mozzarella or fried artichokes (see page 70). Because it is vinegary, it is fantastic with roast meat, as it cuts through the fattiness, particularly of lamb. Traditionally it is also served with seafood ? perhaps grilled or fried scallops (see page 108), prawns or red mullet. With red mullet, I like to add a little more tomato to the caponata. We often cut some fresh tuna into 4cm dice and either saut? it in olive oil or grill it until it is golden on the outside but still rare inside (to test whether it is ready, cut open a piece and it should be a nice rose colour in the centre). Then we add the tuna to the caponata just before serving and toss everything together well. If you don?t like fennel or celery, leave them out and increase all the other ingredients slightly. Keep in mind that this is not a fixed recipe; it is something that is done according to taste and you can change it as you like. 1 large aubergine olive oil for frying 1 onion, cut into 2cm dice vegetable oil for deep-frying 2 celery stalks, cut into 2cm dice ? fennel bulb, cut into 2cm dice 1 courgette, cut into 2cm dice 3 fresh plum tomatoes, cut into 2cm dice bunch of basil 50g sultanas 50g pine nuts about 100ml extra-virgin olive oil 5 tablespoons good quality red wine vinegar 1 tablespoon tomato passata 1 tablespoon caster sugar salt and pepper Cut the aubergine into 2cm cubes, sprinkle with salt and leave to drain in a colander for at least 2 hours. Squeeze lightly to get rid of excess liquid. Heat a little olive oil in a pan and gently saut? the onion until soft but not coloured. Transfer to a large bowl. Put the vegetable oil in a deep-fat fryer or a large, deep saucepan (no more than one-third full) and heat to 180?C. Add the celery and deep-fry for 1-2 minutes, until tender and golden. Drain on kitchen paper. Wait until the oil comes back up to the right temperature, then put in the fennel. Cook and drain in the same way, then repeat with the aubergine and courgette. Add all the deep-fried vegetables to the bowl containing the onion, together with the diced tomatoes. Tear the basil leaves and add them to the bowl with all the rest of the ingredients, seasoning well. Cover the bowl with cling film while the vegetables are still warm and leave to infuse for at least 2 hours before serving at room temperature. Don?t put it in the fridge or you will dull the flavours. It is this process of ?steaming? inside the cling film and cooling down very slowly that changes caponata from a kind of fried vegetable salad, with lots of different tastes, to something with a more unified, distinctive flavour. Deep-frying (#ulink_510401af-7695-5579-bb34-500772aecf10) People think deep-frying is easy, but it isn?t at all, and it can be dangerous. If you shallow-fry something you can touch and turn it easily, but with deep-frying you enter into a contract with the oil in which you have no control. Little home fryers are brilliant because they have safety mechanisms and you can set the temperature, which is so important, to avoid having something which is burnt on the outside and raw on the inside, or vice versa. If you must use a pan never put more than 1.5 litres in a 5-litre pot as not only will the level rise when you add your ingredients, but oxygen is released and so the expansion will be even greater. And use a thermometer. Insalata di radicchio, prataioli e gorgonzola piccante/dolce Radicchio salad with button mushrooms and Gorgonzola dressing (#ulink_4a9cf366-e1b6-5422-9d66-70502e5d2ea9) In Lombardia, we call Gorgonzola erborinato, after the ?parsley green? colour of the mould. In the old days, it was made in damp caves around the Lombardia town of Gorgonzola, where it was left for up to a year so the mould developed naturally. Nowadays the mould is introduced by piercing the cheese with steel or copper needles when it is around a month old. In the restaurant, we use ninety-day-old Gorgonzola, which is harder and saltier (piccante), instead of the young creamy one (dolce), but you could use either. 2 small round heads of radicchio 2 tablespoons olive oil 4 handfuls of button mushrooms, sliced ? wine glass of white wine 60g mature Gorgonzola cheese 2-3 tablespoons mayonnaise (see page 53) 1 garlic clove handful of flat-leaf parsley 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil salt and pepper Clean the radicchio, removing all the white parts from the base and keeping the small red leaves whole. Tear the larger leaves into halves or quarters. Heat the olive oil in a pan, add the mushrooms and saut? until golden. Add the wine and stir until that has evaporated. Season, remove from the heat and keep warm. Break up the Gorgonzola and melt it gently in a bowl placed over a pan of simmering water until it is creamy. Allow to cool slightly and mix into the mayonnaise to make a dressing. Squash the garlic to a paste with the back of a knife, put the parsley leaves on top and chop it, so that the two combine. Season the radicchio and toss with the extra-virgin olive oil. Arrange the radicchio in nests on 4 serving plates, so the whole leaves are around the outside. Mix the parsley and garlic with the mushrooms and spoon into the middle. Drizzle with the Gorgonzola dressing and serve. Insalata di porcini alla griglia Chargrilled cep salad (#ulink_31b047e0-e68a-5385-8a97-d721c0c27885) This is a dish for those times when you go shopping and just happen to see fantastic fresh porcini (see page 232). Whenever I find them, I buy a kilo, use some for a risotto, put some in a veal stew and keep back the most beautiful ones to grill for this salad. In the restaurant, we serve quite a smart porcini salad with reduced veal stock and beurre fondu drizzled around the plate. This is too complicated to do at home, but it is just as good simply to grill the mushrooms, dusted with chopped garlic and parsley, as suggested below, and then rub your plates with a cut lemon before you put the porcini on them. ? garlic clove 2 handfuls of flat-leaf parsley 300g small porcini (cep) mushrooms (see page 239 for preparation) a little extra-virgin olive oil ? lemon 2 handfuls of mixed green salad leaves 5 celery stalks, cut into matchstick strips 50g Parmesan 4 tablespoons Oil and lemon dressing (see page 52) small bunch of chives, cut into batons salt and pepper Preheat the grill or, preferably, a ridged griddle pan. Squash the garlic to a paste with the back of a knife, then put the parsley on top and chop it so that the two mix together well. Cut the mushrooms lengthways into slices about 5mm thick (cutting through the stem, too) and reserve any trimmings. Season the slices and brush with extra-virgin olive oil, then dust with the parsley and garlic mixture. Grill the porcini slices, turning them over to cook the other side as soon as they start to brown. Rub the serving plate or plates with the halved lemon and arrange the porcini on top. Slice any reserved porcini trimmings very finely and mix with the salad leaves and celery strips. Grate about 2 tablespoons of the Parmesan, season the salad and mix with the grated cheese. Toss the salad with the dressing, then pile it on top of the porcini and scatter with the chives. Shave the rest of the Parmesan and sprinkle it over the top. Acciughe Anchovies (#ulink_ba587c77-2b84-5580-bef0-d04267696f7c) ?A fish that deserves respect? Sometimes it seems to me that people in the UK don?t think of the anchovy as a fish at all, but as something in a category all of its own, that goes on top of pizza or into a salade ni?oise. In Italy, though, we have a great respect for anchovies. The ancient Romans ate them fresh and it is thought that, together with sardines and mackerel, they also saturated them in salt and let them ferment in the sun, sometimes adding herbs and wine, to make a sauce called liquamen for seasoning food ? rather like Thai fish sauce. In the North, they sometimes add anchovies to osso buco. In Sicilia, they like to cook them al beccafico ? boned, sprinkled with a little vinegar, covered in breadcrumbs and herbs and grilled or baked. In Trentino-Alto Adige, they specialise in speck (the hind leg of the pig, cured in salt, pepper, juniper and bay, then smoked over wood and juniper berries), which they serve with anchovies mashed into butter. In the South, anchovies are used in a sauce for pasta. When I was a child, at Christmas and on special occasions, such as my grandfather?s birthday, we used to have anchovies in salsa piccante (the only time I ever tasted chilli when I was growing up), which came in small gold tins decorated with three little dwarves, like the ones in Snow White, wearing yellow, red and green hats. They were made by a company called Rizzoli in Parma, who still produce them, in a sauce they have been making to a secret recipe for a hundred years. Whenever I go to Italy and see the gold tins in a delicatessen, I still can?t resist them. Another thing I adore is dissolved or ?melted? (sciolte) anchovies. You put some anchovies into a pan with some olive oil, turn on the heat and warm gently to ?melt? the anchovies, rather than fry them, or they will lose their flavour. If you buy 500g salted anchovies, rinse off the salt, dry them, then ?melt? them like this; you can transfer the paste to a sterilised jar and cover it with a layer of olive oil. It will keep for six months in the fridge, so you can take it out and spoon some over pasta whenever you want. ?Melted-down? anchovies are the basis of the famous Piemonte autumn dish, bagna c??da, which literally means ?warm bath? (see page 146). Like so many Piemontese recipes, it is a dish that needs lots of people to gather round the table with a bottle of good Barolo and share big plates of vegetables, usually raw but sometimes boiled, which you dip into the bagna c??da. It is made with anchovies, garlic (soaked first in milk), oil and butter, and is kept warm in an earthenware pot over a spirit flame in the middle of the table. Sometimes, when only a little of the sauce is left, people break in some eggs and scramble them. Such a fantastic convivial thing to do. It is a funny thing that Piemonte, one of the only regions of Italy that doesn?t touch the sea, has a dish based on anchovies as one of its specialities. The reason is historical. About 300 years ago, the Piemontese people harvested salt and made butter in the mountains. These were traded along the ancient salt routes in return for anchovies from Liguria. A traditional thing that many Piemonte bars do in the early evening is to put out little sandwiches made with butter and anchovies, which you can eat with a glass of wine. Even now, there are still associations of anciue (anchovy sellers) in and around the old trading town of Val Maira that hold dinners to celebrate the relationship between salt, anchovies and butter. In British fish markets, you rarely find the blue-green and silver fresh anchovies. So you usually have to buy them either still on the bone and preserved in salt (the fish are layered with sea salt in small barrels), or filleted and preserved in olive oil. Frequently in the UK, though, the oil is cheap and tastes rancid, and if the fillets are in upright jars they are squashed in so tightly that the ones in the centre become mashed and broken (the fillets laid flat in tins are better), so I always prefer to buy the ones in salt. I have to admit that I buy Spanish ones, because the quality is so good. You have first to soak them in water to get rid of excess salt, then take out the bones and pat the fish dry. Then you can either marinate them in good olive oil, a little vinegar and some chopped herbs and serve them as part of an antipasti, or use them in whatever recipe you want. Insalata di puntarelle, capperi e acciughe Puntarelle salad with capers and anchovies (#ulink_7ba4261a-07ff-5a87-9ad9-3c773b0345a0) Puntarelle is difficult to get in this country, but beautiful, especially raw, rinsed and kept in a bowl of ice cubes to get rid of the bitterness. It?s a real thirst-quencher. When people ask me what puntarelle is like, I usually compare it to fennel, because they share very similar characteristics, apart from the aniseed flavour of fennel. The puntarelle season runs from October to January/February, but as the time goes on it can become more bitter and woody, so you need to wash it much more, and also eventually discard the tougher parts. Otherwise, the closest you can get is chicory, cut into strips, but don?t put these in ice. When we make this dish, we usually discard the outer leaves of the puntarelle, but, if you like, you can keep them to serve as an accompaniment to fish or meat, especially barbecued meat. Blanch the leaves briefly in boiling salted water, then drain, chop and saut? in a little olive oil. Mix with some toasted pine nuts and some sultanas that have been soaked in water for half an hour or so to plump them up. You could even add the mixture to this salad ? spoon it on to your plates first, then arrange the salad on top. 2 tomatoes 2 heads of puntarelle.(or chicory) 8 anchovy fillets 2 tablespoons baby capers (or 3 tablespoons larger capers) small bunch of chives, cut into batons 4 tablespoons Oil and lemon dressing (see page 52) 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil salt and pepper Blanch the tomatoes, skin, quarter and deseed (see page 304). Discard the outer green leaves of the puntarelle, slice the hearts very thinly lengthways, then wash well under cold running water until the water is clear ? the puntarelle will turn the water green at first ? to take away some of the bitterness. When you serve the puntarelle it needs to be really crisp, so put it into a bowl with some ice cubes and leave in the fridge for a couple of hours, adding more ice if necessary, and it will curl up beautifully. Drain the puntarelle well and pat dry. In a bowl, mix together the tomatoes, anchovies, capers, chives and finally the puntarelle. Season, but be careful with the salt, as the anchovies and capers will add quite a lot of saltiness. Toss with the oil and lemon dressing and serve as quickly as possible, drizzled with the olive oil. Capperi Capers (#ulink_9744ec70-b93f-54d6-94a1-ab02524708b9) ?Unique and pungent? Capers are beautiful things, with a unique pungent flavour, which we use a lot in Italy, especially with antipasti, but also with meat and fish. When Prince Charles talked about boiled mutton with caper sauce at a celebration of English mutton and they said this was an old English sauce, I was amazed. Of course you see capers in jars all over the world these days, but I had always thought of fresh capers as Italian. Then I did some research, and found out that in the 1700s there were guys who brought Marsala wine and capers over to England from Italy. The best capers come from the islands of Salina and Pantelleria off Sicilia, with their volcanic soil and hot climate. The capers, which are not pods, as many people think, but tiny tight flower buds of the shrub Capparis spinosa, grow everywhere. The shrubs are planted in special trenches which are dug to hold them firm and protect them from the sirocco wind. And of course, the people of each island will say that their capers are the best. Like saffron, capers are harvested by hand, in the late spring/early summer, before they begin to open. It is only if you pick them at just the right time that you get the proper, stratified texture. If the bud hasn?t developed enough, they are too compact. Like olives, they must be cured, as they are too bitter to eat as they are. The best are laid down on canvas outside, to get the sun for a couple of days, then layered with salt in wooden barrels, though they can also be put into brine or wine vinegar. We use them in tartar sauces, hot caper sauces, sweet and sour sauces and salsa verde, and serve them with any kind of dish where you want their saltiness and special flavour to cut through a fatty ingredient. Sometimes, also, we soak them for 24 hours, then crush them, and fry them as a garnish for fish dishes. It is always best to add capers to dishes at the end if you are using them in cooking, or they will be too strong. If the buds are allowed to stay on the bushes, they open into beautiful white flowers that seem to turn the whole island into a sea of white, before developing into fruit, which we call the caper berry, or cucunci. They look a little like green olives on stalks, but when you cut them in half they are full of tiny seeds. They have a similar flavour to capers, but are less intense. Sometimes we combine capers and caper berries in the same dish, as in Monkfish with walnut and caper sauce (agrodolce, see page 426) in which the caper berries go into a rocket salad. Insalata di endivia e Ovinfort Chicory with Ovinfort cheese (#ulink_3a1f79bf-2984-56cc-90f3-e511ead2a4ba) Ovinfort is a fantastic Sardinian blue cheese that didn?t exist ten years ago. Now I think it beats any French Roquefort ? though I would say that, wouldn?t I? In the North of Italy we are more used to blue cheeses made from cows? milk, but this is made from very high quality ewes? milk and matured for ninety days, so it has quite a strong spicy flavour. People sometimes forget that cheeses have seasons ? like every other natural product ? and this one is available most of the year except between September and mid-December, when the ewes need their milk for their lambs. If you can?t find Ovinfort, you could use a hard Gorgonzola, or even Roquefort ? just don?t tell me. If you want to serve this dish for a party, you could use each chicory leaf to hold the pear and cheese. Drizzle a little mayonnaise into each leaf, put a slice of pear on top, followed by a slice of cheese, and let everyone help themselves. 2 ripe pears, such as Comice 2 heads of yellow chicory and 2 of red chicory (if possible, otherwise 4 yellow) 2 tablespoons mayonnaise (see page 53) 1 teaspoon English mustard 2 tablespoons Giorgio?s vinaigrette (see page 51) 150g Ovinfort cheese (or mature Gorgonzola) salt and pepper Peel, quarter and core the pears, then slice them thinly lengthways. Cut the base off each head of chicory, so that the leaves come away. Mix the mayonnaise with the mustard and add 2-3 tablespoons of hot water, to loosen it up enough to be able to drizzle over the salad. Put the chicory leaves in a bowl, season and toss with the vinaigrette. Put a layer of chicory on each serving plate, followed by a layer of pear, then more chicory. Drizzle with the mayonnaise and, using a potato peeler, shave the Ovinfort over the top. Carciofi Globe artichokes (#ulink_890e3953-72fc-5c70-a474-a8182c3ef4bc) ?Beautiful, purple, perfect?? In the restaurant kitchen we get through one box of baby globe artichokes a day when they are in season in the spring ? usually carciofi spinosi from Sicilia or the purple violetta di chioggia. They are such beautiful things, less intensely iron-flavoured than the bigger ones, so they make a perfect raw salad. Slice them very thinly, mix with some salad leaves, season with salt and pepper, and dress with a little lemon juice or vinegar and oil mixed with a tablespoon of grated Parmesan. Finish with a handful of chopped chives and some shavings of Parmesan over the top ? beautiful. First, of course, you have to prepare them, which isn?t as complicated as you might think. Start by taking the artichoke in one hand and, leaving the stalk on (because it makes the artichoke look more elegant), snap off and discard each outside leaf in turn, stopping when you get down to the tender, pale green-yellow leaves. Next, with a small sharp paring knife, peel off the stringy outside of the stalk and work around the top of the stalk at the base of the artichoke, trimming and scraping away the base and turning the artichoke as you go. Finally, trim off the pointed tops of the remaining leaves, then cut each artichoke in half lengthways and use a spoon to scoop out and discard the hairy choke from each half (it will be very small, as the artichokes are not fully developed). To prevent the artichokes discolouring, rub them with a halved lemon, then keep them submerged in a bowl of water with a squeeze of lemon juice added (or vitamin C, which you can buy from health food shops) until you are ready to use them. Something we like to do with baby artichokes is make carciofi fritti. We prepare the artichokes as described above, dust them with hard durum wheat flour, then deep-fry them in moderately hot oil (160?C) until crisp, season and serve straight away. Another of our favourite starters is Artichoke Salad with Parmesan (see overleaf), which uses both raw and marinated blanched artichokes, prepared in the same way my grandmother used to do them. In our kitchen at home in Corgeno, we always had a jar of preserved artichokes on a cool shelf, ready to use in the winter months when fresh ones were out of season. Homemade marinated artichokes are so much tastier than bought ones that I suggest whenever you are making a recipe that calls for artichokes, you prepare four or five times the quantity you need and preserve the rest (see page 84). Then you will always have some to hand, not only for this salad but also just to serve with prosciutto or salami, or as part of an antipasti. Insalata di carciofi alla Parmigiana Artichoke salad with Parmesan (#ulink_94a330b4-4139-5c78-9823-e2ff2d3c6d00) The combination of marinated and raw artichokes gives a fantastic contrast of flavour and texture in this salad. If you like, you can add some split chillies (with or without seeds, depending on how chilli-hot you like them) to the marinade to give it an extra kick. The boys in the kitchen always do this for my wife Plaxy because it is her favourite way of eating artichokes. In winter, when you don?t have any fresh artichokes, you can make the salad with ones that have been kept under oil. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you can find really tiny artichokes, the size of a golf ball. When we get these in the kitchen, we leave them whole and just trim the tops, remove the outer leaves and clean what there is of the stalk. You don?t need to worry about the choke, because there will be nothing there. We blanch them as described in the recipe below, then brush them with olive oil and chargrill them on a hot griddle until they are well marked, to give them a roasted flavour, before marinating them. 10 baby artichokes 200ml white wine 200ml white wine vinegar juice of ? lemon a little olive oil a good wedge of Parmesan 2 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52) 4 handfuls of mixed green salad 2 tablespoons Giorgio?s vinaigrette (see page 51) small bunch of chives, cut into batons salt and pepper For the marinade: 500ml extra-virgin olive oil 2 black peppercorns 2 juniper berries 2 bay leaves 5 sage leaves sprig of rosemary 2 garlic cloves, lightly crushed 100ml white wine vinegar Prepare the artichokes and cut in half as described on page 70, and keep 2 of them to one side. Blanch the remaining artichokes in a mixture of the white wine, white wine vinegar, 200ml water and 2 teaspoons of salt for 3-4 minutes. They should still be quite firm. Drain and leave to cool. To make the marinade, pour the olive oil into a pan and add all the remaining marinade ingredients except the vinegar. Place over a medium heat (the oil shouldn?t be too hot ? just enough to cook the herbs gently). As soon as the herbs start to fry and the garlic starts to turn lightly golden, turn down the heat and stir in the vinegar. Cut the blanched artichoke halves in half again and put them into the pan. Bring back to the boil, turn off the heat and cool completely. Slice the 2 reserved artichokes, toss with the lemon juice and a little olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Keep to one side. Grate about 2 tablespoons of Parmesan and set this aside, too. Spoon the blanched artichokes from their pan (you can save the marinade for next time). Dress with Shallot vinaigrette and arrange on 4 serving plates. Season the mixed green salad, toss with the grated Parmesan and Giorgio?s vinaigrette, and arrange it on top of the artichokes. Sprinkle the raw artichokes over the top. Shave the rest of the Parmesan and sprinkle that and the chives over the salad to serve. Insalata di fagiolini, cipolle rosse e Parmigiano Green bean salad with roast red onion and Parmesan (#ulink_67dfdbe6-2c56-54e9-83f5-2278a5f65d2d) You can prepare the onions for this salad a few hours before you need them ? or even the day before ? to improve the flavour. It is important that they are quite soft, not crunchy. 2 large red onions 300ml red wine vinegar 1 tablespoon sugar 100ml extra-virgin olive oil 240g fine green beans 2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan, plus extra for shavings 3 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52) small bunch of chives, chopped salt and pepper Preheat the oven to 220?C, gas 7. Leaving their skins on, wrap the onions in foil and bake in the oven for about 1 hour until soft. While the onions are cooking, put the vinegar into a small pan and boil until reduced by about a third. Remove from the heat, stir in the sugar until dissolved, then stir in the extra-virgin olive oil to make a vinaigrette. When the onions are cooked, unwrap them and peel off the skin. While they are still warm, cut them in half, separate the layers and season with salt and pepper, then put them into the vinaigrette. Blanch the green beans in plenty of boiling salted water for about 5 minutes, then drain. Place in a bowl, sprinkle with the grated Parmesan and season with salt and pepper. Toss with the Shallot vinaigrette and sprinkle over the chives. Arrange the onion layers on your serving plates. Place the beans on top and shave over some more Parmesan. Insalata di fagiolini gialli, patate e tartufo Yellow bean, potato and black truffle salad (#ulink_e5cb4779-03de-533e-b7e2-fee3c18f9fb2) One day some lovely yellow beans came into the kitchen, fresh from the market, and I remembered something my grandmother used to make for me and my brother Roberto when we came home from school after the summer holidays. My grandfather grew yellow beans in our garden and he would leave them as long as possible over the summer, so they developed proper little fagioli, tiny beans, inside. The flavour was fantastic. Each summer Roberto and I used to go away to a children?s holiday camp, then our parents would come and get us and we would go to Emilia Romagna or, later, Liguria for another few weeks. By the time we came home to Corgeno, three things were certain: we would have to go back to school, the maize would have grown as tall as Roberto and me, and the yellow beans would be ready. My grandmother used to boil them ? not until al dente, like green beans, but for longer, so they were soft. Then she would boil some potatoes and break them down into a chunky mash ? what has since been fashionably called ?crushed? potatoes. When we came in from school, she would heat up some butter in a pan, put in the potatoes and beans and cook them until the potatoes were a little crusty and burnt. Then she would break two eggs into the pan, to make a kind of frittata. I remember we would look for the little fagioli inside and pounce on them like prizes. So much of the food we ate when we were children seemed to be associated with little games. So when, many years later, the yellow beans came into the kitchen at Locanda, that combination of beans and potatoes kept coming to mind. Of course we had to come up with something a little more refined, so we decided to bring in some black truffles ? partly because they are in season at the same time as yellow beans and partly because the starchiness and sweetness of potato really support the flavour of black truffle, which is milder than the white truffle. To highlight the flavour of the truffle even more, and balance the sweet/sour/starchy elements, the salad also needs to be more vinegary than usual, so the vinegar has a real presence in the mouth. If you don?t have any truffles, you can still make a lovely salad ? or, if you can find some good quality black truffle and mushroom paste in an Italian deli, add a tablespoon of it to the vinaigrette. In Italy, I would use the yellow Piacentine potatoes, which come from very sandy ground. They have a similar quality to the baby Jersey Royals that we use in London for this salad when they are in season. 8 medium-sized new potatoes 240g yellow beans small bunch of chives, cut into batons about 4cm long 1 tablespoon freshly grated Parmesan 2 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52) 3 tablespoons Giorgio?s vinaigrette (see page 51) 60?70g fresh black truffle salt and pepper Cook the potatoes in their skins in boiling salted water until soft, then drain (it is always best to cook potatoes in their skins, to keep in as much flavour as possible). Peel them if you like (we do this in the restaurant, purely for the look of the salad, but at home I might not bother). In a separate pan, cook the beans in boiling salted water for about 7-9 minutes, until they are slightly overcooked (both the beans and the potatoes should be warm for this salad, so try to make sure they are ready at around the same time). Drain and set aside. Cut each potato into quarters lengthways and put them in a bowl with the beans and chives. Season, sprinkle with the Parmesan and toss first with the Shallot vinaigrette, then with Giorgio?s vinaigrette. The dressing should be quite sharp to bring out the flavour of the truffle, so add a little more vinegar if necessary. Arrange the potatoes and beans on serving plates and, at the table at the last minute before serving, grate the black truffle over the top. Insalata di asparagi e Parmigiano Asparagus salad with Parmesan (#ulink_0ae5a771-1825-5b14-9cb3-e8c4d79aa173) For one month of the year only ? April ? we get wonderful, early, thick white asparagus from Friuli in the Northeast of Italy, but otherwise we only make this dish when the green asparagus is in season from late April to mid-June. Such a short time, but an exciting one, especially in Italy. For ten months of the year you have no asparagus at all, then suddenly millions of kilos, then none again, so during this precious period there are large fairs in all the growing regions, with every restaurant serving asparagus. It is no good eating tasteless asparagus all year round, flown hundreds of miles from other countries ? where is the magic in that? Sometimes, especially in London hotels, I see restaurants using little asparagus tips to decorate a dish of something else entirely, such as meat or fish. I consider that an insult ? a great misuse of a fantastic flavour. Asparagus should be the entire dish ? a large portion served with eggs, Parmesan, butter, or a savoury zabaione made with white wine. That?s the way to eat asparagus. Good, fresh asparagus should be firm. If you bend a spear in the shop or at the market when no one is looking, it should snap in the natural place just below halfway ? if it simply bends and doesn?t snap, then it isn?t fresh. Some people also say that only really fresh asparagus will squeak if you rub the spears together. It is best to use a griddle pan for this recipe ? or you could grill the spears on a barbecue. However, if you prefer to blanch your asparagus, divide it into bunches of five or six spears and tie with string, to prevent the tips getting bashed and broken. Then stand the bundles in a tall pan of boiling salted water, keeping the tips above the water so they will steam gently thanks to the heat below and the flavour will be stronger. Often people say that once the asparagus is cooked you should plunge it into iced water to stop it cooking further, but I think it is better to take the spears out of the water about a minute before they are ready (after about 4-6 minutes, depending on thickness). Untie them, wrap them in a wet cloth and then let them finish cooking as they cool down naturally at room temperature ? the colour might not be quite so bright but the flavour will be better, as the spears won?t soak up the cold water, which would dull the flavour. If you like, you can cook the asparagus a few hours in advance, but make sure you leave it at room temperature. If you put it into the fridge, again you will deaden the taste. Trim off the woody bases from the asparagus spears. Preheat a ridged griddle pan and grate the Parmesan. 20?24 medium-sized asparagus spears about 100g Parmesan 100ml extra-virgin olive oil 4 eggs 2 handfuls of mixed salad leaves 4 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52) 2 tablespoons Giorgio?s vinaigrette (see page 51) small bunch of chives, chopped salt and pepper Lay the spears in a row with the tips level and divide them into groups of 3 or 4 ? however many you can get a cocktail stick through easily ? then very gently secure them with the cocktail sticks (this makes it easier to turn them). Brush the asparagus with some of the olive oil, season with salt and pepper, then put the spears on the hot griddle for a couple of minutes on each side, until they are tender but still slightly crunchy. If you think they are not cooked enough but might become too charred, take the pan off the heat and cover with foil ? then they will continue to cook gently for a little longer. While the asparagus is still warm, transfer to a plate, drizzle with the remaining oil and sprinkle with about 2 tablespoons of the grated Parmesan. Cover with cling film and leave for about an hour for the flavours to infuse. Boil the eggs for 6-7 minutes, cool under running water, then shell and push through a fine sieve. Keep on one side. Season the salad leaves and sprinkle with another 2 tablespoons of the grated Parmesan. Toss with 2 tablespoons of the Shallot vinaigrette and Giorgio?s vinaigrette. Arrange the asparagus spears on serving plates. Sprinkle over the sieved eggs, together with the remaining Shallot vinaigrette. Pile up the salad on top, sprinkle over the rest of the Parmesan and finish with the chopped chives. Insalata di cardi alla Fontina Swiss chard envelopes with Fontina (#ulink_0320588e-4f40-57cb-a81b-4e4ba3ba5e99) The idea here is to make little ?sandwiches? of chard stalks, filled with Fontina cheese, and deep-fry them. 2 large Swiss chard stalks 2 thin slices of Fontina cheese 100g plain flour 2 eggs 3 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan 100g dried breadcrumbs 500ml vegetable oil for frying 3 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52) small bunch of chives, cut into batons salt and pepper Remove the leaves from the chard stalks. Blanch the stalks in boiling salted water for 3-4 minutes, until just tender, then drain and pat dry (this is important for later). Put the chard leaves into the boiling water for about a minute, then drain and pat dry. The chard stalks will be pointed at the top where the leaf was attached. Trim off this pointed part and cut it into thin batons, then set aside. Cut the rest of the stalk into an equal number of pieces each about 7-8cm long. Then slice each of these pieces horizontally through the middle, so you are left with pairs of identical pieces. Cut the cheese into slices just a little smaller than the pairs of Swiss chard. Keep the chard slices in their pairs, cut-side upwards. Place a slice of Fontina on one of the slices of chard, then put the other one on top, cut-side downwards. As long as the pieces of chard are dry when you start to fill them with the Fontina, they will stay together in a sandwich ? you don?t need to secure them. Place the flour on a large plate. Put the eggs into a bowl and beat lightly. Mix 1 tablespoon of Parmesan with the breadcrumbs on another plate. Take each ?sandwich? and dust each end and side in turn in the flour ? leave the larger surfaces for now. Shake off excess flour. Do the same with the egg, making sure the sides and ends are covered and shaking off the excess. Finally, dip the chard into the breadcrumbs ? again cover the ends and sides ? and shake off the excess. Repeat the whole process, this time dipping the larger surfaces first into the flour, then the egg and then the breadcrumbs. At the end every surface should be completely covered, and you can press each surface with a spatula, to make sure the breadcrumbs stick really well. Heat the oil in a large, deep pan (no more than one-third full). Meanwhile, mix the reserved little chard batons with the leaves. Season with salt, pepper and 1 tablespoon of the remaining Parmesan. Toss with the Shallot vinaigrette, then arrange on serving plates. When the oil is hot enough to sizzle when you sprinkle in a few breadcrumbs, put in the ?sandwiches? and fry for about 2 minutes, until golden. Move around with a spoon or a spatula, taking care not to puncture them or the cheese will start to leak out. When they are ready, remove and drain on kitchen paper. Season with salt and arrange on top of the salad. Sprinkle over the rest of the Parmesan and the chives. Olive Olives (#ulink_5ccfa8bc-fc08-5002-8ca6-3681b7db2bd8) ?A taste so good it makes you cry? A beautiful, slightly salty, bitter olive can be so good it makes you cry, but a bland olive that tastes of nothing, or that has been pitted and drowned in marinade in a supermarket tub, is a disaster that makes you want to cry for a different reason. If I go into a restaurant and they serve an aperitif with a bowl of tasteless olives, I think, ?Forget it? ? what a terrible start to a meal. What upsets me most are the insipid olives you find on most takeaway pizzas. Often they are not even true black olives, because the really jet-black varieties, as opposed to violet-black or brownish-black, are quite rare. Mostly they are green olives that have been ?dyed? black by putting them in a water bath and running oxygen through them. Then they are treated with ferrous gluconate, a colourant, to give them their shiny, bright black appearance. How unnatural is that? You can?t eat an olive straight from the tree, whether it is unripe (green) or ripe (purplish-black), because it will be far too bitter. They all have to go through a salt-curing process first before they are edible. One of my favourite olives is the small, black and quite delicate Taggiasca, the variety grown in Liguria that was first planted by the Romans. Liguria is a beautiful place, high up in the mountains that stretch all the way to Monaco. You drive there from Milano on a grey day and suddenly you are in the sunshine. They say that Caesar?s armies fell in love with Liguria. After thirty-seven years of conquering Turkey and having the Ottoman Empire at their feet, they found this paradise, almost like a spa ? where it is never too cold, even in winter, and never too hot, even in summer; where there is hardly any rain, and the Alps protect the countryside from the storms that blow in from France, pushing them on towards the East. So they defeated the resistance of the Ligurians and decided to stay there. The olives are grown on terraces and the silvery trees are beautifully twisted like no other olive tree, pruned low so they can be harvested easily by hand. Some of the trees are extremely old (they can bear fruit for around six hundred years) but so strong that even when they have been hit by frost and some of the roots have died, you will find four more little trees have sprung up on top. Traditionally, the olives are cured by soaking them for forty days in fresh water, which is changed daily, then putting them into a brine of water and sea salt scented with thyme, rosemary and bay. This is the way we buy them in the restaurant ? in their brine, never ready-marinated. Then, if we want to, we can rinse and dry them, and mix them with olive oil, crushed chillies and garlic. I always buy unpitted olives, because the bitter flavour that is so important is concentrated in the stone. It is ironic that in the UK olives are so, so popular now ? yet many people have never tasted a really good one. Let us not forget that olives are a fruit. If you go shopping for peaches, you are careful to choose ones that are ripe and unblemished. Yet, when people buy olives, they are often content to buy cheap ones that have been pasteurised (which dulls the flavour) and commercially pitted and stuffed ? not with fresh anchovies or capers, in the way that people in Italy might do at home, but with strips of synthetically flavoured paste. The artificial flavourings are pushed in by machines that can pit and stuff a thousand olives an hour, no doubt in factories run by the sort of people who get excited about making extra money from packing one less olive into each jar. The best olives, the kind that you can find in good delicatessens, cost a little more because they have been freshly imported from the region where they were grown, with the stones left in. If they are pitted, this will have been done at the last minute, and if they are marinated and stuffed, it will have been done by hand, with fresh ingredients. Sometimes you can even find a Greek or Italian delicatessen that will sell fresh (uncured) unpitted olives in season, which you can cure yourself. If you come across them, buy a kilo and put them into a sterilised jar with 200g sea salt. Seal it tightly and store for twelve to fifteen days, turning the jar upside down one day and then upright the next, until enough brine is made to completely cover the olives. Then you can leave the jar upright. Beware, though ? home-cured olives have a really powerful, pungent bite. Accompaniments for salumi Zucchine all?olio Grilled courgettes in olive oil (#ulink_b0a86ce0-6873-5ed1-9227-8a2c577804e3) We serve these with culatello (cured meat made from the fillet of the pig?s thigh), but they are also lovely with slices of mature ricotta cheese. To serve 4, you need 2 courgettes, sliced at an angle to give long pieces about 5mm thick. Season them with a little salt, put in a colander and let them drain for 10 minutes, then squeeze lightly to get rid of excess liquid. Brush them with olive oil and griddle or grill them until they just begin to mark on both sides. Remove from the heat, then drizzle with extra-virgin oil and sprinkle with some rosemary. You can do this an hour or so ahead of serving and keep them at room temperature ? but not in the fridge because they will dry out and the flavour will be suppressed. Sottaceti Pickled vegetables (#ulink_5e687311-4dac-5bfd-8892-336487a9e12a) In Italy there is a ritual that goes on throughout the year of picking or buying vegetables, such as peppers, artichokes and mushrooms, when they are at their best, eating some, then preserving the rest for another time. If you have a jar of peppers, a jar of artichokes, and a salami hanging up somewhere cool, you have the makings of a feast. If you add garlic to any of these vegetables, blanch it briefly first and then make sure that it stays under the oil all the time, to prevent it becoming rancid. Keep the jars in a cool place, where the temperature is consistent, and always spoon out the vegetables with a clean spoon or tongs ? never fingers ? so you don?t introduce any bacteria into the jar. Cipolline all?aceto balsamico Baby onions in balsamic vinegar (#ulink_0692c453-342a-5df1-a6d2-1d37c3cd5164) You can triple or quadruple the quantity given here and store some of these onions for a month in a cool place (the longer you keep them, the better the flavour), but make sure they are always completely covered with the vinegar. Sometimes for this recipe we also use vincotto (see page 48). Peel 500g pickling onions but keep the root intact. Bring 500ml white wine and 500ml white wine vinegar to the boil in a pan, add the onions and blanch for about 3 minutes, until just soft. Remove the onions from the wine and vinegar, peel off the outer membrane and leave to cool. Put 25-30g light, soft, brown sugar into a small pan and melt until it darkens slightly. Just before it starts to bubble, put in the onions and toss around to coat. Add 250ml balsamic vinegar and cook gently for about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and cool. The onions are ready to eat, but if you want to keep them, put them into sterilised jars and make sure the vinegar completely covers the onions (add a little more if necessary). You can serve the onions with salumi, such as ham or cured pork, or, if you like, mix them into a salad. Chop the onions, then season a handful of rocket and toss with a little Balsamic vinaigrette (see page 52). Arrange the salad on the centre of a plate with the slices of salumi around the outside. Carciofi Artichokes (#ulink_6bbec5eb-2553-5610-9156-f15fd754c9d4) Prepare about 20 artichokes as for the recipe on page 70, blanching them in a big pan with 400ml each of water, white wine and white wine vinegar and 2 tablespoons of salt. Make the marinade (doubling the quantities) and cook briefly (see page 72). When the artichokes have cooled down in their marinade, spoon them into a sterilised jar, strain the marinade and then pour it over the top, making sure the artichokes are completely covered. Seal the jar tightly. The artichokes will keep in a cool place for 3 months (the longer you keep them, the more vinegary they will taste). Serve them with whatever you like ? in salads or with prosciutto or salami. Peperoni Peppers (#ulink_1020f58f-539d-5bee-a241-0445fecf096d) Halve and deseed 5 red or yellow peppers, then blanch in 500ml each of white wine and white wine vinegar, plus 2 tablespoons of salt, for 3-4 minutes. They should still be quite firm. Take the peppers out (you can cool the cooking liquid and keep it in the fridge for next time). Put them in a bowl, cover with cling film and leave them to steam for about 10 minutes, after which time you should be able to peel them easily. Leave them to cool completely, then put them into a sterilised jar. Cover with light olive oil and, if you like, a few sprigs of rosemary and bay and some blanched whole peeled garlic cloves. Make sure everything is completely covered and seal. Store in a cool place for up to 3 months. Barbabietole Beetroot (#ulink_bbb33ccb-6054-50d2-9213-3fe344a9a157) Use baby beetroot if possible ? golden or red. If they are very small, blanch them whole and unpeeled (just washed) in 500ml each of white wine and white wine vinegar and 2 tablespoons of salt for about 10 minutes, until just soft. Drain and, while still warm, peel and cut into halves, quarters or cubes, as you like. Put into sterilised jars and cover with light extra-virgin olive oil. Make sure the oil covers the beetroot completely and seal. Keep for up to 3 months in the fridge. If you can find only large beetroot, cook them whole and unpeeled in salted water until just soft (don?t add any vinegar to the water at this point, as the beetroot will take a couple of hours to cook and during that time the vinegar would flavour it too strongly). Keep topping up the water level as necessary. When the beetroot are cooked, let them cool, then peel and cut into cubes, etc. Because larger beetroot can taste more bland than small ones, you need to work a bit harder at bringing out their flavour. So, put the pieces into a bowl and cover with white wine vinegar, then leave in the fridge for a couple of days. Lift them out of the vinegar and place in a sterilised jar. Top up with enough extra-virgin olive oil to cover and seal. Store as before. Melanzane Aubergine (#ulink_77b0411b-4e32-56a2-b433-e64c0a39ef79) The best aubergines for preserving are the pale purple, melon-shaped ones, as they are firmer and a little sweeter. Cut them into slices about 2cm thick, place in a colander and sprinkle with salt. Leave for at least half an hour, preferably overnight. Drain them, brush with olive oil and grill or cook in a ridged griddle pan until they mark (a couple of minutes on each side). Don?t overcook them or they will become too soft and disintegrate after being in the oil for a while. Remove them, lay them out on a tray and sprinkle with whole peppercorns, blanched peeled whole cloves of garlic, sprigs of rosemary and, if you like, some large chillies, deseeded and split lengthways (or with the seeds, if you prefer them spicier). Layer in sterilised jars, then cover completely with light extra-virgin olive oil and seal. Keep in a cool place for up to 3 months. There is another typical sottoaceti with aubergine, which is originally from Napoli, and is often served with antipasti in bars in Italy ? my wife Plaxy calls the little strips ?worms?. What makes them very special is that the aubergine pieces, which are blanched in vinegar, retain a slight crunch, and if you eat them with a salami that is very generous with the fat, they really help to cut through the richness. To make a jarful, take 2 aubergines, peel them, and, using a mandoline grater, cut into thin slices and then into strips. Sprinkle with salt, leave to drain for an hour, then squeeze gently. Rinse under cold running water, then squeeze again. Get a pan with a measured amount of water boiling and for every litre of water add 100ml red wine vinegar. Bring to the boil again, then add the aubergines and keep boiling for about 3-5 minutes, depending on the thickness. They should still be quite firm. Lift out with a slotted spoon on to a clean tea towel. Move them around until completely cold and dried, then put into a sterilised jar along with some big chillies that have been deseeded and split lengthways. Cover with light extra-virgin olive oil and seal. Serve with bread and salami, or maybe some anchovies (if you like, you can scatter the aubergine with chopped garlic and parsley). Finferli Girolle mushrooms (#ulink_e273ec34-4ed1-520d-a4f5-c9366715658b) Clean 1kg small-to-medium girolle mushrooms and blanch them very briefly in 500ml each of white wine and white wine vinegar with 2 tablespoons of salt ? they should cook for less than a minute. Drain and lay them on a clean tea towel to dry. This is very important or the mushrooms will release their water into the jar (in Italy we leave them out in the sun to dry ? but in Britain you might have to pick your day). When they are dry to the touch, put them in a sterilised jar with some blanched peeled whole garlic cloves, bay leaves and enough light extra-virgin olive oil to cover. Seal the jar and keep in a cool place for up to 6 months. Serve with salumi ? if you like, you can mix them with balsamic onions (see page 82). Mozzarella and Burrata ?Pearly-white treasure? (#ulink_0b7a2daa-7756-5a96-96a5-ef2a01b4bbca) In the UK, people seem to be convinced that mozzarella is something rubbery and bland, after years of having only a version of this cheese that was made of cow?s milk (Fior di Latte), sold in packets and looked like ping pong balls. This is the mozzarella that you could buy in every supermarket twenty years ago, when every neighbourhood Italian restaurant had salad caprese on the menu: mozzarella and tomatoes, sometimes turned into a tricolore with slices of avocado. Real, fresh, hand-made unpasteurised mozzarella, made from pure buffalo milk in Campania, close to Napoli, is a beautiful pearly-white treasure that keeps for only a few days ? something sensual and soft, full of the sweaty, mossy flavours of the buffalo milk. When you have a large ball of this mozzarella, which drips with buffalo buttermilk when you cut into it, you don?t want to do anything other than drizzle over some peppery olive oil, grind over some black pepper and serve it as a starter, just as it is. To make the cheese, whole fresh buffalo milk is inoculated with a ?starter culture? of whey from the previous day?s cheese making, which is left to sour naturally. This is mixed with calf?s rennet and, after about half an hour, it coagulates into soft curds, which are broken up into pieces and left to ripen in warm whey for four or five hours, until the curd becomes stretchy. Then the curds are put into wooden vats of boiling water and stretched by drawing them out continuously with a wooden stick. Finally the mozzatore, the cheese maker in charge of the final stages of the process, judges just the right moment for the hot elastic cheese to be cut into pieces (the name mozzarella comes from the Italian mozzare, ?to cut?). Then it is gently shaped into large balls, trecce (plaits) or bocconcini (tiny balls weighing just 40-50g) and dipped into a brine bath to let the cheese relax and soften. Like so many Italian specialities, buffalo mozzarella started off as a poor man?s food, made from the buffalo that were brought into Italy through trade with India and used as beasts of burden, grazing on the marshes of Campania. You had to milk the animals, so people made the milk into cheese. Now, of course, the whole world wants to eat mozzarella. But how many buffalo do people think we have in Italy? Where are they all? Do you get off the plane in Napoli and say to the kids, ?Look at all the buffalo?? The reality is that there are only about 600,000 buffalo in Italy and each one will give you around 4-6 litres of milk a day, enough to make about twenty mozzarella. You would need about a million buffalo just to satisfy the demand from the UK alone, so a lot of the cheese has to be made with cow?s milk, or a mixture of buffalo and cow?s milk. If you buy cheese labelled buffalo mozzarella, or mozzarella tradizionale, it might be made either with buffalo milk or a mixture of buffalo and cow?s milk ? and there is as yet no law that says the producer must tell you which. So the way to be sure that the mozzarella you buy is made with 100 per cent buffalo milk is to look for one that carries the mark of the DOP (protected designation of origin) and is labelled mozzarella di bufala Campana. This tells you that the cheese has been made by one of the consorzio of producers within a specific area with unique microclimatic conditions, who have to make their cheese according to very strict laws. Confusingly, there is another label, mozzarella di latte di bufala (which must also carry the name or registered trademark of the producer between the words mozzarella and di latte). This means that the mozzarella must be 100 per cent buffalo milk. However, it can be made anywhere in Italy and, of course, true aficionados of mozzarella di bufala Campana will say its unique taste is all to do with the particular quality and characteristics of the terrain where the buffalo graze. Because real, traditionally made unpasteurised buffalo mozzarella is at its best only for a day or so, if we want to buy it in London the producer has to drive it to the airport just hours after it has been made, put it on a plane overnight, then have it collected and sent out to customers in the morning. So, of course, it is expensive and not always easy to find. However, there is another version allowed under DOP rules, which says that the whey in which the mozzarella is kept (in little packets or pots) can be pasteurised, so that the cheese will last longer. This is the one you are most likely to find in delicatessens, and at least you know it has been made traditionally in Campania, from pure buffalo milk. Burrata (#ulink_f857862f-cc66-5bb7-920a-2906bf47b37b) Another beautiful cheese is burrata, which is made in a similar way to mozzarella, but with cow?s milk. The stretched curd is made to form a little ?pouch? which is filled with mozzarella-like strings of curd, mixed with cream from the whey, and the pouches are knotted and dipped in brine. Traditionally they are wrapped in bright green asphodel (lily) leaves, which look beautiful against the milky white cheese. Burrata is brilliant as part of an antipasti with salami or prosciutto ? put it in the middle of the table and let everyone scoop out a little of the rich creamy cheese with a spoon. Seafood antipasti (#ulink_e95117bc-ac09-5362-a3c2-78c65fed4bf0) In England, people love big fish, like salmon or sea bass, with no bones left in to negotiate. But Italians have a bit of a love affair not only with octopus, squid and cuttlefish but also with little fish, cooked whole, head and bones included. I have always loved those cheap little fish like mackerel and sardines, which are so full of flavour yet so underrated because they don?t have any snob value. We always have one or two of these oily ?blue fish? on the menu, and they are a very healthy option. Sardines and mackerel contain the fatty acids called omega-3, which are thought to protect the heart, and help the working of our brains and immune systems. Again, we go back to the idea that good quality food doesn?t have to be expensive. I believe you are being more generous to someone if you give them cheap and healthy sardines than if you spend a lot of money on farmed salmon, which is so controversial in terms of the health of the fish and our environment. At home in Italy we would prepare these fish really simply, perhaps whole under a marinade. In the restaurant, of course, it is crucial that we don?t serve things that are too fiddly to eat, or that will cause people to end up with food splashed down their clothes. So I?m afraid that some of these recipes require you to fillet the fish first ? or, if you don?t want to do it yourself, ask your fishmonger to do it for you. Sgombro all?aspretto di zafferano Mackerel with saffron vinaigrette (#ulink_e97c6a7c-0def-5de8-9af7-d6680c1a88a4) This is the dish that Tony Blair ate when he came to the restaurant ? I was impressed by his choice of healthy proletarian food. Where I come from in Lombardia, we are quite close to the Ligurian Sea but for some reason we get more fish from the Adriatic ? mackerel is one that we used to have all the time when I was little ? in addition to our usual diet of fish from the local lakes. Fat and flavoursome, mackerel actually have a better flavour when they are well cooked (unlike most fish) and, because they are very oily, the flesh won?t dry out the way other fish do. Sometimes I make this dish without the pancetta but with a little saffron instead. You brush the mackerel fillets with oil and a few saffron threads, then season them with salt. Heat a pan and add a little oil. When it is hot, put in the fish, skin side down, pressing it down so that all the skin comes into contact with the pan. Don?t fiddle with it, just leave it for three or four minutes, until the skin turns golden, and you will see the flesh starting to turn white, rather than translucent. Once the flesh has turned white almost to the top, turn the fillets over and finish them off very briefly on the other side for about a minute. This is a dish of hot fish with a cold salad, which is why you need to choose fairly robust leaves, such as rocket. Note: if you are using saffron vinaigrette that you have made earlier and kept in the fridge, warm it up in a pan (but don?t let it boil) before using it, to bring out the flavour. 2 large mackerel (each about 80-90g) 8 thin slices of pancetta or Parma ham 4 handfuls of mixed green salad leaves 2 tablespoons Giorgio?s vinaigrette (see page 51) 3 tablespoons Saffron vinaigrette (see page 52) bunch of chives, cut into short lengths salt and pepper Take one of the mackerel and cut down either side of the central bone, so that you can remove this ?panel? completely, leaving you with 2 small, boneless fillets. Repeat with the other mackerel. You don?t need to season the fish, as there will be enough saltiness from the pancetta. Wrap each fillet completely in pancetta, without overlapping it. Cut each fillet crossways, at an angle, into 2 or 3 pieces depending on the size of the fillet. Place a non-stick frying pan on the hob until it is moderately hot, but don?t add any oil. Put in the fish ?parcels? and cook until the pancetta is crisp and golden on each side (about 3-4 minutes in all). While the fish is cooking, quickly season the salad leaves, toss with Giorgio?s vinaigrette and arrange in the centre of your serving plates. Carefully remove the fish ?parcels? from the pan, then dip them into the Saffron vinaigrette and toss them around gently, and arrange them around the salad. Drizzle over the rest of the Saffron vinaigrette and sprinkle with the chives. Sardine alla rivierasca Fried stuffed sardines (#ulink_435b01d7-5c6c-5bb4-acec-d77f8f4b79c5) Sardines are my favourite of all the oily fish, with an amazingly rich flavour. My grandmother used to fry sardines in really hot oil, then take them off the heat and keep them on one side. She would put some sliced onions into a big pot on the hob with plenty of oil (enough to cover the sardines later), add a splash of white wine and vinegar and let everything warm up to make an infusion. Then she would pour this over the sardines and leave them for twelve hours. Finally, she would take out the sardines, break them up and serve them with pasta. Or sometimes she would just put the pot on the table and let everyone take a bit of fish and eat it with some bread. This is a little more complicated, and a dish to make in the summer, when fresh sardines are plentiful, but make sure the ones you buy have really silvery skins. If they are being sold on a stall and the sun is out, or they are under the lights in a fishmonger?s, you should be able to see the skin shining from far away. If not, don?t buy them, because they are old. In Italy, we get smaller sardines than the ones in the UK; no matter ? the bigger ones just look a little less precious. There is a really famous Italian dish from Sicilia which I love, called sardine al beccafico, which is sardines split open and stuffed with breadcrumbs, olive oil and tomato, then rolled up and baked for five or six minutes. The story is that the little rolls with their tails sticking out look like the beccafico, a small, greedy bird who loves to eat figs, and so is considered to be a great judge of good food. I really wanted to have this dish on the menu, but it isn?t easy to serve in a way that is right for the restaurant. I knew I would have to take out all the small bones ? it is very important for a London restaurant to sanitise fish. So we came up with this way of filleting the fish and then wrapping the fillets around little balls of stuffing, made of breadcrumbs, herbs, olive oil and Parmesan. I have to confess, though ? and whisper this ? that it breaks one of the fundamental rules of Italian cooking: never put cheese and fish together. Because sardines are so generously fatty, we cut through the richness by serving them with a little salad of tomatoes (seasoned with salt and vinegar to bring out their acidity), some leaves, black olives and plenty of chives ? a really big handful. I hate to use any herb just sprinkled on a dish for decoration; I use them for their texture and taste, and I really like the oniony flavour of chives, especially in this recipe. Whenever we can, we use the fantastic sweet San Marzano tomatoes that come in from Italy, because they have thick flesh and very few seeds, so they absorb the vinegar well. And we use wild salad leaves, predominantly rocket but also red chard, mizuna and mustard ? the more aromatic and peppery the salad, the better. Again, remember you are putting hot fish on to soft leaves, so you don?t want any leaves that are too delicate or they will ?cook? and wilt immediately. That is why we favour rocket so much, because it has real tenacity, and a lovely pepperiness. 8 small, vine-ripened tomatoes, blanched, skinned, cut into quarters and deseeded (see page 304) 10 tablespoons Giorgio?s vinaigrette (see page 51) 12 small or 8 large sardines about 20 black olives, pitted and halved 2 tablespoons olive oil 3 handfuls of rocket small bunch of chives, cut into short lengths salt and pepper For the stuffing: 2 slices of soft white bread, crusts cut off a little milk good handful of basil good handful of flat-leaf parsley 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil 30g breadcrumbs 20g Parmesan, freshly grated 1 garlic clove, chopped Well ahead, start making the stuffing: put the slices of bread into a bowl and pour over enough milk to wet them all the way through. Transfer to a fine sieve and leave to drain for 4 or 5 hours, but preferably overnight, until the bread is moist but not wet (this step isn?t essential, but it is best if you can do it). Towards the end of the bread soaking time, sprinkle the tomatoes with 4 tablespoons of the vinaigrette and leave to marinate. Put the basil and parsley into a food processor with the olive oil and whiz until finely chopped. Then add the breadcrumbs, soaked bread (first squeezing out any excess milk, if necessary), Parmesan and garlic. Pulse until all the ingredients come together into a paste. Taste for seasoning and add some pepper and salt if necessary (there will already be some saltiness from the Parmesan). Under running water, scale the sardines and then open them out, leaving the heads attached. To do this, insert a sharp filleting knife at the tail end, next to the backbone, and cut upwards, until you reach the belly of the fish. Turn the sardine over, then cut in the same way to the same point on the other side of the bone. Starting at the tail end, take the backbone between your forefinger and thumb and run them along the length of the bone up to the head. Cut across the bone at the tail end and head end and the bone should lift out, leaving the fillets still attached at the opposite side, so you can open them out like a book. At the outside of each fillet, you will see a black area with some fine bones. Just take your knife under these parts, and remove them. Then, with a pair of tweezers, take out any pin bones that may have remained in the fillets. Take a little of the stuffing and work it into a ball. Then place a filleted sardine on a board, put the stuffing inside, as close to the head as possible, and wrap the fillets around it. Smooth the stuffing that is still visible at the top and bottom, then secure with cocktail sticks. Alternate the tomato and olives around the edge of 4 serving plates. Cook the sardines in 2 batches. Heat half the olive oil in a large, non-stick frying pan. Season the sardines with a little salt and, when the oil is hot, put in half of them and brown on one side for about 1-2 minutes. Turn over and cook for 2 minutes on the other side. To make sure the stuffing is heated through, insert a sharp knife into the centre and then put the knife to your lips to check that it is hot. Remove the sardines and keep hot while you cook the remainder in the rest of the oil. Take the cocktail sticks out of the sardines. Toss the rocket with 2 tablespoons of the vinaigrette and put it in the middle of the serving plates. Place the sardines on top of the rocket, then sprinkle with the chives and spoon over the rest of the vinaigrette. Carpione di pesce persico Escabeche of perch (#ulink_09c5ddbe-1a5f-5768-8ccc-0a0112611139) Where I come from in Northern Italy, the local fish is all lake fish ? especially perch ? which we would cook and put under vinegar with vegetables, to bring to the table cold as part of the antipasti. The idea here is that you don?t completely cook the fish in the pan but finish it off in the oven, still in the vinegar mixture. We serve it hot, but you can also leave it to cool, cut it into smaller pieces and serve at room temperature, with more antipasti. If you do this, don?t reduce the juices at the end, as you will need enough to cover the fish completely. You can also serve this as a main course with some fregola (see page 166) ? use 12 onions, double the quantities of carrots, white wine, vinegar, rosemary and leek, and choose fillets of fish around 200g. Then cook 4 tablespoons of fregola in plenty of salted water for 7-8 minutes, and saut? with some diced cucumber and tomato. 8 baby onions 1 carrot about 3 tablespoons sunflower or vegetable oil 4 perch fillets or steaks, each about 80g 2 tablespoons white wine 5 tablespoons white wine vinegar 4 bay leaves 2 small sprigs of rosemary white part of 1 small leek 4 juniper berries 4 black peppercorns small handful of flat-leaf parsley 3 tablespoons olive oil salt and pepper Preheat the oven to 220?C, gas 7. Blanch the onions in boiling salted water for about a minute, then remove them with a slotted spoon and cut them in half. Blanch the carrot for 1-2 minutes (you can use the same water), then drain and slice thinly. Set aside. Heat the sunflower or vegetable oil in a large, ovenproof frying pan (or 2 small ones). Season the fish, put it in the pan, skin side down, and fry until golden; this will take about 2-3 minutes. Turn the fish over, add the white wine and leave for that to evaporate for a minute or so, then add the vinegar, blanched vegetables and all of the remaining ingredients except the parsley and olive oil. Bring to the boil, then transfer to the oven for 2 minutes, until the fish is cooked through (larger fish may need 3-4 minutes). Remove from the oven and transfer a fillet to each serving plate. Put the pan on the heat, and simmer until the cooking juices have reduced and thickened slightly. Check the seasoning, then spoon the juices over the fish and finish with the parsley and oil. Insalata di polpo e patate novelle Octopus salad with new potatoes (#ulink_3be41a31-81c6-51ef-9681-6bf3fca42fb5) For years, I always boiled octopus in water, the way I was taught when I first started cooking. Then one day I was with my good friend Vincenzo Borgonzolo, who used to own Al San Vincenzo, which was one of my favourite family-run Italian restaurants in London. Vincenzo grew up a true Scugnizzo Napoletano, one of the street urchins who give the city so much of its colour. For some reason we were talking about octopus. He asked me how I cooked it and when I told him, he said, ?But you don?t have to cook it in water ? it has enough water of its own.? He showed me how he cooked his octopus for forty minutes with no water, just simmering it gently in oil so that it released its juices and moisture into the pan, braising itself in its own liquid. You end up with a fantastic concentration of flavour and an incredibly tender octopus. After it is cut up and cooled a little, it becomes rich, sticky and gelatinous and really meaty in the mouth, with a huge flavour of the sea. When I saw the octopus done this way, I couldn?t believe it. Brilliant, brilliant. How could it be that I never knew about it before? It seems this method of braising is the way they cook octopus in Napoli, with the addition of tomatoes, where it is eaten with bread ? but in the North I had never seen it done. (By the way, in the North we call octopus polpo, in the South it is polipo.) I can honestly say I had been wrong for twenty years. Except for certain recipes, like the Octopus Carpaccio on page 99, boiling is completely the wrong way to cook an octopus. Ask your fishmonger to clean and prepare the octopus. If you can?t find a fresh one, use frozen, which comes ready cleaned and works almost as well. It will already be tenderised, as the freezing process breaks down the cell structure. If you use a fresh octopus you will need to bat it before cooking. 1 large octopus, cleaned 1 large chilli, split in half 2 handfuls of flat-leaf parsley 4 garlic cloves 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 8 small new potatoes, scrubbed 1 onion, chopped 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar juice of 1 lemon 2 celery stalks small bunch of chives 2 handfuls of mixed green salad leaves (optional) 2 tablespoons Giorgio?s vinaigrette (see page 51, optional) salt and pepper Wrap the octopus in a cloth and bat it with a meat hammer for 3-4 minutes to tenderise it. Rinse well under cold running water for 10-15 minutes, to take out any excess salt. Put the chilli, one handful of parsley, 3 whole garlic cloves and 3 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large casserole. Add the octopus (don?t season it, or it will toughen up), cover with a lid and simmer gently for about 1? hours, until tender. Leave to cool. Meanwhile, boil the potatoes until tender, then drain. When cool enough to handle, remove the skins. Heat a couple of tablespoons of the remaining oil in a small casserole, add the onion and sweat until soft but not coloured. Add the white wine vinegar and let it bubble until completely evaporated. Remove from the heat. Cut the potatoes into quarters, mix with the onion and season to taste. Squash the remaining garlic clove to a paste with the back of a knife, then put the rest of the parsley on top and chop it so that the two mix together well. When the octopus has cooled enough for you to handle it, remove any big suckers and discard, then cut the rest into small chunks and put into a bowl. Add the parsley and garlic, and the lemon juice. Season if necessary and mix in the rest of the olive oil. (At this point, you can keep it in the fridge for 2-3 hours and finish it just before serving.) Cut the celery into julienne strips, and the chives into short lengths. Combine the potatoes with the octopus mixture and add the chives. If using the salad, dress it with Giorgio?s vinaigrette and some salt and pepper. Arrange on serving plates and put the octopus and potato mixture on top. Garnish with the celery. Carpaccio di polpo Octopus carpaccio (#ulink_1f230d4d-1660-5b60-9b7d-d8173ae3ad23) This is the exception to the rule of not boiling octopus, because in this case you need to keep as much gelatine as possible inside the octopus (rather than letting it come out as the octopus cooks in its own juices). It is this gelatine that will hold the pieces of octopus together in the carpaccio. When you slice and serve the carpaccio, it looks beautiful: the perfect pearly-white flesh of the octopus, with its purple streaks, against the bright red of the tomato and the green of the basil. We serve it as a starter, but it would also be fantastic as part of an antipasti. The trick here is not to boil the octopus too fast. Just bring the water up to the boil, then turn down the heat and keep it simmering very slowly. Also, put a couple of corks into the pot ? don?t ask me why. I don?t know if there is anything scientific about it but Corrado Sirroni taught me to do it in my first job and I have done it ever since. 1 large octopus 1 lemon, cut in half 1 onion 1 carrot 1 celery stalk 2-3 bay leaves 3 black peppercorns wine glass of white wine To garnish: 3 tomatoes, deseeded and finely diced 2 tablespoons Giorgio?s vinaigrette (see page 51) small bunch of basil 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil salt and pepper Put the octopus in a large pan and cover with cold water. Add the lemon halves, whole onion, carrot and celery stalk, plus the bay leaves, peppercorns and wine. Put in a couple of clean wine corks at this point if you like. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and keep at a very slow simmer for about 15 minutes. Remove from the heat. When the octopus is still warm, take it out of the water. Cut off the head and put it inside the body, close up the tentacles and lay the octopus on a large sheet of cling film. Take the edge of the cling film, pull it over the top of the octopus and roll it up very tightly, twisting the ends. It is important to compress the carpaccio firmly, otherwise it will fall apart when you try to slice it. Wrap the roll of octopus in a clean cloth, let it cool slightly, then put it in the freezer. When the octopus is completely hard, use a very sharp knife to cut it into thin slices ? as thin as you can manage ? being careful not to let it warm up or it will be too soft to cut and will break up. If it starts to soften, put it back in the freezer. Lay the pieces, not overlapping, on a tray covered with cling film, then lay another sheet of cling film on top and keep in the fridge until required (it needs a couple of hours). Mix the tomatoes with Giorgio?s vinaigrette, season and set aside. When ready to serve, arrange the tomatoes on a serving plate with basil leaves around and put the octopus on top. Drizzle with the olive oil and sprinkle with a little sea salt. Calamari Squid (#ulink_eda64f88-c4f4-55ff-beb8-9b5c5bab0701) ?The flavour of the sea? If I could have one really good calamari fritti a week, I would be a very happy man. It is one of those favourite childhood memories ? like the little gold tins of anchovies in salsa piccante, or the bread with five faces that I used to buy with my Granddad ? that have lodged in my brain and make me feel good whenever I think about them. In the summer, when I was a boy, we used to go and eat in a local pizzeria run by six brothers, all of them short and fat. They came to our restaurant; we went to theirs. It was a great place. All you had to do was decide what kind of pizza you wanted and then before it arrived the brothers would bring out a long tray piled with fried prawns and rings of calamari. The Spanish slice their calamari rings quite thick but Italians cut them very thinly, like wedding rings, and dust them only in flour or semolina ? not batter ? before frying. Incidentally, on restaurant menus in some parts of Italy, around the coast of Liguria and also in Sardegna and Toscana, you might come across totano, also called ?flying? squid because it shoots out of the water and ?flies? over the waves. Totani are longer than squid and they hunt different prey, so the flavour is slightly different and they are a little tougher, but they are cooked in similar ways. The smaller ones are often served in a fritto misto. Cooking squid at home is easy in one way, because it is very quick, but hard in another, because there is about forty seconds? difference between squid that is beautiful and squid that is as tough as a shoe sole. Like octopus, squid contains a lot of water, so you have to chargrill or saut? it extremely fast (1?1? minutes on each side, that?s all) over a very high heat. Otherwise it will just boil in its own liquid, losing flavour and toughening up at the same time. People always tend to worry that it might not be cooked, so they leave it a little bit longer and then ? disaster ? it is too late. Many people say that frozen calamari is as good as fresh, but I can tell the difference from a long way off ? really I can. For me, when you blast-chill something as delicate as squid, unlike octopus, it sanitises all those unique flavours and the smells of the sea. So, when you buy squid, look for a pearly-white membrane, which shows that it is fresh. Cleaning squid isn?t the nicest job in the world ? I recommend you teach your children to do it as soon as possible, then they can take over. Usually when you buy squid, the head ? with its tentacles attached ? will be tucked inside the body pocket. So pull out the head, detach it from the body and set it aside. Discard the intestines, which will come out too, then reach inside the body with your fingers and pull out any other innards, including the plastic-looking quill. Throw all of these away. Next, you have to take off the fins. Pull them downwards so that you pull off the purplish skin at the same time. Throw away the skin and the fins. Then you need to wash the body ?pocket? inside and out. I always make my chefs turn the pocket inside out to wash it because it may contain a bit of sand or other debris ? who knows? But it is very important to turn it back again ? you can tell immediately when somebody has left it inside out, because the outside of the squid has a different, shinier texture. Finally, you should take the head, cut away the tentacles in front of the eyes and squeeze out and discard the beak. Keep only the tentacles. To grill (or barbecue) squid, slash the pockets down one side, then open them out so that the whole area will touch the grill and pick up the charred flavour. If the squid are thick, bat them out a bit, or slash them on the inside criss-cross fashion with a sharp knife (but not cutting all the way through). If the squid is thin, though, there is no need to do any of this. Chop some garlic, mix it with some olive oil, season it with salt and pepper and then brush it over the squid (including the tentacles) and grill as quickly as possible. Calamari ripieni alla griglia Chargrilled stuffed squid with tomato (#ulink_8fdd6c3a-7625-5ba4-a846-dae8a997eeb5) This is a lovely, quite rustic dish. It is simple to make, but relies on very good quality ingredients, so it is another one to do in the summer, when tomatoes and basil are at their best. The dish dates back to the days when I was cooking at Olivo, and each week we used to get three large boxes of calamari arriving in the kitchen, full of squid of all different sizes. Because I hate waste ? all Italians do ? I came up with this recipe using all the squid, big or small, tentacles and all, and it tastes fantastic ? despite the fact that this is yet another case of breaking the cardinal Italian rule of never putting cheese with fish. The finished dish is something between a starter and a soup, almost like squid in a broth of warm tomato salsa. Serve with a knife, fork and spoon and let people dip bruschetta into it. enough squid (including tentacles) to give you 16 small, intact bodies, plus 2 or 3 extra for the stuffing, prepared as above 4 tablespoons light extra-virgin olive oil, plus a little extra for brushing 2 very ripe large tomatoes, diced handful of basil salt and pepper For the stuffing: 2 anchovy fillets 4 tablespoons light extra-virgin olive oil 2 garlic cloves handful of flat-leaf parsley handful of basil breadcrumbs made from stale bread (a quantity equal to the chopped-up squid tentacles and reserved bodies?so for a handful of squid, you need a handful of breadcrumbs) 2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese To serve: 8 slices of ciabatta bread 1 garlic clove, halved a little extra-virgin olive oil a few basil leaves Make the stuffing by putting the anchovies, oil, garlic and herbs into a food processor and processing until finely chopped, then adding the chopped tentacles and extra squid bodies, together with the breadcrumbs and Parmesan. Do not add any seasoning at this point. Pulse until the mixture will come together in your hands without being too sticky. Since both the squid and the Parmesan are quite salty, you need to check whether any extra salt is needed, so take a small amount of the stuffing mixture and cook it quickly in a non-stick pan; taste and season with salt if necessary. Otherwise, just add a twist of black pepper. Stuff the squid pockets with the mixture ? not too full, or they will burst during cooking ? then close up and secure the openings with cocktail sticks. Put the olive oil, diced tomatoes and basil into a pan with a large base set over a low heat and warm through without boiling. Season to taste. Brush the squid with a little oil, then heat a griddle pan or heavy-based frying pan until smoking. (If the pan isn?t hot enough, the squid will boil ? leaching out its liquid, which will make it tough and flavourless.) Don?t overcrowd the pan or griddle ? cook no more than 4 squid at a time. You need enough space around each one to enable you to turn it over into a spare hot space, so that once again you can make sure it sears rather than boils. Chargrill or grill quickly (about a minute on each side) until the squid begin to mark if on a griddle or take on a bit of colour if in a frying pan. Remove the cocktail sticks and add the squid pockets to the pan of sauce. Move them around gently, taking care not to break them. Really, you just need to leave the squid in the sauce long enough to release some of the juices from the stuffing that will have gathered inside the pockets, so they can blend with the tomato, basil and oil ? but don?t leave the squid in for too long, or it will become rubbery. Chargrill or saut? the slices of ciabatta on both sides until crisp, then rub with the garlic clove and drizzle with oil. Serve the squid in its sauce in bowls, garnished with basil leaves and with the bread on the side. Insalata di seppia alla griglia Chargrilled cuttlefish salad (#ulink_e27a5f65-7db7-5abe-9d14-4ac39a3feeba) Cuttlefish are bigger than squid and have larger ?bones? that often get made into earrings. They also have a little sac inside the body containing a sweet-tasting black ink, which they squirt at enemies in self-defence, and which we use in this recipe. Clean the cuttlefish in the same way as squid (see page 100), being very careful not to puncture the ink sac ? just pull it out whole. Sometimes the sac will have emptied when the cuttlefish was caught, so it is best to buy a little packet or jar of ink, which your fishmonger will sell separately, just in case you find there is no ink inside. With this sauce, we try to bring out the sweetness and full flavours of both the ink and the onion. To do this you need to cook the onion very slowly and gently. as if it burns, the sauce will taste bitter. Also, when you finish off the sauce after straining it, use a straight-sided pan because you need to keep a low flame just underneath the base. It is very important that the heat doesn?t spread around the sides of the pan because, again, if you overheat it the sauce will turn bitter. The sauce can also be used for risotto and pasta. 1kg cuttlefish, cleaned (see above), heads reserved olive oil, for brushing 1 garlic clove handful of flat-leaf parsley 4 handfuls of mixed peppery salad leaves (or just mizuna, if you can get it) 3 tablespoons Oil and lemon dressing (see page 52) salt and pepper For the cuttlefish sauce: 5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling 4 onions, sliced about 1 tablespoon cuttlefish ink 1 litre fish stock salt and pepper To make the sauce, heat 3 tablespoons of the oil very gently in a small, straight-sided pan, add the onions, then cover and sweat slowly for about 15 minutes until softened but not coloured. Add the cuttlefish heads and cook uncovered, still very gently, until the juices released by the cuttlefish have completely evaporated. Add the ink and fish stock, stir until well mixed and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Pass through a fine sieve into a clean small, straight-sided pan, pressing and squeezing the onions and heads to extract all the juices. Bring the sieved liquid to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until the sauce thickens and becomes very syrupy. Cover and keep warm. Cut the cuttlefish into pieces roughly 8 x 10cm, score diagonally each way to make a diamond pattern and season with salt and pepper. Brush with a little olive oil. Crush the garlic with the back of a knife, put the parsley on top and chop it all together, to mix well. Cook the cuttlefish in 2 batches. Preheat a dry griddle pan or a heavy-based frying pan until hot and smoking (otherwise the fish will just boil in its own juices). Sprinkle the cuttlefish with the garlic and parsley mixture, put it into the pan and cook for about 30 seconds on one side, then 30 seconds on the other. As with squid, be very careful not to overcook it, or it will become tough. Season the salad with salt and pepper, toss with the Oil and lemon dressing and arrange it in the centre of 4 serving plates. Quickly beat the rest of the oil into the sauce and spoon it around the salad. Place the chargrilled cuttlefish on top of the salad and drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil. Gamberi e borlotti Prawns with fresh borlotti beans (#ulink_6ab8ecef-b869-56fa-b78f-581817273e7b) This is based on the dish my grandmother used to make with gamberi rossi, the beautiful pink prawns that come in from Liguria. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we can get them in London, but otherwise we use large Mediterranean prawns, or you could use tiger prawns. Of course, cooking in a restaurant is different from the way my grandmother worked at home, boiling up the beans while we waited, and then dipping the prawns into the pot at the last minute. So we have adapted the dish so that everything can be ready in advance and you have only to saut? the prawns and bring everything together in five minutes. The fresh sweet chillies that we use are quite large ? long, thin and not too spicy ? not the tiny ones used in Thai cooking. This is a brilliant recipe to glorify good olive oil and demonstrate how it can enhance simple flavours. In this case, the one we use for drizzling over the finished salad is the peppery Manni Per Me. Remember that when you are cooking a large number of prawns, you need enough space in the pan for them all to touch the bottom, so that they all sear quickly. If some of the prawns are not in direct contact with the pan, and therefore don?t get hot enough, then they will release their juices and boil in them rather than frying. So, no overcrowding. In the recipe overleaf, I have suggested that you cook the prawns in two batches to avoid this problem. I have also suggested that you use some of the liquid from cooking the beans to make a little ?sauce?. However, in our kitchen we never waste anything, so before we start this dish we make a stock from the shells of the prawns, which we use instead of the bean water. We saut? the shells in a little olive oil with a splash of white wine, some chopped chilli and garlic (for about 150g prawn shells, we would use half a chilli and two garlic cloves), plus a tablespoon of our home-made tomato sauce (you could use tomato passata). Then we add enough water to cover (no more, as we want to concentrate the flavour), boil everything for 10 minutes and strain the stock, really squeezing the shells against the sieve. 450g fresh borlotti beans in their pods (around 250g podded) or 100g dried borlotti beans, soaked ? head of garlic (unpeeled), plus 3 extra cloves, finely chopped 1 celery stalk, chopped bunch of sage 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 12 large fresh prawns, shell on 4 tablespoons olive oil 2 teaspoons sliced sweet chilli pepper ? wine glass of white wine 2 tablespoons tomato passata salt and pepper To serve: 1 garlic clove handful of flat-leaf parsley extra-virgin olive oil, preferably Tuscan First cook the beans: put them into a large pot with the ? head of garlic, the celery, sage and 2 tablespoons of the olive oil (don?t add salt until the beans are completely cooked, otherwise they will harden). Cover with plenty of cold water (about double the volume of the beans), put a lid on the pan and bring to the boil. Remove the lid, skim the foam from the top and reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. Cook until the beans are soft to the bite (45 minutes to 1 hour), stirring every 5-10 minutes, then leave to cool in their cooking water. When the beans are almost ready, peel the prawns, leaving only the heads on. Run a sharp knife along the back as far as the tail and remove the black thread that runs down it. Then open out the prawns as far as you can. Cook the prawns in 2 batches. Heat a large, heavy-based frying pan and add 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Add half the chopped garlic and half the sliced chilli, and cook for a few seconds over a medium heat, without allowing to colour. Season the prawns, then put them into the pan, back downwards. Once they have seared and caramelised a little, press the heads to release some of their juices. This not only helps the flavour but will reduce the temperature of the oil and prevent the garlic burning and turning bitter. If there still isn?t enough liquid and the garlic begins to colour too much, add a little more oil. Saut? the prawns for a couple of minutes, until they turn pink or dark red (depending on the type of prawn), then flip them over. Transfer to a warm plate. Wipe out the pan with some kitchen paper. Add the rest of the oil, garlic and chilli and cook the rest of the prawns in the same way. Return the first batch of prawns to the pan, then add the wine and let it evaporate. Remove the prawns and set aside in a warm place. With a slotted spoon, take the beans from their cooking liquid (reserving the liquid) and put them into the pan in which you cooked the prawns. Season and bring to the boil, then add the tomato passata and a ladleful of the cooking water from the beans ? you need to add enough liquid to create a little sauce around the beans. Adjust the seasoning if necessary. Let the beans heat through for a couple of minutes so they take on the garlic and chilli flavours. As they do so, crush a few of them with a wooden spoon to thicken the sauce. Return the prawns to the pan and toss everything together. Quickly crush the garlic to a paste with the blade of a knife, chop the parsley on top and mix together. Serve the beans and prawns drizzled liberally with extra-virgin olive oil. Season with lots of freshly ground black pepper and finish with the chopped parsley and garlic. Capesante all?aspretto di zafferano Pan-fried scallops with saffron vinaigrette (#ulink_f7809cff-ab07-524a-a881-0babfd425bfe) Saut?ed scallops are fantastic just with salad, if you don?t feel like making the celeriac pur?e with which we serve them in the restaurant. Scallops were a great revelation for me when I came to London, because here in the UK you have the best in the world. In the Mediterranean we have what are known as ?queenies?, which are much smaller, and don?t have the same milky sweetness. 8 large fresh scallops or 12 small ones, cleaned but with any corals still attached 4-5 celery stalks 4 tablespoons Saffron vinaigrette (see page 52) 2 tablespoons lemon juice 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons vegetable oil salt and pepper For the celeriac pur?e: ? celeriac, diced 1 tablespoon olive oil 2 garlic cloves 1 sprig of rosemary 3 tablespoons double cream 20g butter If the scallops have been in the fridge, bring them to room temperature before cooking. To make the celeriac pur?e, preheat the oven to 180?C, gas 4, put the celeriac in an ovenproof dish with ? wine glass of water, a pinch of salt and the olive oil, garlic and rosemary, seal completely with foil and then bake for about 30 minutes, until soft. Transfer to a food processor and blend, adding the cream as you go. Then push through a fine sieve, so you have a smooth pur?e (it is important to process the celeriac while it is still hot, as it makes the pur?e smoother and it will pass through the sieve more easily). Keep the pur?e to one side. Cut the celery into julienne strips and leave in a bowl with a handful of ice cubes to crisp them. Have the Saffron vinaigrette ready in a large, shallow bowl. Mix the lemon juice and extra-virgin olive oil. Turn the oven up to 190?C, gas 5. Heat a large ovenproof frying pan ? or 2 if you have 12 scallops (see my note about overcrowding the pan on page 105). When the pan is good and hot, but not smoking (or the scallops will burn), pour in the vegetable oil, then add the scallops. Don?t season them at this stage, or the salt will make them leach out their moisture and they will become dry. Let the scallops turn nice and golden on their undersides (about 1? minutes for large scallops, less for smaller ones), then turn them over and place the pan in the oven for 1 minute. This just makes sure that after frying them harshly on the outside they are cooked through. Season and transfer them to the bowl of Saffron vinaigrette. Warm up the celeriac pur?e in a small pan and season if necessary. Remove from the heat and beat in the butter. Spoon the pur?e on to 4 serving plates and arrange the scallops on top. Drain the celery from the ice, season with the lemon oil and arrange on top of the scallops. Drizzle the remaining Saffron vinaigrette around. Razza al balsamico Skate wing with aged balsamic vinegar (#ulink_4f1cd1e1-30df-54de-81d0-bbe51007d2a4) Skate is a great, great fish, with a fantastic flavour, and it?s in season most of the year. In winter, I love it cooked this way, served with balsamic vinegar and pomegranate seeds; or in the summer, simply with a tomato salad. Sadly, as with so many of our favourite fish, we have taken too much of it from the sea, so it is an endangered species, but I am including this recipe in the hope that stocks will recover and we can enjoy it in good conscience again. 2 tablespoons sultanas 400ml white wine 260ml white wine vinegar 1 shallot, roughly chopped 1 carrot, roughly chopped 1 bay leaf 2 parsley stalks (no leaves) 3 black peppercorns 2 tablespoons salt 2 medium-sized skate wings, cleaned and trimmed (ask the fishmonger to trim off the thin part of the skate wings for you) 4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil ? pomegranate 2 tablespoons pine nuts 2 bunches of rocket, roughly chopped 2 tablespoons Giorgio?s vinaigrette (see page 51) 4 teaspoons aged balsamic vinegar Soak the sultanas in water for about 30 minutes, until they plump up. Put the wine, 200ml of the vinegar and 1 litre of water into a large pan, wide enough to hold the skate wings side by side. Add the shallot, carrot, herbs, peppercorns and salt. Bring to the boil and put in the skate wings, thickest side downwards. Turn the heat down to a simmer and cook for about 3-4 minutes, depending on size, until the flesh will come away from the bone if you insert a knife. Remove the pan from the heat and leave the skate in the cooking liquid for a couple of minutes. Take the skate out of the pan, then put it on a tray and drizzle it with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and the rest of the white wine vinegar. Cover with cling film, so that the fish ?steams? in the marinade and keeps moist. Meanwhile, deseed the pomegranate, reserving the seeds. Toast the pine nuts in a dry pan until golden. Take the skate wings from the marinade and cut each one in half, through the bone (it will be soft and easy to cut through). Toss the rocket with the vinaigrette, arrange on 4 serving plates and place the skate on top. Scatter over equal quantities of pomegranate seeds, sultanas and pine nuts. Drizzle the rest of the olive oil and the balsamic vinegar over the skate. Insalata di borlotti, tonno e cipolle rosse Tuna salad with borlotti beans and red onion (#ulink_56e29729-b4f1-5658-8196-3336c60c52cb) This is good when fresh borlotti beans are in season, from June to September, otherwise use dried ones. Just remember to soak these in water for twenty-four hours, without putting them in the fridge, and change the water as close to every five or six hours as you can. You can cook the beans well in advance. They will keep in their cooking water in the fridge for four or five days, but don?t put your fingers into the water or you will introduce bacteria. When the beans become cold, they harden a little, so take them out of the fridge an hour or so before using, or warm them up in a pan, and they will soften again. 450g fresh borlotti beans (around 200g shelled), or 100g dried borlotti beans, soaked for 24 hours (see page 183) 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling 1 celery stalk, chopped 2 garlic cloves, unpeeled bunch of sage 1 red onion about 500ml vegetable oil for frying 300g fresh tuna, cut into 16 cubes (about 5 ? 5 ? 5cm) 4 bunches of rocket 2 tablespoons Giorgio?s vinaigrette (see page 51) salt and pepper Put the beans in a large pan with plenty of water, plus the olive oil, celery, garlic and sage (no salt, or the beans will toughen). Cover and bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for about 45 minutes to 1 hour. Try a bean: they are cooked when the skin, and not just the bean inside, feels soft in the mouth. At this point, you can add salt to taste, then leave the beans to cool in their cooking liquid. Slice the red onion into very thin rings. Rinse under cold running water to remove some of their sharpness, then put them in a bowl with some ice cubes. Take out 2 tablespoons of the beans and pulse to a pur?e in a food processor. Keep on one side. Heat the vegetable oil in a deep-fat fryer or a deep saucepan (no more than one-third full) to about 180?C. Season the tuna with salt and pepper, then put about 3-4 cubes at a time (so as not to lower the temperature of the oil) on a ?spider? (see photograph, below left) or in a fine sieve. Dip them into the oil and cook for about a minute, moving the cubes around, until the outside of the tuna turns crisp but the inside stays rose-coloured. Remove and drain on kitchen paper, then put in the next batch and continue until all the tuna is cooked. Season the rocket with salt and dress with the vinaigrette. Squeeze the red onion rings to remove any excess water and mix with the rocket. Finally, remove the beans from their cooking water with a slotted spoon and mix with the rocket and onions. Season to taste. Spoon the bean pur?e on to 4 serving plates, then arrange the rocket, onion and bean mixture on top, with the tuna on top of that. Drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil. Bottarga (#ulink_15b63ed4-0256-52c5-b0a2-460dae248cf7) There are two kinds of bottarga, which is the salted, pressed and sun-dried roe of either grey mullet (muggine) or tuna (tonno). You should be able to find it in 50g or 100g blocks in good Italian delicatessens. Most of it comes from Sardegna and, since it is such a regional speciality, many Italians have never eaten it ? my father never tasted it in his life, until I served it to him. Nowadays it has become something of a luxury, but I guess originally it was just another way for the fishermen to feed their families. They fished the grey mullet or tuna, cleaned them, took out the egg sac, sold the fish and then salted and dried the roe to eat at home. If you visit the south of Sardegna they will tell you, categorically, that the amber-coloured grey mullet bottarga is best ? partly because it is more rare, and because it takes two mullet to make one baffa (the commercial unit), whereas tuna are much bigger and the roe much more plentiful. Also, when the grey mullet roe is completely dry it becomes powdery, with a texture similar to Parmesan, and less powerful and salty-tasting. In other parts of the island and in Sicilia, though, they will insist that the tuna bottarga (which looks dark browny-grey and is slightly saltier and stronger and richer-tasting) is best. Personally, I can?t say I like one better than the other; I love them both. For me, the best time to buy bottarga is in the spring; it is made all year round but early in the year the flavour is fantastic and the colour of the grey mullet roe is a brilliant yellow-orange. When the new batches of spring bottarga come into the kitchen, I have to stop myself just sitting there, slicing it and eating it then and there ? it is beautiful on toasted bread, with some quite strong olive oil (as with Parmesan, never buy bottarga ready-grated, as all the flavour will be lost. Buy it in a piece and grate it yourself just before you need it). It is a curious flavour, a little like caviar, that opens up in your mouth and then you are hooked. In Sardegna, grey mullet bottarga is usually served sliced, as part of the antipasti, with lots of olive oil and lemon juice. In Cagliari, in the south of the island, they serve it in a very purist way, just shaved, like a truffle, over pasta, with only a knob of butter and some pepper (no salt as the bottarga is salty enough). Butter seems to help the flavour of the bottarga, though it can also make it a little heavy, and because it has such a high fat content it needs plenty of seasoning with pepper or lemon juice ? or something fresh like shavings of fennel ? to cut through it. Tuna bottarga is also produced in Sicilia, where you will sometimes find it served in a pasta sauce made with olive oil, chilli, garlic and parsley. Either way, it is an acquired taste, with such an intense flavour that when you serve it as a starter you set a very high note at the beginning of the meal, which you have to follow with powerful flavours. Insalata di ravanelli e bottarga di muggine Grey mullet roe and radish salad (#ulink_37041de5-6f93-56b0-84ef-ba1e1df578b2) Near to our house in London is a small Sardinian restaurant, a family affair, very local, offering simple things ? the kind of place I used to know when I was growing up. We would often take Margherita there for a pizza, and the owner, who is also the chef, would always bring us out a plate of beautiful bottarga with carasau, the famous crisp bread of Sardegna. After a while, I got talking to him, and he told me he brings in the bottarga himself from Sardegna, where his brother still lives. So we started to buy some from him. I liked the way he served just a little of it before the meal, with a drink, and so we began experimenting with something you could serve to people in a Chinese spoon ? one mouthful of flavour. In spring, when I believe the bottarga to be at its best, English radishes are also in season, and the two are just brilliant together. There is something about the heat that comes at the end of the radish that complements the salty bottarga experience, which carries on in your nose and mouth in the same way as that of truffles. Remember, though, that the radish and celery need only to be very lightly seasoned with lemon juice, as the bottarga is very salty. As a variation, instead of the radish (which incidentally in my region of Lombardia we call rapanelli, not ravanelli), we often serve the bottarga grated over a salad made with two large fennel bulbs, sliced thinly, seasoned lightly and tossed with the lemon juice and half the olive oil. Then we deseed and quarter two tomatoes, again lightly season them, and arrange them in the centre of each plate. We mix the fennel with a bunch of chives, cut into batons, and pile it on top, scatter over 50g grated bottarga, and drizzle with the rest of the oil. Or sometimes we do it in exactly the same way, but with green beans instead of the fennel. Just blanch the beans for a minute or so in boiling water, then drain and refresh under cold running water. 24 radishes 2 celery stalks juice of 2 lemons 4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus a little extra for drizzling 50g bottarga salt and pepper Thinly slice the radishes, using a mandoline or knife, then cut into matchsticks and put in a bowl. Cut the celery into similarly sized strips and add to the radishes. Toss with the lemon juice and half the olive oil. Make a mound of radish and celery on each plate and finely slice or grate the bottarga on top. Season with black pepper and drizzle with the rest of the olive oil. Salumi Cured meats (#ulink_814633e0-091f-5ddb-899b-17e9ddfbd503) ?The voice of the people? I am a great believer in the idea that ? as much as art or literature or poetry ? cured meats are truly representative of the cultural background of society; they are the voice of the people, and have been over hundreds of years. You have to remember that Italy was traditionally an agricultural country; so at one time most families would have kept a pig and used every part of it. In our region a typical dish was cazzola, made with a whole pig?s head, trotters and ribs, and Savoy cabbage. What wasn?t eaten fresh would be cured to feed the family for the next year. In every larder there would have been hams and salame hanging from hooks in the ceiling, each representing the taste, produce and microclimate ? the real rural roots ? of a particular community. In some villages, on the feast of St Anthony Abate, they still run a lottery to win a pig which runs around the village for a year before being slaughtered to feed the winning family. In the Northeast around Trentino-Alto Adige, where it is more rainy and often cold, you are not going to cure anything in salt alone as easily as in Parma, so you tend to have salumi that is also lightly smoked, such as speck (smoked prosciutto). Or you first marinate the meat in wine to speed the curing process, as in bresaola, the speciality of Valtellina, in my region of Lombardia. Though the majority of salumi is made with pork, in Northern Lombardia we have more cattle than pigs, so the bresaola is made with beef, first marinated in red wine, and then air-dried. Sometimes, too, they make bresaola with horse meat or venison. And in the mountains, the leg of a kid goat is often cured, like a ham (violino di capra), or made into salami. In Colonnata in the mountains above Carrara in the Northwest of Toscana, they traditionally make lardo, which is hard pig fat from under the skin of the animal?s back, covered with salt, garlic, peppercorns, spices and herbs like rosemary, then matured in a closed container for six months, so that the oils in the seasoning impregnate the snowy white fat. (In ancient times, it was packed in tubs made using marble from the local mines, and known as ?white marble?.) Unpromising as it might sound, lardo is beautiful when sliced very thinly and served on toasted bread. Never underestimate how local such foods still are in many parts of Italy ? even though you might see a selection from every region in an Italian deli in London. In Bologna, for example, they make the famous mortadella, the biggest of Italian sausages, which is steamed or poached, rather than cured, and has a texture so fine it is almost a paste. It is made with pork, but sometimes with beef added, together with spices, and often pistachio nuts, coriander seeds, wine and sugar. I remember talking to a guy I met in the army, about how we used to go into Bologna and have a focaccia with mortadella, and he said he had never had mortadella, because he came from Napoli. Salami (#ulink_3d5dfbd3-7528-569f-a525-1b833498729e) Salami really began its life as the food of the poor. The lean cuts of the animal would be sold to the rich, and whatever was left over would go into salami, along with whatever herbs and spices you had locally. Originally, everything would have been chopped by hand, and in many places it still is. In Toscana, for example, the typical coppa di testa is made with practically the whole head of the pig: the tongue, cheek, skin, ear, everything. To make salami, you need lard, or hard fat, which is cut into pieces, like nuggets of white marble, which won?t go rancid in the way that soft fat can; and the best salame achieve the perfect balance between meat and fat. The mixture is forced into the casing or skin of the salami (i budelli), which is traditionally the intestine of the pig, but may be synthetic. Once the salami has been forced into its ?sock? or skin, and tied with string, it is hung up in carefully controlled conditions for 2-4 months, to cure and dry. During this time it forms le muffe (mould), which should be uniform all the way over the surface of the salami (and all the same colour), leaving no gaps to allow air in, as this could cause the salami to become rancid. This ageing process, which contributes so much to the final character, is called ?la stagionatura?. For a simple family lunch, I like nothing better than a good salami with some bread, a little salad and some balsamic onions or other sottaceti (pickled vegetables). You can serve salami at dinner and then that is one course you don?t have to think about. I would always choose salami over prosciutto, perhaps because I still have a special memory of going up into the mountains with my granddad, when I was small. We would buy some bread, and a salami cacciatore ? these are the little ones from my region of Lombardia that are not much bigger than a plump sausage and that hunters would carry in their rucksacks ? which he would slice with his knife; and it was the best taste out in the open air. On a picnic, even now, I can?t think of anything better. If you were to ask me now which is my favourite salami, I guess I would have to say salami di felino, the long one made in Emilia Romagna, which is a very straightforward salami, the first one you are given to have in your panino when you are very young. It is made with coarsely minced pork, seasoned only with salt and peppercorns and, usually, no garlic, so it is quite sweet-tasting and still moist in the middle. But there is no salami I don?t like; and there are so many to choose from, varying in texture: some are soft; some are like dry sticks of meat. In the South, you often find less salty salame, made with more chilli; peppercorns and, occasionally, light smoking are favoured in the North. In Toscana, they like to flavour their salame with fennel seeds (salame toscano finocchiona or sbriciolona). They say this salami was first made by the farmers in order to sell their wine that wasn?t so good. The fennel seeds have an anaesthetic power over your taste buds, so when you came to the farm to taste the wine, they would first offer you a slice of the finocchiona, so that the flavour would disguise the poor quality of the wine. On holiday in Calabria I tasted ?nduja from Spilinga for the first time (strangely, the name ?nduja comes from the French andouille). It is a soft (morbido), almost spreadable, salami: a mixture of pork and offal, chopped with a knife, with a lot of chilli, which goes inside the pig?s intestine and is lightly smoked over wood, then matured. You spoon it out and mix it with some pasta, or have it on bread. My son Jack would come back from swimming in the sea all afternoon and tuck into it as if it was peanut butter or chocolate spread. Prosciutto (#ulink_271374a5-7e3f-5533-ab83-0bed3c71d47a) Prosciutto crudo is famous all over the world and the word may be an amalgamation of two Latin verbs, one meaning to burn, the other to draw out or strip (as in drawing out the moisture of the meat). Of course the most well known is prosciutto di Parma (Parma ham), which ? like Parmesan cheese, from the same region of Italy ? has travelled the world. Just as you could roll your wheel of cheese on to a boat, you could pack your ham and a knife in your knapsack and go off on your travels. Meat has been cured since ancient times, so why is Parma so important? Partly because there was an abundance of salt passing through the area from the trading port of Venezia as far back as Roman times, and partly because the dry, aromatic breezes that circulate through the Appeninos create the perfect environment for curing hams. Italian pigs, salt, air and time ? those four ingredients, they say, give Parma ham its special sweetness (no sugar, spices, water, nitrites or smoking are allowed). Prosciutto di Parma has become so synonymous with prosciutto crudo, I often think people don?t even know that there are many, many more styles of cured ham being made in regions around Italy. All the time at Locanda, we are being brought new ones to taste, from small producers reviving old methods, and I am always fascinated by the subtle differences that come not only from the various breeds of pigs that are used, but from the diet of the animals, and the environment and conditions in which the ham is cured and dried. After the Second World War, when there was not enough food for everyone, many people went into intensive breeding of pigs, but now there is much more attention being paid to traditional breeds, and the way they are raised. Remember, we are talking about raw cured ham, so the quality of the meat is the most important thing. What you put in at the beginning, you get back at the end. Parma?s fame has also brought it close to a disaster, because until the rules tightened to protect the product, who was going to say: ?No, we can only produce 150,000 hams a year,? when the demand around the world might be 150 million? It was easier to bring in pigs from outside the region ? even from Poland and Romania ? and have them slaughtered and cured in the locality, in order to get the Parma certification. Imagine vans of several hundred animals, banging around inside lorries, kicking each other as pigs do, and getting crushed. Of course, the first thing that would be damaged would be the legs (only the hind legs are cured to make Parma ham), so the flesh becomes soft. Why do you think prosciutto without the bone became so popular? Because, if the bone was taken out and the flesh squeezed together, it was a way of selling second quality meat, and still calling it Parma ham, so that a lorry load of pigs that left Spain worth ?20,000 was now worth ?40,000. So gradually Parma ham has come under much stricter controls. Since 1970 it has been awarded a Protected Designation of Origin and production is controlled by the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma (CPP). Now the law says that you must produce your ham from Italian pigs, either pure-breed or cross-breeds derived from Italian Large White, Landrance and Duroc animals, that must be born and raised in one of eleven specified regions of Central-Northern Italy. To be certified by the Instituto Parma Qualit? (IPQ) the hind legs of the pig must also carry an indelible tattoo put on within 30 days of being born, which shows the date and place of birth, and the breeder?s code. The pigs are raised in huts, which increases their fat, and fed on a diet of grain and whey from the production of Parmesan cheese. The idea is similar to the ?West Country cycle? that used to be followed in Somerset, which you have to chant, like a nursery rhyme: ?The cows eat the grass, then give the milk that makes the cheese, that gives the whey, that is fed to the pigs, who make the muck to grow the grass that the cows eat.? When a pig is slaughtered (at a minimum of 9 months, and weighing at least 140 kilos), the code of the abattoir in which it is slaughtered will be fire-branded on to its skin. It will be kept in cold rooms to harden, then pressed and cleaned and trimmed of some of its fat to give the characteristic ?chicken drumstick? shape. Then, at the salting stage, it will have a metal seal attached to the ham that bears the initials (CPP) of the Consortium and the date that curing began. The salt master (maestro salatore) controls the salt levels, temperature and humidity, so that the flesh absorbs only enough salt to keep the meat tasting sweet. Next, the hams hang for 70 days in refrigerated rooms, before being washed and brushed to remove excess salt, and then hung for three months in well-ventilated rooms with large windows that are opened to let the famous aromatic breezes through. After this, they are greased with minced lard and salt, and then finished in dark, cellar-like rooms for at least a year, but sometimes up to 30 months. At last, at the end of curing, the ham must meet certain taste and appearance requirements. Its colour can be from pale to deep rose, and the fat should be white or rosy, but not yellow. The flavour should be rich and sweet, and the texture velvety but slightly chewy. Only if it satisfies all these criteria is it awarded the five-pointed ducal crown of Parma, which is branded into the skin, together with the producer?s identification code. So, in theory, it should be traceable every step of the way ? though the Consorzio continues to prosecute the makers of the hundreds of imitations it tracks down around the world. In the region of the Po valley, near Parma, they also produce the famous culatello di Zibello, which is made from the fillet of the pig?s thigh. This is the pear-shaped ham that you see encased in mesh, which is aged for at least 11 months and owes its intense aroma and sweet flavour to the special climate around the river Po, with its humidity, fogs and hot summers. Some people prefer San Daniele ham, which is made in the same fashion as Parma, but only in very small quantities in the Friuli region ? where the microclimate is different, and the pigs roam free, feeding on acorns in the woods. Unlike Parma ham, in which the trotter of the pig is taken from the leg, on a San Daniele ham the trotter is left on and the meat tends to be lean, with a stronger flavour, as the pigs develop more muscle from their exercise. Despite all the noise about Parma, my ultimate ham is prosciutto di Cinta Senese from Umbria. The Cinta Senese are a smallish breed of pig, dating back to the Middle Ages, that you sometimes see depicted in old paintings. They are very beautiful: dark brown with a white stripe or ?belt? (cinta); and are very agile because they were bred to live in the wild, and if they run at you, you have to move fast, because they really are quite scary. They are reared around Siena and, before the Fifties, most people would have kept one in the backyard, but when everyone began intensively producing bigger pigs to satisfy the lust for Parma ham, they almost became extinct. Now, because of the revival of interest, they have been saved. Because they are allowed to wander freely around the woods, picking up acorns or chestnuts, they produce lean, deep red hams, with a quite hard surround of fat, which I think give the perfect balance of long-lasting sweet-savoury flavour and aroma. Slicing and serving salumi (#ulink_643067e5-2b6f-5aa1-84f7-15f95722cbb6) I always buy whole salame and hams, and slice them at home, because so much of the magic comes with the release of the aroma as it is cut ? but then I am so dedicated to salumi that I have a slicing machine at home as well as at Locanda. Otherwise, I recommend you buy your prosciutto crudo from a good delicatessen and ask them to slice it for you, because slicing is a skilled thing. You want it to be cut very thinly to show off its delicacy of texture and flavour ? but not so thinly that it ends up in shreds. The pig has been killed once ? you don?t want to kill it again with terrible slicing. Salami is easier to slice yourself at home, provided you have a very sharp knife, but, again, if you prefer, have them slice it for you at a delicatessen. Personally, I would never buy any salami or ham that was sliced and pre-packed, because so much flavour is lost ? and anyway I never buy anything I can?t smell beforehand. Remember that cured meats were being made long before fridges ? that is precisely why they were invented, because there was no other way to keep meat without it going off ? so they would have been kept in a cool cellar or pantry. In the fridge the cold temporarily deadens the aromas and flavours, so always bring your salami or ham out of the fridge a while before serving, so that you enjoy it at its very best. Prosciutto e fichi Parma ham and figs (#ulink_e50cc412-f7a0-5f85-81d7-19c5079db719) Figs are so sexy, aren?t they? When you open them up they have that beautiful lattice work between the flesh and they seem almost alive. With their sweetness and the sweet fattiness of the ham you have a combination that has entered our taste code and one that we will always love ? it is the same with ham served with the best, sweetest melon. Even in a restaurant such as Locanda, when either fruit comes into season and we offer it with a plate of ham, that is all people want to eat. And don?t say it?s a simple dish: because first someone has to produce that brilliant ham. This is barely even a recipe. Just peel the figs ? or you can leave the skin on ? and cut them into quarters, then arrange on plates with slices of Parma ham. Mediterranean figs, in season from the end of August until the end of September, are the best, as they are picked from the tree when they are ripe and then transported quickly. This means they are juicier than ones that come from further away, which tend to be harvested while they are still green. Bresaola di cervo e sedano di Verona Cured venison with celeriac and black truffle (#ulink_1bd0243d-ac1e-54ba-b022-7cf27e637a07) Cured venison is made from a whole loin. You?ll find it in good Italian delis, and they should slice it for you. If the loin is small, you will need around thirty slices; if it is larger, use less. You only need half the head of celeriac for this recipe, so you can use the rest for another dish ? perhaps the celeriac pur?e on page 108. The mayonnaise is a little sharper than usual in order to cut through the richness of the venison. If you can?t find fresh black truffles, make the dish without any truffle at all rather than using truffles from jars or truffle oil, which is usually chemically flavoured. ? head of celeriac 1 teaspoon English mustard 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar 2 tablespoons mayonnaise (see page 53) 20g fresh black truffle (optional) 30 slices of cured venison 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil salt Slice the celeriac very thinly, then cut the slices into matchsticks. Mix with a pinch of salt and leave to drain in a colander for about 1 hour to allow it to soften up. Add the mustard and vinegar to the mayonnaise and grate in the fresh truffle, if using. Mix the celeriac sticks with the mayonnaise mixture. Spoon the mixture into the centre of your serving plates and arrange the venison around or on top, as you like. Drizzle with the extra-virgin olive oil. Bresaola di manzo al caprino Thinly sliced cured beef with goats? cheese dressing (#ulink_9aa489cf-7f41-5b04-bb11-44ed1924b564) Bresaola of beef is another of our Lombardia specialities from the Valtellina valley. It is raw fillet that has been salted, marinated in wine and herbs, and then air-dried to give it a lovely, delicate flavour. It is sliced very thinly to serve as an antipasto, traditionally with oil, lemon juice and black pepper. At the restaurant, we like to be a little different? 100g soft fresh goats? cheese 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil juice of ? lemon 4 handfuls of rocket 200g thinly sliced bresaola salt and pepper Put the cheese into a bowl and mash with a fork until it becomes a little more smooth. Slowly mix in the vinegar and 5 tablespoons of the oil. The mixture should still be a little coarse. Mix the lemon juice with the rest of the oil and use to dress the rocket lightly. Season to taste. Put a small bunch of rocket in the centre of each slice of bresaola (roll up if you like). Arrange on serving plates and drizzle with the goat?s cheese dressing. Finish with a good grinding of black pepper. Carpaccio di manzo Beef carpaccio (#ulink_6837ba18-c013-5575-b3d9-a5a1cd2885bd) I suppose everyone these days knows the story of how beef carpaccio was invented, but just in case?It happened in Harry?s Bar in Venezia in 1950, when a regular customer, the Contessa Amalia Nani Mocenigo, came to dine. Her doctor had put her on a special diet, which meant she couldn?t eat cooked meat. In a moment of inspiration, Guiseppe Cipriani, the father of the current owner of Harry?s Bar, Arrigo Cipriani, suggested to his chef that he cut up some raw beef into wafer-thin slices, and they then decorated it criss-cross fashion with a sauce made from mayonnaise mixed with Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice and milk. Guiseppe called the creation carpaccio, after the Italian painter, Vittore Carpaccio, who was famous for his use of brilliant reds and whites. Of course, now every Italian restaurant has come up with their own version of beef carpaccio. At Locanda we either serve it with our own mayonnaise (as in the recipe below), perhaps with some fresh black truffle grated over it. Or we dress some rocket in a little olive oil and lemon juice and serve it with the carpaccio, with Parmesan shavings over the top. At other times we cook some finely diced broccoli stalks and florets until they are soft (ie slightly overcooked), then whiz them to a pur?e in a food processor and season. Then we season the carpaccio, brush with lemon and oil and serve with the broccoli pur?e drizzled on top. Once one of our suppliers sent a box of persicelle (probably from persicum, which is the Latin for peach), or baby peaches, to Locanda. In Italy, when there are too many peaches on the tree the farmer snips off the smaller green ones, like little fat green almonds, which are mostly thrown away, but are sometimes kept and put into syrup or, as in this case, sent out as a speciality to kitchens. We blanched them, made some truffle oil, which we put over them, and served them with the carpaccio. They were beautiful ? but sadly we have never had a box since. Remember you are showing off raw beef, so it must be the best quality. 300g beef fillet 2 tablespoons mayonnaise (see page 53) 2 tablespoons salted capers, rinsed and drained (optional) salt and pepper Trim the fat from the fillet and chill the beef in the fridge to firm it up and make it easier to cut into thin slices. Place three or four slices at a time (side by side) on a sheet of cling film, cover with another sheet of cling film, then pummel with a meat hammer or rolling pin until the meat is paper-thin. Season the carpaccio and serve drizzled with the mayonnaise and, if you like, sprinkled with capers. Sformato di patate, pancetta e Taleggio Layered potatoes and pancetta with cheese sauce (#ulink_e602a9a8-2487-5f5a-814f-cef9ee932987) Sformato is a kind of savoury pudding cooked in the oven. Traditionally it was made in a ring mould so it could be turned out and the centre filled with sauce. This one isn?t traditional at all. It is one of my mixtures of French technique and Italian ingredients. Potatoes, cheese, pancetta, these ingredients are as old as time. For me, they are the flavours of cold weather. They have been used in a million ways, but I wanted to try to find a way of my own and this idea first came to me when I was cooking in Paris at Le Laurent. One of my jobs was to prepare the potatoes for a special fish dish. I used to peel the potatoes without washing them, so that the starch stayed inside, then ?turn? them into perfect cylinder shapes and finally slice them into thin rounds with a mandoline. Then I had to lay them out on a tray, sprinkle them with a little salt and bake them until golden. When they came out of the oven, I would lay them out again, overlapping slightly this time, so that when they cooled down, the starch in the potatoes would stick them together in a sheet. When the order for the fish came in, I would take a fillet, place it on top of the sheet of potatoes and cut around it. Then I would cook the fish in a frying pan, skin-side up, turn it over, skin down, lay the sheet of potato on top and put the pan in the oven, so the fish would roast with the potatoes ?melting? over the top. The dish was served with cr?me fra?che and caviar, which was too fiddly and complicated an idea for my taste, but I loved the idea of the potato sheet and it stayed in my mind. I used to experiment with wrapping other ingredients inside, and then one day, when I had a potato sheet left over, I dropped it into a cup that happened to be nearby. After a while, I noticed it had set in the shape of the cup, and when I turned it out it stayed that way. That gave me the idea of making a container with the potatoes, which would be like a crust but also add another layer of flavour. I started trying out different fillings enclosed in potato and then fried ? eventually I came up with this one. I think of this as a winter dish, and sometimes when porcini mushrooms are in season I like to use them instead of the pancetta ? just sliced and saut?ed with a little chopped garlic and then mixed with the Taleggio cheese, as in the recipe that follows. This is a little bit complicated, but the important thing is to have really starchy potatoes for this dish, so that they will stick together well. You also need some small round ovenproof flan dishes or cocottes, about 7-8cm in diameter. If you want to serve the sformati more simply, you could just make a salad instead of the sauce. 2 large starchy potatoes, such as Desiree 500ml sunflower oil, for frying 150g pancetta, cut into strips 150g Taleggio cheese, cut into small dice 20-30g butter sea salt For the sauce: 250ml milk 20g butter 20g plain flour pinch of freshly grated nutmeg 60g Fontina cheese, grated Peel the potatoes and slice them about 2mm thick, using a mandoline grater or a large, sharp knife. Put them on a baking tray and season with sea salt to draw out some of their water. Heat the sunflower oil in a large, deep pan to about 120?C. To test, dip in one of the slices of potato; it should just fry very gently. Put the potatoes into the oil to ?blanch? them ? ie so they soften without crisping or colouring. Cook them in batches of 3-4 slices at a time, keeping them well away from each other so that they don?t stick together. Remove them with a slotted spoon and place on kitchen paper to drain very briefly ? again, keep them separate from each other. Don?t leave them longer than a few minutes or the paper will blot away all the starch, which you will need to stick the layers together. Line each small ovenproof dish with overlapping slices of potato, covering the entire base and sides and making sure there are no gaps (this is where the starch in the potatoes will stick the slices together). The potatoes around the sides need to come about 3-4cm above the top of the dish or enough to fold over and completely enclose the filling. Heat a dry frying pan, add the pancetta strips and fry quickly to release excess fat but not enough to colour them. Remove and drain on kitchen paper. Mix the diced Taleggio cheese with the pancetta, and scatter over the base of each potato-lined dish. Pull the overhanging slices of potato over the top, making sure there are no gaps, and press down lightly so the potatoes seal the top completely. Put in the fridge for at least an hour or overnight to firm up. Preheat the oven to 220?C, gas 7. Meanwhile, make the sauce. Bring the milk just to the boil and then take off the heat. Melt the butter in a pan, add the flour and cook, stirring, for a couple of minutes. Slowly pour in the milk, mixing well, then add the nutmeg. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 3-4 minutes, stirring all the time, until the sauce thickens. Keep in a warm place, covered with cling film to prevent a skin forming. Heat a film of sunflower oil in an ovenproof non-stick frying pan and turn the sformati out of the dishes into the pan (2 at a time if you have a small pan). Cook gently for 3-4 minutes, until golden (be careful not to cook too fast, in case the cheese melts too quickly and begins to bubble through the potato). Turn over carefully with a spatula, add the butter to the pan and transfer to the oven for 2-3 minutes to finish off. Mix the grated Fontina into the sauce and spoon it on to 4 serving plates (preferably deep ones). Remove the sformati from the oven, rest each one briefly on a piece of kitchen paper to blot off any excess butter, and place on top of the sauce. Mondeghini Stuffed cabbage (#ulink_712ff5be-817d-5ef4-af4d-8aa39fe5718d) Around Milano, there are a few recipes that break with the tradition of serving pasta or risotto followed by a meat course by bringing the two together. Many reasons are given, but the main one is that when the men came home from the factories they had only one hour to eat, so it was seen as a quick way of having your meat and carbohydrate together ? the same principle as the American hamburger. The most famous of these dishes is risotto Milanese (saffron risotto) with osso buco, but stuffed cabbage is another that I have always loved. When my grandmother made this dish, the smell would fill the whole house. When I came home from school, I knew what was cooking as soon as I opened the door, and I couldn?t wait to eat it. My grandmother served it in the traditional way: a big dish of risotto alla Lodigiano (made with grana cheese) with a portion of the mondeghini ? cabbage stuffed with meat ? on top. Let?s not forget that, forty years ago, to eat meat twice a week was a luxury ? whereas now it is almost a luxury not to. So you would share what meat there was, cooked inside the cabbage, which was a way of stretching whatever food you had. Now, because I am cooking in a London restaurant and because we all live in a more affluent society, we have played with the old idea a little. So meat (in this case sausage meat) and cabbage have become the main ingredients, and the risotto is now the garnish. ? recipe quantity of Saffron risotto (see page 226) 1 large Savoy cabbage 350g sliced white bread, crusts cut off 175ml milk 400g good quality plain pork sausages, skins removed 1 small garlic clove, finely chopped sprig of sage, finely chopped sprig of rosemary, finely chopped 1 tablespoon freshly grated Parmesan cheese 2 tablespoons olive oil 2 tablespoons vegetable oil ? wine glass of white wine 20g butter salt and pepper If you are making fresh risotto, follow the recipe on page 226 but keep cooking it until it is ?overcooked? ? about 25-30 minutes, so it is really sticky and dry. Don?t finish with any butter, just the Parmesan. If you are using leftover risotto, put it back on the heat, add a little hot water or, better still, hot stock, and cook it for about 10 minutes, until it reaches this ?overcooked? stage. Keep on one side. Discard the outer leaves of the cabbage and choose 8 fairly large inner ones. Blanch them in boiling salted water until just soft, then drain, rinse under cold running water and pat dry. Soak the bread in the milk. Put the skinned sausages in a separate bowl and mix with the garlic, sage, rosemary and Parmesan. Squeeze the bread and add to the sausage mixture. Season and roll into 8 balls, each about the size of a golf ball. Lay the cabbage leaves out flat and cut out the stalks with a sharp knife. Now you need to make little balls of cabbage-wrapped sausage meat ? to do this, hold a cloth in one hand, put a cabbage leaf on top, and then a ball of the sausage mixture in the centre. Close your hand so that the cabbage wraps itself around the sausage meat. Turn your hand over and, with the other hand, twist the bottom of the cloth so that it squeezes the cabbage into a tight ball. Unwrap the cloth and trim the cabbage of any excess, leaving enough to enclose the sausage meat completely. Repeat with the rest of the sausage meat and cabbage leaves. If not using straight away, keep in the fridge. Heat a saut? pan on the hob, add the olive oil, spoon in the risotto and press into a ?cake?. Cook until crisp and golden underneath, then place a plate over the top and turn over the pan, so the risotto cake lands on the plate. Slide it back into the pan to crisp up the other side. While the risotto is crisping up, heat another flat pan large enough to hold all the cabbage balls. Put in the vegetable oil and add the cabbage balls, smooth side down. Cook over a medium heat for 2-3 minutes, turn them over, then add the white wine. Cover with a lid and cook for another 15 minutes, very slowly, adding a little water (or chicken stock if you have it) if the liquid evaporates. Remove the cabbage balls from the pan and keep warm. Let the liquid in the pan reduce a little, then add the butter to make a slightly creamy sauce. Take the pan from the heat. Slice the risotto into whatever shapes you like and place on 4 serving plates, with the cabbage balls on top. Drizzle over the sauce. Lingua di manzo in salsa verde Ox tongue with green sauce (#ulink_745bd243-8205-558a-b3be-1ecaa5c93148) In Italy we traditionally serve salsa verde, our famous green sauce, with anything that is boiled ? bollito misto (mixed meats), boiled chicken or ox tongue. If you go into a butcher?s to buy ox tongue, they will usually sell you a little pot of green sauce to go with it. I prefer to make salsa verde with a mortar and pestle, the way it was made for centuries before modern kitchen gadgets came along. You can, of course, use a food processor, but it tends to warm up the sauce and darken the fantastic bright-green colour, whereas in a mortar you don?t crush out any of the flavour or colour. The tongue can be served hot or cold. If you like it cold, you can cook it the day before you want to serve it. Just make sure you peel the skin off while it is still warm (it will be impossible to do it later) and keep the tongue in the cooking water in the fridge, to preserve it and keep its colour. The cooking liquid will solidify because it will be full of gelatine from the tongue. By rinsing the tongue well before cooking, you should draw out the excess salt but if, when it is cooked, you taste the cooking liquid and it still seems too salty, you can cover it with sparkling water ? the gas helps to draw out the salt ? and leave it overnight in the fridge. Take it out a few hours before you need it so that it is not too cold, or keep back the cooking liquid (keep it in the fridge as well) and warm the tongue up in it, in a pan. 1 salted ox tongue 1 carrot, cut in half 1 shallot, cut in half 1 wine glass of white wine 3?4 black peppercorns 1 bay leaf 3 tablespoons plain flour 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar For the salsa verde: 6 salted anchovy fillets, rinsed 1 garlic clove leaves from 50g flat-leaf parsley yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs, plus a few extra for garnish, if you like 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar 15g dried breadcrumbs 200ml extra-virgin olive oil Rinse the tongue under gently running cold water for an hour to remove the excess salt. Put the carrot, shallot, wine, peppercorns and bay leaf in a large pan of water. Bring to the boil and add the ox tongue. Once it is boiling, taste the water and, if it is salty, bring another pan to the boil and transfer the vegetables, herbs and tongue from the first pan. Mix the flour with the vinegar to make a thin paste, add it to the pan and whisk in. It will make the water appear cloudy, but it will help to keep the colour and bring out the flavour of the tongue. Turn down the heat and simmer for about 2? hours. The tongue is cooked when you can easily peel off the skin. Peel, then leave to cool in the cooking liquid. If it still tastes a little salty, leave it to cool down more, as the salt will be less apparent when the tongue is cold. Make the sauce, preferably using a mortar and pestle. First crush the anchovies and the garlic, then put in the parsley leaves and egg yolks and work to a fine paste. Mix in the vinegar and breadcrumbs, then add the olive oil a little at a time. If you prefer the sauce a little sharper, add a touch more vinegar; if you like it firmer, put in more breadcrumbs. (To make the sauce in a food processor, put everything except the oil in together, then add the oil a little at a time. Pulse very quickly, as the longer you let it go on, the darker green it will get as the food processor warms up.) Slice the tongue quite thinly, drizzle the green sauce over it and, if you like, grate some more hard-boiled egg yolks over the top. Testina di vitello Calf?s head salad (#ulink_e83333f7-31f8-5413-9b6f-82ebe1a57d09) Until thirty or forty years ago, when the market for veal began to decline, veal farming thrived in Northern Italy, especially in my region of Lombardia and Piemonte. Small farmers reared calves along with chickens and other animals, and sold the prime meat to rich people or Milanese restaurants, so they were left with the cheaper cuts and the heads and feet, which would be eaten at home or sold to poorer people. Cooking these parts of the animal requires much more work, but because they are full of gelatinous tissue they become meltingly tender, with long-lasting flavours that make some of the most memorable and tasty dishes. I understand that people these days find offal a harsh reality to deal with at home, and even in the restaurant I know it can take a bit of courage to try. One of the reasons we have become wary of eating certain parts of animals is the prevalence of problems such as BSE, which is why you have to find a responsible butcher and trust him. But, you know, sometimes I think that if people saw what goes into the processed foods they eat every day they might think differently about some of the food they buy without question. The foot of an animal is far more wholesome than the chemicals, additives and processed fats many people consume regularly, most of the time without even knowing it. Think about it: we happily buy anything in friendly sanitised commercial packaging because we are convinced it must be okay, when the guy who set up the company is probably already in Bermuda with a big house and a private jet. He doesn?t give a damn if we die after twenty years from eating all the additives his factory has put into our food. But if you buy a calf?s head that has been carefully boned and rolled up and tied with string, a process that takes a lot of time and care, you know you are being given something that has been prepared by someone who doesn?t cut corners. And if you go into a restaurant where calf?s head is on the menu, you know that the cook is someone who cares about sharing fantastic flavours ? because it would be much easier just to do a burger and chips. Again, it brings us back to the idea that good food doesn?t have to be expensive. The problem, I know, is finding prepared calves? heads. Supermarkets? Forget it. Even the few high-street butchers that are left rarely sell them, but if you ask, they may be able to get them for you. And if enough people ask, maybe we can make them fashionable, the way the humble lamb shank became something ?smart? in the Nineties. If you like, you can do a variation on this dish by cooking the calf?s head in the same way, then slicing it about 1cm thick, dipping it in flour, then egg yolk, then breadcrumbs and deep-frying the slices until they are golden. Serve the slices with pickled red and yellow peppers (see page 84) mixed with capers. 1 calf?s head, ready prepared (ie boned, shaped and rolled) 1 onion, cut in half 1 celery stalk, cut in half 1 carrot, cut in half 1 bay leaf 50g plain flour 1 wine glass of white wine vinegar, plus 3 tablespoons 5 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52) 3 bunches of large spring onions, thinly sliced lengthways bunch of chives, finely chopped pepper Cook the calf?s head with the onion, celery, carrot, bay leaf, flour and glass of vinegar in the same way as the ox tongue (see page 132). Leave it to cool completely in the liquid, then put it in the fridge until it sets to make a jelly. Slice through the calf?s head, including the jelly, as thinly as you can. Sharpen up the Shallot vinaigrette by adding the 3 tablespoons of white wine vinegar and a few twists of freshly ground black pepper. Mix the spring onions with 2 tablespoons of the Shallot vinaigrette and arrange on serving plates. Lay the thinly sliced calf?s head on top and finish with the rest of the vinaigrette and the chopped chives. Insalata di piedino di vitello Calves? foot salad (#ulink_7630dbfb-15a7-5299-87aa-98666c8cc06b) This can be made with pigs? trotters as well. If you buy whole feet, you will need to open them out once they are blanched. Alternatively, you can sometimes buy feet that have already been boned and opened up. If you don?t have a deep-fat fryer, use a deep saucepan no more than one-third full of oil ? and don?t turn away and forget about it while it is heating up. If necessary, cook the calves? feet in batches: preheat the oven before you start the preparation, then switch it off, and as you cook each batch, put them into the oven to keep warm. If you wanted to serve this for a party, then rather than make the salad you could just serve the deep-fried strips with the mustard fruits (see page 482) in a pot, for people to dip the fritters into. 4 whole calves? feet 400ml white wine vinegar 1 lemon 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 2 eggs 100g plain flour 100g breadcrumbs (made from bread that is 2-3 days old) 500ml sunflower oil for frying 50g Mostarda di Cremona (mustard fruits, see page 482), finely diced if large 2 handfuls of mixed salad leaves salt and pepper Put the calves? feet into a large pan of cold water, bring to the boil, then drain. Put them into fresh cold water and bring to the boil again. Reduce the heat and simmer for about 2 hours, until tender. The meat will start to come away from the bone, but not completely. Leave to cool down in the water for about half an hour, to let the meat firm up a little. Peel off the skin and remove any small hairs that might have been left behind. Take the meat off the bone with a knife, open it out and lay it flat on a tray. Cover it completely with the vinegar. Put another tray on top and weight it down, so the meat is pressed flat; that way it will be easier to cook and will look more attractive. Leave overnight in the fridge ? up to 2 days if you want a more pronounced vinegary flavour. With a vegetable peeler, remove the zest from the lemon, taking care to leave the bitter white pith behind. Then cut the zest into julienne strips. Squeeze the lemon, mix the juice with the olive oil and set aside. Bring a small pan of water to the boil, put in the strips of lemon zest, then remove straight away with a slotted spoon. Bring the water back up to the boil, put the zest back in and remove it again straight away ? this will soften it and take away a little of the bitterness. Cut the meat from the calves? feet into strips or squares, or whichever you prefer. Lightly beat the eggs in a bowl and season them. Put the flour on a plate and the breadcrumbs on another, then dip each piece of meat first in the flour, then into the eggs, then into the breadcrumbs. Do this carefully, because the meat needs to be completely coated with flour before dipping it into the egg, but any excess flour should be shaken off, otherwise the egg will only stick in patches. Then make sure you dip the meat completely into the egg, again shaking off any excess ? so when you dip it into the breadcrumbs you get a nice even coating. (Don?t be tempted to do another coating of egg and breadcrumbs as it will be too thick, and all you will taste is breadcrumbs.) Preheat the sunflower oil to about 180?C (to the point where if you put in a little morsel of bread it will start to fry). Put in the pieces of breaded calves? feet and fry for 2-3 minutes, moving them around with a fork or metal spoon, until golden all over. Remove, drain on kitchen paper and season with a little salt. Drizzle your serving plates with the mustard fruits. Mix the salad leaves with the lemon zest, season with salt and pepper and toss with the reserved lemon oil. Pile the salad up on the plates and arrange the pieces of calves? feet around. Pane Bread (#ulink_6c4867e9-5eb5-534f-a048-949ee67510a6) My father goes seven kilometres to buy the bread every day. In our house, like most houses in Italy, bread is the first thing that goes on the table. It is such a big part of the meal ? at one time, in poor families, it was the meal, supplemented by whatever else you had to hand. When I was in Sicilia I learned a new expression, il conpanatico. I was out in the olive groves at the Planeta estate near Menfi, tasting the oils we buy from Alessio Planeta and his family, and they had some agricultural students from Roma working there. At about eleven o?clock, one of them asked, ?Che cosa c?? per il conpanatico?? ?What are you talking about?? I asked them. Of course the word conpanatico must mean ?with the bread? ? but I had never heard the expression before. In this area, they told me, bread is considered so important that you don?t ask ?What is for lunch,? but ?What are we going to have with the bread?? I thought it was a brilliant expression that really shows the way that Italians, like most Europeans, value bread. It is something that is difficult for many people in Britain to understand, because, despite there being a new wave of artisan bakeries and a big interest in different kinds of bread, the bestselling loaf is still the commercially made white square one that goes in the toaster, and is only eaten at breakfast time, or for sandwiches. When my father first came to London, it drove him crazy that if you went out to eat there was no bread on the table as soon as you sat down. He even asked for bread in a Chinese restaurant. In Italy, people don?t bake at home that much, because they don?t need to. Virtually every village still has a bakery and every region has its own style of baking. In the very North, close to Austria, they make a lot of rye bread, and often use spices. In Lombardia, we still make castagnaccio, chestnut bread, which was a staple during the War, and pane de mais, made with polenta, but most of our breads are quite light, and like the French, we buy some every day. In Toscana and further south you have the bigger breads. In Toscana they are also often unsalted, perhaps because they use a lot of salt in the local salami and prosciutto, which is traditionally eaten with it. In Sardegna they like to use semolina in their bread and they also have the wonderful crispy pane carasau, or carta di musica: thin, thin sheets that are so-called because they resemble music parchment paper, which you buy stacked up like Indian poppadoms, then sprinkle with olive oil and rosemary, and put into the oven for a few minutes to serve with olives and drinks before you eat. It makes me laugh that one of the first Italian breads to become fashionable in Britain was the ciabatta, when at home it was originally the bread of the poor people. After the War, there was a shortage of grain, and white dough was considered to be the privilege of the rich, but when there were scraps of the dough left over, they were stretched into long ?slipper? shapes for everyone else. The bread that really brings back nostalgic memories for me is the michetta (or rosetta), which is almost a symbol of Lombardia. When I used to go mushroom hunting with my granddad, we would go to the salumificio and buy the mortadella, and then to the baker for the panini (bread rolls), usually the michetta, then sit down on the wall and eat it. Michetta is the bread with ?five faces?, which is made using a special stamp, a little like a rose (which is why it is also called rosetta) that is pressed down into the dough. When it goes into the oven, the air is forced into each of the five ?faces? or ?petals?, which puff up until they are virtually hollow. At Locanda we are very proud of our bread basket, because, when it comes to the table as soon as you sit down, with some long Parmesan grissini, it gives you a taste of what is to come. We have our own dedicated bakery area in the kitchen and always we are developing new breads. At Zafferano, and when we opened Locanda, we worked with our good friend Dan Lepard to create the kind of breads that we were looking for. Now we have our own baker, ?little Federico? Turri (as opposed to ?big Federico?, our sous chef) who, like me, is from Lombardia and used to work at the Gnocchi bakery of my cousins in Gallarate. Baking is a beautiful thing to do. The dough is soft and warm and gorgeous and the smell of the yeast is fantastic ? but you need to have some patience, and when you work with dough constantly, you begin to learn to judge instinctively how to adapt your bread to the conditions of the kitchen, which can be different every day. So you might use more or less water, according to whether the kitchen is more dry or more humid, and when it is summer, and hotter, you see that the bread proves faster, so you might use less yeast the next time you bake. However, the recipes that follow are some of our more straightforward ones, which you should be able to make successfully at home even if you haven?t made bread before ? and, of course, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you are only putting pure ingredients into your bread to feed your family, and none of the commercial additives and ?improvers? that the big companies use in order that your bread can stay on the supermarket shelves for weeks. The flour (#ulink_a0002175-6a35-5bd1-9b1d-58ed745d97f7) The flour we use for all our breads is Italian extra-strong (W300 P/L 0.55 on the bag), which has a good elasticity and the power to absorb water well. It isn?t easily available outside Italy, but to create a similar flour you can mix equal parts of Italian 00 flour with strong white bread flour. The colomba (#ulink_3c487a39-f784-5d56-b8d2-e70c5909074b) Instead of kneading, most of our breads involve a technique of ?folding?, the Italian way of incorporating air into the dough, to help and speed the fermentation and lighten the finished bread. We call it the colomba, which means ?dove?, because it is as if we are folding the ?wings? of the dough. We spread out the dough into a rough rectangle by pressing down with the fingers (hold them vertically, not at an angle), stretching and dimpling the dough at the same time, to create pockets in which the air can be trapped. Then we fold the top third of the dough into the centre, and dimple it lightly again. Next we fold the bottom third of the dough over the top and dimple again. Then we turn the dough through 45 degrees and repeat. Baking (#ulink_99d99e93-5ac7-52fb-be80-e6ceb6dc6113) It is a good idea to check the temperature of your oven using an oven thermometer ? as you might find that it isn?t actually as hot as your controls tell you it is. When you put the bread into the oven, put a metal bowl half full of water into the bottom of the oven, and when it comes to a simmer, this is the time to put the bread in. This puts some humidity into the oven, which will help the dough to stay moist enough to expand properly at the beginning of baking. For the focaccia, if you make a salamoia (see page 148), you don?t need the water. Yeast (#ulink_705564d6-b271-5b9e-8812-690f1947f19b) We like to use fresh yeast because it has a subtle flavour and, as it is a living thing, it works as soon as you mix it in, so you can do it at a cooler temperature; dried yeast, on the other hand, needs warmth. More and more health food shops and delis are stocking fresh yeast, or you could ask your local baker for some ? if you are lucky enough still to have one. Water (#ulink_cdd4c823-6383-558c-86cb-fd5aadb74072) It is best to use bottled water rather than tap water, to ensure there are no chemicals that can slow down the fermentation. Have it at room temperature (around 20?C) as, if it is too cold, the dough will take longer to rise, and if you don?t give it enough time the bread will be heavy and dense. In our baking recipes we measure water by weight as it is more accurate. Parmesan grissini (#ulink_826c1eba-bb18-59b0-af17-6070c061de80) They say that Napoleon loved grissini, which he called le petit baton de pain de Turin ? and that he was eating it at Waterloo, when he lost the battle. I would always make a big batch of these, because if you have any left over you can keep them in an airtight container for about a week ? also they make fantastic crunchy breadcrumbs, with a special flavour from the Parmesan. Just put the breadsticks in a clean polythene bag and crush them with a rolling pin. Kids especially love chicken breasts dipped in some flour, a little beaten egg, then into the breadcrumbs and saut?ed. Makes about 25 grissini (25 cm long) 50g unsalted butter 200g whole milk 10g fresh yeast 375g strong white bread flour (see page 140) or Italian 00 (doppio zero) flour 3 generous tablespoons grated Parmesan 10g fine salt Preheat the oven to 230?C, gas 8. Melt the butter in a pan, add the milk and heat it gently until it just feels warm to the fingertips (37-40?C). Whisk in the yeast. Put the flour, Parmesan and salt in a bowl, then add a little of the milk mixture at a time, mixing it in well with your hands until it forms a dough. Alternatively, mix in a food processor, with a dough hook, for 3 minutes on the first speed, then 6 minutes on the next speed. Turn the dough out on a clean work surface (you don?t need any flour or oil), and dimple and fold as described on the previous page. Cover with a damp tea towel and leave for 30 minutes. Repeat the dimpling and folding process and leave for another 30 minutes, again covered with the tea towel. Cut the dough in half lengthways, flour your work surface and roll each piece out into a big rectangle. Cut the dough across its width into strips about 1cm wide ? you can use a sharp knife against a clean plastic ruler. Roll each strip with your fingertips, starting at the centre and moving outwards in three movements, stretching the dough slightly as you roll. Press each end lightly with your thumb, to make an ?ear? shape. Lay on a non-stick baking sheet and leave to rest for 10 minutes. Turn the oven down to 180?C, gas 4, and bake for 10-15 minutes, until crisp and lightly golden. Remove from the oven and let cool on a wire rack. Pizzette (#ulink_71c75e93-aa6b-5e90-8f31-a04a27a89fb0) I was making a journey across London in a black cab one day and the driver asked me, ?What do you do?? I made the big mistake of saying, ?I have an Italian restaurant.? ?So,? he started, ?what is it about pizza, anyway? It?s just tomatoes on toast, isn?t it? With a bit of cheese on top?? and off he went. Well, all right; he had a point ? probably the guy had never eaten the real thing. In Italy, though, everyone understands that a proper Italian pizza (not what we call pizza al taglio ? the thicker-based one that has come in from America) has to have the perfect balance between a thin crisp base and a softer garnish, which means that you have to eat it within 5-6 minutes of it coming out of the oven, or it will be soggy and spoilt. So you buy pizza in the baker?s shop, or from the guys who sell slices of it on the streets, straight from big wood-fired ovens ? not from the chiller cabinet of the supermarket, or delivered from a takeaway. In Italy, we don?t think of pizza as something cheap that can be packed into boxes and driven around town. Not even if they threatened you with six years in prison, would you eat a takeaway pizza delivered on a motorbike! The perfect pizza oven is a work of art, heated to 500? Fahrenheit, designed to give a combination of air rolling over the top of the pizza, while the bricks underneath seal the base immediately and it becomes so crisp that when it comes out of the oven and you cut a slice, it will be completely firm. I?m not saying anything that has a thick base of dough topped with tomato and cheese is bad ? in fact, the kids love it; it?s just not pizza. I am very proud of the pizza we introduced to London when I worked at the Red Pepper, and later during the time I was at Zafferano, when we launched Spiga and Spighetta, and though we don?t serve pizza at Locanda, we often serve these little pizzette to our guests with aperitifs, while they are waiting for their table. If you want to make big pizza instead of little ones, this recipe will make three ? just bake them for about 10 minutes. Bagna c??da (anchovy sauce) is a very typical sauce in the North of Italy. Not everyone likes anchovies, I know (in which case, serve the pizzette without the sauce); but, if you do, you can make up bigger quantities of it and store it in a squeezy bottle in the fridge, then just shake it up before you use it and drizzle it over pasta, or toasted bread rubbed with garlic, whatever you like?Though I would normally say buy anchovies in salt, this is one recipe that is traditionally done with anchovies in oil. Makes around 24 small pizzette for serving with drinks, or 12 larger ones 375g strong white bread flour (see page 140) 200g water at 20?C around 60g (about 4 tablespoons) extra-virgin olive oil 10g fresh yeast 10g fine salt For the bagna c??da: 3 garlic cloves 3 tablespoons milk 1 small tin of good anchovies, drained a little extra-virgin olive oil knob of butter For the topping: 15?20 cherry tomatoes, sliced a handful of good olives, stoned and sliced Put all the ingredients for the pizzette, except the salt, into a food mixer with a dough hook. Mix for 3 minutes on the first speed, then add the salt and mix for 6 more minutes on the second speed. The dough should be very soft and sticky. If working by hand, mix with a wooden spoon, rotating the bowl as you do so for about 5 minutes, then work it for another 5 minutes with your hands until the dough is smooth. Turn the dough out on a work surface (you don?t need any flour), dimple with your fingers and fold (see page 140) and leave to rest for 20 minutes. Lightly flour your work surface and roll out the rested dough thinly. Have ready 2 upturned baking trays. With a 5-6cm diameter biscuit cutter, cut the dough into rounds. Lay them on the baking trays and put into the fridge for at least 4 hours ? but no longer than 8. If you like, you can roll the trimmings of dough into rough grissini and bake them (see page 142). A good hour or so before you are ready to bake, preheat the oven as high as it will go. If you have a baking stone, put it into the oven as soon as you turn it on; if you don?t have a stone, use a baking tray. To make the bagna c??da: put the garlic in a small pan with the milk, bring to the boil and then turn down to a simmer and cook until the garlic is soft, about 10 minutes. While the garlic is cooking, put the anchovies with a little olive oil and butter into a small bowl over the top of the pan and stir to ?melt? them ? it will only take a few minutes. (Alternatively, what I often do is just put the closed tin of anchovies into boiling water for 8-10 minutes, then take it out carefully, open it up and discard the oil.) Push through a fine sieve. Crush the garlic with a little of the cooking milk and mix into the anchovies. Loosen, if necessary, with a little more extra-virgin olive oil. Remove the dough from the fridge and, with your fingers, prod each circle of dough, starting from the centre and working out and around in a circle, then back to the middle again. Prick the tops with a fork, and add your tomatoes, sprinkled with a little sea salt, and the olives. Slide on to your hot baking stone or baking tray in the oven and cook in batches for 7-10 minutes, depending on the thickness, until golden brown and shiny. Drizzle with a little bagna c??da and serve. Schiaccata di San Zenone (#ulink_903e55a8-7d0c-5c06-8966-5c8f07aeed26) These are called after the patron saint of Crenna di Gallarate in Lombardia, where my cousins have their bakery, and where Federico, our restaurant baker, used to work. They make fantastic wafer-like canap?s so thin they practically dissolve in your mouth, which we serve with drinks at the restaurant along with the pizzette ? much better than any crisps. You need to make the dough 24 hours in advance and leave it in the fridge. We use strutto for this, which is pure pork fat ? but a good alternative would be goose fat. Makes around 20 1 tablespoon finely chopped onion 100g strutto or rendered goose fat 200g strong white bread flour (see page 140) 100g water at 20?C a little olive oil To finish: a little extra-virgin olive oil freshly grated Parmesan salt and pepper Put the onion and fat into a small pan and saut? gently for 10-15 minutes until the onions are soft. Leave to cool to room temperature. Transfer to a large mixing bowl, add the flour and water, and mix until you have a sticky, greasy, soft dough. Form it into a rough square, about 3 fingers deep. Oil a deep container, put in your dough, put into the fridge and leave for 24 hours. When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 220?C, gas 7 (or up to 250?C, gas 9, if possible). Cut the dough into 4 squares. Lightly oil a sheet of non-stick baking parchment. Put your first square of dough on top and rub the top with a little oil. Roll out the dough until it is paper-thin, then transfer it, together with the baking parchment, on to a baking tray. Put in the oven for 6 minutes until golden, crisp and just singed at the edges (if you can get the oven as high as 250?C, this will take only 2-3 minutes). Repeat with the other 3 squares. When the schiaccata come out of the oven, drizzle them with olive oil, season and top with the grated Parmesan ? as much as you like. As they begin to cool, the schiaccata will crisp up, and they will stay crisp for hours. Focaccia classica (#ulink_5e5d9700-85e8-5cfa-a95b-e52919739e44) This is Federico Turri?s fantastic foolproof focaccia, ready to bake in just over an hour. The dough is very soft, like a sponge, so that when you brush it with good extra-virgin olive oil, it absorbs it. If you like, you can replace 50g of the quantity of flour with chestnut, chickpea or rice flour. Sometimes we roast the rice flour to give a darker colour and slightly more intense flavour. We just put it in a dry pan and heat it in an oven preheated to 200?C, gas 6, or in a frying pan on top of a hob until it colours: whether you let it turn golden or a darker brown is up to you, though obviously don?t let it burn. Makes 1 loaf 500g strong white bread flour (see page 140 and above) 15g fresh yeast 225g water at 20?C 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for greasing 10g salt For the salamoia: 65g water at 20?C 65g extra-virgin olive oil 25g salt For the topping: small handful of rosemary sprigs or handful of good pitted olives To make the salamoia, whisk all the ingredients together so they emulsify and the colour changes to light green. Preheat the oven to 220?C, gas 7. In a bowl, mix together all the ingredients (except the topping) until they form a dough. Rub the surface with a little oil and leave to rest for 10 minutes, covered with a damp cloth. Oil a baking tray and transfer the dough to it, then rub a little more oil on the top of the dough (preferably spray on the oil, using a clean plant spray). Leave for another 10 minutes. Using a rolling pin and starting at the centre of the dough, roll it very lightly upwards, once only, to the top of the dough. You need a light touch, so as not to break the bubbles in the dough. Go back to the centre of the dough and, this time, lightly roll downwards to the bottom of the dough, once only. Leave for 20 minutes, during which time the dough will double in size. With your fingertips, make deep dimples in the dough, taking care not to go all the way through. Whisk the salamoia, then pour it over the surface and into all of the holes. Leave for 20 minutes more. Either press the rosemary into the dough or push the olives into the holes. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until golden, then let cool on a wire rack. A more complex focaccia (#ulink_254c65ee-6e24-5e19-b1fb-4e75695b5dff) This is the bread Dan Lepard developed for us using 10g malt extract and 150g of ?biga? (see page 153), and only half the amount of yeast shown in the classic recipe on page 148, which we mix with the rest of the ingredients to form the dough. Instead of leaving it to rest for 10 minutes, we leave it for an hour. Then, instead of rolling with a rolling pin, we dimple and fold it (see page 140) and leave it for 20 minutes, fold it again and leave it for another 20 minutes before pressing it out into a rectangle, making the dimples, oiling the surface or using a salamoia (see previous page), sprinkling with salt and pressing in sprigs of rosemary or olives as described on the previous page. Then we bake it in the same way. Flavoured bread (#ulink_1388bcc4-1792-5313-9857-e56a18d7d81a) We use focaccia dough to make garlic, aubergine, and sun-dried tomato and sage bread, or cabbage, potato and buckwheat bread (see overleaf for the recipes). Make the dough as in the previous recipe, oil it and leave to rest for 20 minutes. Then turn the dough over, dimple it and spread the filling over two-thirds of the dough. Fold the short side, covered with the filling, into the centre. Fold the other short side (without filling) over the top. Then fold in the sides in the same way. Press down very gently with your fingertips and flatten out. Handle the dough as carefully as you can, as the filling mixture makes it quite fragile. Turn the dough over and rest for another 20 minutes. Turn it back again and repeat the turning and folding twice more. So that you get three lines of filling running through the bread, it is important to fold always in the same order, so make a mark with some flour on your work surface and also make a mark with the top of a knife on your piece of dough. Then you can match these up and start folding from the same place each time. Leave to rest for 30 minutes, no longer, otherwise the weight of the filling will knock out the bubbles (especially if it is quite moist) and you will have a line of unbaked dough. Sprinkle well with flour and place on a large baking sheet or non-stick tray. With a long knife, cut in half widthways. Turn each half over on to one end and stretch each half lengthways. Rest for 10 minutes to let the dough relax. ??? ???????? ?????. ??? ?????? ?? ?????. ????? ?? ??? ????, ??? ??? ????? ??? (https://www.litres.ru/giorgio-locatelli/made-in-italy-food-and-stories/?lfrom=688855901) ? ???. ????? ???? ??? ??? ????? ??? 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