Largesse...

...from Brancoli, in the shape of industrial quantities of Bitter Oranges, accompanied by a jar from the last batch of marmalade (most of which was promptly consumed in one sitting, at breakfast, this morning) and a rather splendid panettone ( re which I foresee panettone-bread-and-butter-pudding at some point very shortly). The Brancolis were passing through en route back to London, and bemoaned the fact that they'd spent much of the past week in their mountain eyrie walled-in by cloud, as last Saturday's spring sunshine turned out to be a false dawn, and gave way to days on-end of gloom and torrential downpours. Until today, that is, which dawned bright and clear, and was actually warm enough for us to throw open the french windows for the first time this year - always a red-letter day in the calendar. Brancolis departed for the airport, looking slightly miffed to be leaving behind them the first good weather they'd seen, and I spent a happy hour in the garden poking and prodding at things and noting the appearance of green shoots on wistaria(s) and spyrea and newly-planted climbing roses (yes, more...)

As I was going to get bread for breakfast, Lampacione were for sale outside the Amantea Man's shop in Via San Francesco, which is another reliable sign of Spring advancing. At the bakers, though, I was thwarted in buying bread from Altamura - the wonderfully chewy loaf that I normally get, but which for some inexpliable reason is unavailable outside university term time - and instead in its usual place on the shelf (right beside the splendidly named Bruta di Pontadera ) was Pane di Laterza. Effectively the same thing, I was assured, since Laterza and Altamura are only 20 kilometres distant from each other....that and the fact that the cross inscribed on top of the loaf is small in Altamura and very much larger in Laterza. Which makes all the difference, for sure, when you're making toast!

Tonight's Dinner:


Flamiche.

Ossobuco alla Novese.

Bitter Orange Soufflés.

The Sweet Potato Challenge

"Yams, and Clams, and Human Hands, washed down with Coconut Wine...the taste of which was filthy, but the after-effect divine!" pretty much sums up my attitude to sweet potato (all apart from the 'divine' bit). This is not a vegetable I would hurry to include on any menu, having as it does a one-dimensional flavour and a tendency to dissolve into soggy pap if you aren't careful. However, since the good people of North Carolina are in search of ways of dealing with the things, then who am I to deny them in their hour of need? (http://sweetbytesblog.blogspot.com "We are having a contest sponsored by the North Carolina Sweet Potato commission......")

I engaged in some research: Patience Grey was interestingly literary; Elizabeth Schneider, in her excellent and practically biblical tome on vegetables of all shapes and forms, had much to say on the subject; Jane Grigson waxed lyrical about their supposed aphrodisiac qualities; and James Peterson explained at length the precise difference between yams and sweet potatoes (before going on to talk of the latter being served smothered in 'melted marshmallows'...the very idea of which should be enough to make strong men shudder!)

The common thread running through all of this is that in order to make anything worthwhile of sweet potato you need to mix with it some assertive flavours in order to cut the sweetness, to give the dish another dimension, and to rescue it from the realm of nursery food. Many of the asian ways of treating the vegetable include pretty aggressive flavours like chili peppers and galangal, which have the effect of reducing the 'sweet' quality to an interesting undertone. And in Shakespearian England, it appears that the normal way of serving sweet potato was to smother it in dry sherry once it had been cooked. It was this that gave me the clue that in fact Sweet Potato is actually not unlike parsnip, and for best results it should be treated in the same way. Hence, the following: puréed and then mixed with sherry and walnuts, which act as the perfect foil to the sweet potato's natural flavours:

Excellent with any roast meat, the last stage in cooking the sweet potatoes also fits with this combination, as the finished dish can just go into the oven for the last twenty minutes of roasting time, enough to heat the sweet potatoes through and to brown the walnuts.

For four.

Ingredients: 2 large-ish Sweet Potatoes; 4 fl oz Cream; 2 fl oz medium Sherry; half a teaspoon of ground Nutmeg; Salt & Pepper, to taste; 2 oz Butter; 2 oz Walnut pieces.

Method:

1. Steam the Sweet Potatoes for twenty minutes or so, until tender (you could equally cook them in water, I suppose, if you don't have a steamer). Leave to cool for ten minutes or so, then peel them and cut into pieces.

2. Once cool enough to handle, process the cooked Sweet Potatoes along with all of the other ingredients apart from the Walnut pieces. Turn out into a greased ovenproof dish, and level the surface.

3. Sprinkle the Walnut pieces evenly over the surface of the Sweet Potato purée, and place into the lower part of a hot oven for fifteen to twenty minutes. (The Walnut pieces should each be no larger than a pine-nut - if they're larger, before sprinkling them, break them up by crushing gently between your hands.)

Serve.

Meanwhile, in Tuscany...

Spring is doing its best to get started - although it was clear from the state of the citrus trees when we arrived last week that there'd been a heavy frost sometime recently, and the lemons and bergamot were looking distinctly sorry for themselves. No longer. The temperature has soared in the past few days, and the shoots of the spring flowers are pushing forward purposefully. Massed ranks of narcissus throughout the garden; white crocuses against a background of lush ground cover (white-flowering vinca minor, which I planted, and a sea of violas, which I didn't, but which are very welcome all the same); the Camellia Japonica covered in pure white blooms, with many more to come; blossoms just opening on the Armandii, which means that the south pergola will be awash with fragrant blooms a week or so from now; fresh leaves opening on all of the roses, and even some buds on 'Mrs Herbert Stevens', which is always the first to come into bloom, and to my mind heralds the true end of winter each year. The climbing hydrangea and the jasmines are all limbering up to do their stuff, and look set for a good display.
After certain (sometimes heated) discussion, the Technical Department and I have finally come up with an agreed planting scheme for the loggia, which is to cover the walls in a variety of musk roses (my preference) and holbelia (his). Watch this space...

Gardening and cooking seem closely related, IMHO. I'm not entirely sure why...perhaps the same sort of impulses to do with creating order from chaos, and in taming nature in tooth and claw. Certainly, in both activities there's a slightly uneasy combination of control-freak meets creative-impulse (which doesn't invite close examination; some things are better left well alone). Most cooks that I know are also keen gardeners. Not all of them, that's true, but I suspect that the cook who isn't a gardener is marching to a different beat from the rest of us. Less 'home and hearth' oriented, somehow.

This week's culinary departures: a praline and chocolate flavoured Crème Caramel (in fact, a more robust version than the usual, as this one also has soaked amaretti biscuits included in the mixture), which got a thumbs up from the TD; and a new variation on the boned and roast chicken, but this time with a stuffing based on Marsala and Porcini, with a truffle-infused cream sauce. Not at all bad...

And I've been dipping into Patience Grey's 'Honey from a Weed', which is an absolute pleasure. Lots of familiar references, from her time spent living at different times in Tuscany and in the Cyclades...from a passing mention of 'Da Cammillo' in Florence, to the image of the weatherbeaten black-clad donkey-ladies in Greece who used to rap on the garden door in the mornings, with offerings of horta (greens) or fresh mulberries, or bunches of flowers that were heady with the scent of herbs from the fields. Happy memories, of a world which I suspect has now already disappeared.

Tonight's Dinner:

Fish Pithiviers.

Veal & Pepper Burgers; Carrots in Marsala.

Limoncello Panna Cotta.

Recipe: Cheese Biscuits

These are biscuits-containing-cheese, not to be confused with biscuits-to-be-served-with-cheese. To be consumed, preferably still warm from the oven, these are delicious (and very more-ish) with a glass of chilled white wine, or two, as an aperitif. Spicy and with a good 'edgy' flavour, they are best eaten just as they are; you can use them as a base for something spreadable, but I think the point rather gets lost in the process.

This is another of those recipes that's so simple and quick that it barely merits being called a recipe. A minute or so to make the biscuit dough, time to let it rest, and thereafter, the time it takes to roll and cut out the biscuits, and twenty minutes or so to bake them. You'd never guess the simplicity of the process, though, from the quality of the end result. First class!

For about 20 biscuits.

Ingredients: 60g Butter, cut into approx 1cm dice; 60g strongly flavoured hard-ish Cheese (extra mature Cheddar is good, or a strongly-flavoured Pecorino - I suppose Parmesan could also work well, but I tend to use it to make Parmesan Crisps for this kind of purpose), also cut into approx 1 cm dice; 75g plain Flour; 1 tsp Salt; 1 tsp Paprika; 1 tsp dry Mustard.

Method:
1. Process all ingredents together in a food processor, until they form one homogeneous lump - this might take 15 seconds or so. Wrap the ball of processed dough in clingfilm and leave to rest in the fridge for an hour.

2. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C.

3. On a floured surface, roll the dough to a 5 mm thickness and cut out 5 cm diameter biscuits from it; place these on a greased (or trennwaxed) baking sheet.

4. Bake for twenty minutes in the pre-heated oven until brown and crisp, then remove to a cooling rack, before serving.

How to de-bone a Chicken...

Or a Duck, or a Guinea-fowl, or a Poussin, or indeed any kind of poultry whatsoever; there are some minor internal differences between each of them, but nothing that need get in the way of this process, which is actually quite straightforward and is well worth mastering.
A de-boned bird goes much further than one which has been cooked bone-in ( a medium-sized Chicken will feed six people with ease, treated this way) and a bird which you buy whole and cut up yourself comes out to be much cheaper than the aggregate cost of all the parts, were you to buy them all separately. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a whole Duck, which I then de-boned, and used the carcase for stock, the breasts for a main course for four, the legs for confit, and the fat was rendered down into a generous amount that should last me several weeks at least as a delicious cooking agent. Bought separately, that lot would have come to around £18 - which was almost twice what the duck had actually cost me.

I can't remember when I first de-boned Chicken, but I certainly associate it with a Paul Bocuse recipe for boned-and-roast Chicken, which I first started to do sometime in the mid eighties (I think I saw him demonstrate it on a programme on the Food Channel in the States...) and it's been a standard in my repertoire ever since.

Two points to remember in de-boning a Chicken:

1. Make sure your knife is very sharp! In fact, I tend to use a vegetable paring knife rather than a proper boning knife - it's up to you to use whichever you find most comfortable to work with - but whichever it is, make sure you sharpen the knife freshly before you begin.

2. Always work the knife towards you when de-boning. And as I'm right-handed, I always start with the left side of the bird, freeing the rib-cage from the flesh, and then, when I've done that side of the bird, I turn it round, so that the side to be worked on is once more on the left side of the bird, which means I can continue working the knife towards me. Were I left-handed, then I presume I'd start with the right side of the bird and reverse the process, in order always to be working towards myself.

Anyway...the method:

1. Place the bird breast-down on the work surface, and cut through the skin just to one side of the back-bone. Then slide the tip of the blade under the flesh and free it up between the leg and wing on the left-side of the bird.

2. Keeping the knife blade as close to the rib-cage as you can, free the meat away from the rib-cage for about an inch or so, and then turn your attention to the leg and the wing.

3. Carefully, cut around the top of the leg, freeing it from the carcase, and find exactly where the leg joins the carcase. Sever the tissue that connects the two, and then cut down to free the leg completely from the main part of the bird. Repeat this process with the wing-joint.

4. Once the wing and leg joints have been severed, free the breast meat from the rib-cage in its entirety with a couple of good cuts (try and make your cuts as clean as possible, and as close to the ribcage as you can manage, to avoid slashing the breast meat as you do so - at first it's inevitable that the breast will emerge looking a little 'ragged', but in practice this doesn't matter, and your technique will hugely improve once you've done this a few times).

5. Once you've freed one side of the bird entirely from the rib-cage, turn it round, and repeat the process with the other side. At the end of this stage you'll be able to extract the entire rib-cage and drop it into the waiting stockpot.

6. Next, remove the lower bone in each leg, by cutting down and around the bone and severing it at the 'knee' joint (this is essentially common sense, and needs no special explanation). Unless I need the bird entirely boneless (for a galantine or a ballotine, for example) then I stop at this stage, and either roast the bird in this state (with a butter and herb stuffing pushed generously between the skin and the meat) or else cut it up into its constituent parts to be used in either sauté or fricassé dishes.

Once you've tried this a few times, you'll find you get very quick at it ( I find a decent sized bird takes me about five minutes to de-bone, these days) and the result is well worth the effort.

A Weekend of Consumption...

And about equally balanced between the cerebral and the calorific. If the ‘Beyond Babylon’ exhibition at The British Museum were to be understood in culinary terms, though, I think it would probably be a British Rail sandwich: more effort spent on the packaging than on the content, which turned out to be thin, tired, unimaginative, and entirely lacking in nutritional value. Perhaps when Neil Macgregor has finished churning out the series of intellectually-bereft extravaganzas with which he seems determined to burden the BM (and for which he was previously responsible during his stint at the National Gallery) he should consider a move to head up British Rail Catering. At least that way I’d be unlikely to trip over any more of his dreary and deeply depressing output.

The Palladio exhibition at the RA, on the other hand, would be a splendid Game Pie: four-square, robust, absorbing, and with a range of wonderful flavours contained within it. Deeply satisfying. Not much that was unfamiliar, but like a substantial slice of something one hasn’t tasted for a while, all the more rewarding in re-discovery!

And after that, an afternoon spent wandering the galleries of the Wallace Collection can surely only be compared with the myriad delights of an over-enthusiastic dessert trolley. In amongst the fruit salad, and the things with pink icing, and the garishly glazed strawberry tarts – to please the palates of the timid and the human young, respectively – the glories of a perfect Millefeuille, or a Paris-Brest, or a Pear poached in Sauternes! In the words of Noel Coward: “Gainsboroughs… and Lawrences…and some sporting prints of Aunt Florence’s…(some of which, were rather rude!)”
When we were finally ejected into the street, at closing time, it was with a sense of having been very well fed indeed.

In between times, the calorific intake included a celebration dinner at The Ambassadors in Exmouth Market - the Brancolis-in-London were marking one of their ‘zero’ birthdays with a Grand Dinner - which of course entailed a lateness of hour and quantity of consumption that was entirely out of kilter with the age that was being celebrated! (But then, isn’t that nearly always the case? I recall once catering a ninetieth birthday in Dr Johnson’s House, in Gough Square, where the steepness of the stairs combined with too many cups of tea meant that many of the guests – once they’d made a trip to the loo – found it easier to go home than to contemplate tackling the stairs up to the first floor once more!)

Tonight’s Dinner:

Egg-white Cheese Soufflé

Double-roast Lamb Shanks in Red Wine; Parsnip purée (with Sherry & Walnuts)

Tartes aux Pommes

Recipe: Endive with Orange

When serving a deliciously uncomplicated joint of meat, or a baked fish, or a spit-roast bird - where the freshness and sheer quality of the creature shines through, and the less you muck around with it, the better it is - there's an opportunity to offset this with a vegetable dish where there's clearly rather more going on. This is one of those dishes. I've experimented with an easier version, where I merely shredded and sauteed the endive, and added the orange flavouring at the end, and although it worked perfectly adequately, it was nowhere near as good as the version given here The concentration of flavours in the sauce and the slightly 'caramelised' texture of the endive lifts it to a higher level, but without it too obviously crying out for attention. If serving for a dinner party, prepare the endive in advance to the point where it's about to go into the oven, and then set it aside and put it into the oven as you sit to the first course.

For four.

Ingredients: 4 Belgian Endive; 2 oz Butter; 1 clove of Garlic, minced; juice and rind of half an Orange; 1 tsp Brown Sugar; 4 tbs White Wine Vinegar; 5 fl oz Water; Salt, to taste.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 190 degrees C.

2. Melt the Butter in a sauté pan (one that can subsequently fit entirely in the oven) and once melted, lightly colour the Garlic in the Butter.

3. Cut the Endives in half, lengthwise, and discard any obviously hard bits of central core. Place the Endives face down in the sauté pan and cook a couple for of minutes on each side, until slightly browned at the edges. Add all the remaining ingredients, and bring them to a boil, stirring all the time. Remove from heat.

4. Cover the pan with foil, and then place in the pre-heated oven for twenty minutes. Once the Endives are tender and cooked through, remove the pan from the oven and take the Endives out of the sauce. Place them on the serving plates.

5. Boil the sauce down for a minute or so, until it has noticeably reduced and thickened; spoon the sauce over the plated Endives, and serve