Recipe: Pear Soufflé

A recipe from Anne Willan, I first tried this in the early eighties, when I was dipping into her 'French Regional Cooking' as my project over Christmas in St. Michel one year (which reminds me ... her version of Pintarde aux Choux from the same book was also particularly good, and long overdue to be dusted off; definitely one for the colder months toward the end of the year). The pear recipe re-surfaced in Willan's 'French Recipes' from the Books for Real Cooks series - a gem, if ever there was one - and the current household glut of pears prompted me to make it for dessert a couple of evenings ago.
It isn't the easiest of dishes to get right - it must have been a fluke that it came out well the very first time I made it, as I didn't have a lot of experience with soufflés at that time - but it repays the effort of trying. Light, creamy and delicious. The secret, I think, is to stick absolutely unwaveringly to the recipe, with regard both to quantities and cooking time. Willan's version was for one large soufflé, which I never particularly like, as the process of serving has a tendency to ruin the whole effect, and so I've re-worked it for individual soufflés instead (made in 10cm diameter ramekins).
Twelve minutes and a few seconds of cooking, exactly!

For four individual soufflés

Ingredients: 4 large ripe pears (approx 1 1/2 lb); 2 tbs lemon juice; 3 tbs brandy; 3 eggs + 3 egg whites; 3 tbs sugar + 2 oz sugar; 6 fl oz milk; 2 tbs flour; 1 tbs cornflour. Icing sugar, to sprinkle.

Method:

1. Peel and core the pears, and liquidize them along with the lemon juice. Heat in a small pan over medium heat for about 10 minutes, until the purée has lost most of its liquid, and will keep its shape on a spoon. Set aside to cool.

2. In a double-boiler or simmertopf, heat the milk; in a bowl, whisk the egg yolks and 2 oz of sugar until they are pale yellow, then mix in the flour and cornflour. Pour onto this the heated milk, and mix together, then return the contents of the bowl to the double boiler, and cook, stirring for five minutes or so, until the mixture (which is in fact a pastry cream) has become quite thick.

3. Fold into the pastry cream the cooled pear mixture, along with the brandy; cover with clingfilm, to prevent a skin from forming, and put in the fridge for up to three hours.

4. Heat the oven to 220 degrees C. Butter, or Trennwax, four individual 10 cm ramekins, and place them in a deep roasting pan.

5. Beat the egg whites until stiff, adding the 3 tbs of sugar for the last ten seconds or so of whisking. Mix a quarter of the beaten egg white into the pear/cream mixture, then fold in the remaining egg white.

6. Fill the ramekins to the brim with this mixture, smooth the surface of each one with a palette knife, and then run the tip of your thumb around the rim of each ramekin, leaving a shallow indentation around the inside of each one.

7. Fill the roasting pan with hot water about halfway up the ramekins, and bake in the pre-heated oven for twelve minutes.

8. Remove the soufflés from the oven and sprinkle with icing sugar before placing each ramekin on a dessert plate. Serve immediately.

And then, it rained....

A centimetre of rain, we were promised by Tempo Italia. And, after five weeks without a drop, it seemed a welcome change - even the possibility of an evening off from garden-watering duties, which is a two hour task every rainless day throughout summer.
Dutifully, the clouds gathered, and by mid morning, the rain began. Stuck indoors, we decided to go across town to pick up the new lights for the library in Via Fucini, and allow the rain to wash the accumulated summer dust off the car in the process - and found ourselves crawling through Pisa in monsoon conditions, barely able to see through the windscreen, despite frenetic activity from the windscreen wipers.By early afternoon, it had diminished to a fine drizzle, and then to nothing at all, and was even replaced by watery sunlight. We'd had our centimetre, and then some...and Gian Carlo reappeared to continue with building, and I got on with (yet more) weeding.
Around five o'clock, heralded by increasingly threatening growls of thunder, it began again.

And it got heavier...
And the courtyard behind the house - into which the gutters drain from the roof of the church, and from the roof of this house and (because they don't clean their gutters properly) from the roof of the Teatro Lux next door - began to fill up. We've seen it before...whenever there's an intense downpour, the sudden volume of water is too much for the drains, and at a certain point the water gushes up out of the drain, rather than disappearing efficiently down it.And, because some ecclesiastical architect at some point, in an excess of enthusiasm for poured concrete, had decided to line the floor of the courtyard in the stuff, in these circumstances the courtyard acts as a waterproof tank, with no opportunity for water to drain away.
Fortunately, we'd already witnessed this happening before we installed the french windows from the Pranzo to the courtyard, and so had left about a foot of clearance beneath the windows, to avoid water simply pouring into the house the next time the courtyard unexpectedly turned itself into a swimming pool - and since the house is probably six or eight inches lower than the level of the courtyard, then pour in it most definitely would!

The thunder boomed overhead, the rain lashed down, and our confidence ebbed, as we watched the level of water in the yard inexorably rise. Three times, the storm moved away, and the water level diminished - although, the third time, before the rain lightened, the water had already been lapping at the sills to the doors, and we armed ourselves with mountains of rolled towels to try and stem the imminent influx. Long before that, I'd stopped taking pictures of it as an 'interesting event', and had started contemplating moving bits of furniture, and unplugging possibly vulnerable bits of electrical kit.

During dinner, the storm began again, and we could hardly hear ourselves speak for the din of the thunder. Once again, the water level rose, and - this time by the light of the candles from the dining table - we watched as it gushed ever closer to danger point. Again, it diminished, and drained away once more.

It was as I finished a glass of grappa that it started again in earnest. And, this time, it just went on and on....and on.....and on. We lined the outer sills with rolled towels, as the water got to that level, and we closed the french windows and put more towels on the inside sills. And more towels again. And still the water rose, until it was a couple of inches above the sills, and the towels got wetter and wetter as the water seeped under the doors from outside. Large damp patches appeared on the walls beneath the windows, and small pools began to gather on the Pranzo floor.

At which point, the rain eased off. And by twenty minutes later the water level was back down to safety level, and we decided to call it a day. There was nothing further we could do, anyway, even if it had continued to rain, since we'd used up all available towels by that point...it was a sauve qui peut moment, and so we did, and went to bed. Fortunately, to the accompaniment of rain-free silence.

And we awoke this morning to sunshine, and clear skies, and a wonderful freshness to the air.

According to the online news, though, there had been more than 4,000 thunderbolts over the course of six hours (whoever was counting them?) and at Marina da Pisa there was even a mini tornado. Which is possibly the most exciting thing that's ever happened at Marina da Pisa.

Over morning coffee, we discussed the advisability of sandbags (much to be said for them).

I think, perhaps, I might even allow myself a second day without bothering to water the garden. It seems wet enough as it is.

A hard day's work...

Time for the lavender to be dead-headed...a task I normally put off as long as I can. Watching the stalks lengthen and the flowers come into bloom marks the onset of summer, and when they're over it's difficult not to think of the season passing and the approach of September. Except that in fact autumn here can be the best part of the year - so, what's not to like? - and the newly-shorn lavender bushes suddenly make the garden look surprisingly tidy....the causeway lined with them, looking like two rows of those hedgehog-shaped shoe cleaners that decorate the back doors of English country houses. And now, from a bowl on the hall table, the scent of lavender wafts gently through the house, as the flower heads dry.

Harvesting continues apace. Having finished the apricots several weeks ago, we picked a boxful of newly-ripened plums to take with us to Belforte, where we weekended recently - and then returned to find the plum tree suspiciously empty of all other fruit. Either extremely thorough birds had been at work, or else the gardener from the seminary next door had nipped in and helped himself (as I'd previously found him doing with the smaller plum tree, which fruits a month earlier). NB. one of the tasks for August: install a new and lockable gate between us and the seminary grounds!
We aren't short of fruit, though, as the large pear tree has just surrendered serious quantities of small and succulent pears, and the apple trees in the old orchard are now just about ripe for picking. After that, we have the figs, quince and grapes to look forward to...not to mention the late-fruiting peach trees, which fruit through until the end of September, I think.

Gian Carlo is hard at work, building the walkway for the new entrance we're installing at the south-west corner of the garden, and the pergola which will link it to the end of the barn. Much to the relief of the climbing roses which were planted just before Christmas, and have been increasingly gasping to have something decent to climb up, and looking deeply frustrated by their pro-tem bamboo frames.

And the four-footeds are hard at work, too, generally getting in the way of either building or gardening work...or else concentrating deeply on ball control!

Tonight's dinner:

Sformatini of Fennel, with Gorgonzola sauce.

Pork, pot-roast in milk; Fava Beans.

Lemon Tart.

Portrait of a Lady

We found her languishing - grubby and unloved - at Sothebys in Milan, several years ago. Generations of grime had left her peering out from a stygian gloom that could have been the depths of a coalmine, for all it was possible to tell, and the canvas sat within a tacky, vaguely art-deco gilt frame of apologetically mean proportions. Sloppily, Sothebys attributed her to John Riley (it's standard, clearly - anything from that period that they can't be bothered to think about gets listed as being either by Riley or by Kneller), but in fact she's a relatively early Michael Dahl. Same period, better painter.

A trip back to London to be cleaned, and suddenly colours emerged, an elaborate coiffure, and a sylvan landscape disappearing off in the background. Obviously a lady from the later Stuart Court, we have no idea exactly who she was - although her features have a strongly 'House of Windsor' look to them, and she could readily be (the current) Princess Anne in fancy dress. How she ended up, in the twenty-first century, being Lot No.182 on a rainy November afternoon in Milan is anybody's guess...

Eventually, after much searching, we found a replacement frame for her - the canvas is an unusual proportion, and it was ages before something of exactly the right size came up at Bonhams - and then the fun started! When we went to pick the frame up, not only was it too large for the car, but we couldn't even fit it into the back of a Black Cab... and eventually carried it home between us, going the back way, via Montpellier Square and the bum end of Holy Trinity, Brompton Road. Then, it turned out to be too large to fit through the cargo door of an Airbus, so had to sit around in London - for many months - until the next time we were shipping enough things down to Italy to make sense of a truckload.
And, once it got here, it was clear that the frame was too tall for the room in Via Fucini which the portrait then graced, and there was a conflict between a ceiling vault and a quantity of gilded gesso. So, again, the frame sat around doing nothing for a year or so...and it was only once we were moving house that an appropriate wall became available for it. In much need of restoration, the frame was delivered to Juliana about six months ago, for her to work miracles on...which she duly did. Yesterday, for the first time, canvas and frame were united, and the end result is stunning.

The Lady herself looks pleased with the result. Which means everybody is happy.

Tonight's Dinner:

Snails, in Garlic Butter.

Guinea Fowl in Champagne Sauce; Swiss Chard, baked with Parmesan.

Peach and Apricot Tarts.

Recipe: Plum & Walnut Lattice Tart

I promised the Brancolis I would post this, having served it to them at dinner a couple of weeks ago...and now, I need to get on and do it before I completely forget what went into the thing The recipe was the result of a bowl of garden plums sitting on the worktop in the kitchen, and the need to do something with them before they got up and left of their own accord...and walnuts and plums are always a good combination, where the bitterness of the nuts matches the sweetness of the plums (which can sometimes seem a little one-note-ish).
The quantities are given in volume measures, rather than by weight, as I made the recipe up as I went along.


For one 12" tart.

Ingredients: Shortcrust pastry, made with 300g '00' flour, 250g butter, 50 ml water, & a pinch of salt; 4-5 cups of small, ripe plums (the ones I used were about the size of large cherry tomatoes - larger fruit would work, too, but would need to be cut into eighths rather than quarters); half a cup of demerara sugar; one generous tablespoon of cinnamon; 20 walnuts, shelled and cut into large pieces; rind of one lemon and one orange; one cup of ground almonds (or, in the absence of almonds, you can substitute flour - the point of this ingredient is to absorb the juice that the fruit will release during cooking, which risks making the pastry soggy); one egg white; caster sugar (for sprinkling).

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 200 degrees C.

2. Use slightly more than half the pastry to line a greased, false-bottomed tin. Blind bake until it begins to brown, then set aside while you make the filling.

3. Stone and quarter the plums, and then combine with all the other ingredients, apart from the ground almonds, egg white and caster sugar.

4. Spread the almonds evenly over the baked pastry shell, then fill the shell with the plum and walnut mixture.

5. Roll out the remaining pastry and either cut it into strips to make a lattice top for the tart, or else use a lattice template (which I always do - much quicker and more straightforward). Brush the top of the tart with beaten egg white, and bake for about half an hour, until the pastry is a rich golden brown. Immediately on taking the tart from the oven, sprinkle the top with a couple of spoonfuls of caster sugar.

Best served warm or cold, not hot.

The Apricot Harvest ...

...is in! Each one practically the size of a tennis ball, I was expecting them to be watery and tasteless - but, in fact, they have a wonderful flavour, almost more like peaches than apricots. I've probably never eaten apricots straight from the tree before now ( I don't remember....perhaps once, many years ago, which might explain why I always expect them to be delicious, and they generally disappoint). The ones which are available commercially tend to be picked while still hard, I suspect, so that they won't bruise in transport, and so have no flavour whatsoever, even though they look so inviting.

I was so surprised by their peach-like quality thatI researched peach-apricot hybrids. Jane Grigson says of 'Peach Apricots' that she understands them to be the acme of the apricot family...but, then again, pêches apricots in fact appears to be the term the french use for a standard yellow peach... so I'm unclear what exactly she was talking about. There are all sorts of peach-apricot hybrids in production, but the pictures I've seen all show them to have a smooth skin, more like a nectarine, whilst ours have a definitely fuzzy exterior.

We have two apricot trees in the old orchard, which, when we arrived last year, were oozing large quantities of a gelatinous substance from wounds at the base of their trunks. "Oh, those have had it," we were confidently informed by an authoritative source. "You'll have to get rid of them". Fortunately, Signor Tempestini took a more relaxed view: "E gommosa..." he said, and handed over some blue powder that had to be mixed with water and painted onto the affected areas. Two coats and several months later, and all was well.

Delicious on their own, they sit in a bowl on the kitchen counter, and those which escape the depredations of passing locusts in the course of the day have so far been used in bavarois, strudel, sorbet, and tarts. I had researched how to oven-dry the ones which wouldn't get used immediately, so as not to lose them - but I realise now that there's little danger of that happening.

Tonight's dinner:

Almond-coated goats cheese, baked and served on a bed of purple figs, basil and baked red peppers.

Fiorentina, with rocket and parmesan.

Pear Soufflés

Busy doing nothing...

Christian - who was staying with us for a couple of days last week - remarked of some friends of his who live in Galicia that 'they do more work in not-working than anybody I can think of'. It's a concept I can relate to (occasionally).

This week: Monday was the latest (and last before the autumn) round of heavy-duty planting, with new poplars, silver birch, sorba, cypresses, arelias, pieris japonica, and black bamboo; Tuesday, Brancolis came for dinner, which was splendid and late; Wednesday, we flogged down to Torre Mozza outside Piombino for lunch, as something to do while Christian was here which wasn't either cooking or gardening; Thursday, we collected the tiles for the new kitchen in Via Fucini, and sorted out the details for the new french windows for the first floor terrace at Santa Caterina; Friday was weeding, and watering, and mowing, and hacking-and-slashing in general in the endless process of trying to wrestle the garden into submission. (In fact, the garden is behaving well at the moment, with many things in bloom: roses, delphiniums, hemerocallis, agapanthus, water lilies, verbenas, and some late deutsias...)

We now have high summer. Blissfully hot, day after day, and already town is subsiding into summer somnolence, listless and exhausted in the heat of midday, and returning to life in the relative cool of the evenings for passagiato and al fresco living. Gardening is limited to early and late - avoiding the midday sun - with evenings spent watering the fruit trees, as the sun goes down and shadows lengthen across the north lawn.

The nespola harvest is over, and for the first time I've actually found a use for the things - in the past, I've generally found them slightly sour, if they had any discernible flavour at all; one of the nespola trees we've inherited, though, produces fruit of a remarkable sweetness and succulence, and I picked bushels of the things during the short fruiting season. Excellent, baked in a tart over a frangipane base. One of the plum trees is also already finished - the one that produces quite small fruit, with red and yellow skins (perfect when combined with walnuts, brown sugar and cinnamon) - and the other one, with much larger fruit, is heavy with plums that should probably be picked next week. Ditto, the apricot and greengage trees, and after that quinces, and then industrial quantities of apples and pears. Despite their unfortunate leaf-curl earlier in the year, the peach trees are delivering quite well, and even the white peach, which we transplanted from the garden in Via Fucini at quite the wrong time of year, produced a solitary (but perfect) offering, which we solemnly shared between us a few days ago. The fruit from that tree is quite simply the most delicious imaginable...

The midday bells are ringing out from San Francesco, which has roused the four-footeds from their normal (for now) state of general drowsiness.

Onward and upward...

Tonight's Dinner:

Tagliatelle, with a sauce of Celery & Tomato.

Pork Loin, roast in Pancetta; Fagiolini with Parmesan.

Pear & Cinnamon lattice tart.