Recipe: Broccoli, Roman style

Perfect with any simple grilled or roast meat, this dish has the sort of complex structure of flavours which makes it a first cousin to ratatouille...but with a list of ingredients which takes it straight back to the pages of Apicius, if not before.
Eminently suitable for entertaining, as all of the work can be done hours in advance, and the wonderful smell of cooking that greets your guests on arrival will have them salivating even before they hand over their coats! And, just as with ratatouille, any leftovers are excellent re-heated the next day, and served with a lightly-poached egg as an informal starter.

For four.

Ingredients: the stalks from two large heads of Broccoli - you need about 350g of stalk (reserve the florets for another day, to steam, or to use for purée, for example); 2 medium Onions; 60g stoned Black Olives; 4 large Anchovy fillets; 50g Parmesan; Salt; Olive Oil; 10 fl oz dry Red Wine.

Method:

1. Peel and thinly slice the Onions; peel the broccoli stalks, and slice wafer-thin.

2. Lightly oil the base of a heavy iron casserole, or a sauté pan with a lid. Distribute half of the sliced Onion over the base of the casserole, and cover with a layer of sliced Broccoli stalks, again using half of the total amount.

3. Thinly slice the Olives and Parmesan, and chop the Anchovies into small pieces. Over the layer of Broccoli stalks scatter half of the Olives, Parmesan and Anchovies; salt lightly (not too much, as the cheese and fish are already salty) and a light dressing of Oil (about half a tbsp).

4. Repeat with another layer of Onion, then Broccoli, and finally the remaining amount of Olives, cheese and Anchovies. Lightly salt, and moisten with a little more Oil.

Set aside until about an hour before you want people to come to table.

5. Pour the Wine over the assembled dish, and heat over a low heat for an hour, with the lid firmly in place. Check and adjust seasoning just before you serve.

I find it works well if I remove the pan from the heat just as the first course is served, and it can then rest, with the lid on, for the duration of the first course, ready to be served along with the main course.

To Sarteano, and beyond...

With only pause to take breath and change baggage in Pisa, on Saturday, we were off the plane from London and on the road to Belforte practically seamlessly. Sunday was a zero birthday for She-who-must-be-obeyed in Belforte, and a commemorative trip had been especially organised for a private viewing of a painted etruscan tomb at Sarteano, which was rediscovered only about five years ago. The weather, of course, was filthy, and on Saturday evening the cross-country route to Belforte took much longer than usual, as rain lashed down and the windscreen wipers struggled at times to keep pace. Although, I suppose the fury of the weather outside only increased the home-and-hearth sense of wellbeing, as we dined beside the blazing kitchen fire, on beautifully tender roast lamb, washed down with some hearty burgundy that wasn't quite also celebrating a zero birthday, but was still doing pretty well!

More rain on Sunday, as we made the journey across from Siena to join the Autostrada del sole (hollow laughter) and then down to Chiusi, from where it's just a short climb up to Sarteano. The hill towns in that area were shrouded in low cloud, and the rain had diminished to a steady constant drizzle by the time we'd finally arrived: dreech, I think the Scots call it.

To re-charge batteries before the cultural event of the afternoon, we lunched at the Trattoria di Merlo in Cetona, a pretty little town, but one which I can imagine in summer is absolutely heaving with tourists, and only to be recommended out of season. In the screen version, lunch would of course have been memorably wonderful - but in fact, it was rather disappointing. There was more enthusiasm than skill in the kitchen, and the menu largely comprised dishes that aimed at edgy creativity, but where in fact two plus two ended up being merely a rather unexciting four. Oh, well...

And the tomb. We were met in the middle of a damp and misty olive grove by one of the local archaeologists, who led us down a muddy path, and past the openings to numerous other tombs, en route to what is the only frescoed tomb in that particular necropolis. Through a locked door, and down a dripping sandstone tunnel, we were met by an astonishing sight: walls bright with the mineral colours of paint, exactly as they would have looked when they were painted nearly twenty-five hundred years ago. A large hipocamp, and an enormous three-headed serpent; diners at a banquet (presumably, the occupants of the alabaster sarcophagus in the main tomb chamber); and a dramatic image of Charon charging off to the underworld, in a chariot pulled by gryphons and lions, surrounded darkly by an enveloping black nimbus. Stunning! Completely wonderful!
Although visitors are normally whisked in and out for only a couple of minutes at a time, in order for their breath not to damage the fragile paintwork, we ended up staying for the best part of an hour - probably because of SWMBO's archaeological credentials - and drank in every last detail. And we emerged eventually to the same damp olive trees that must have been familiar to the builders of the tomb, all that time ago, leaves dripping heavily onto the grass beneath, and the leaden mist obscuring the lower slopes of the grove, further down the hill.

After an hour spent in the otherwise deserted museum, back up in Sarteano itself, we set off for Sorano, some distance to the south-west, where dinner and a hotel had been organised - although, in fact, we almost didn't make it. The heavens opened once more, and at Castel Giorgio we were turned back by flood waters, and sent off by the local carabinieri into the great unknown...more precisely, in the direction of San Lorenzo Nuovo, where the floods didn't have any carabinieri attached to them, and we suddenly found ourselves, in the middle of dark countryside, ploughing through water about a foot deep, and several hundred yards long. Much more of it, and we'd be there still!

As it was, we eventually - somehow - made it to Sorano, and trudged through narrow, steeply-sloping cobbled streets to the hotel (designed for high summer, we were the only guests, and the off-season chill was less than optimal) and thence to the Trattoria Aldobrandeschi for a very good dinner. Blazing fire, an excellent prosecco, a profusion of white truffles (with tagliatelle), meltingly-delicious guanciale, and a grappa from Friuli that was one of the best I've ever tasted.
We were the only diners, and in fact the town itself was pretty much shut up for the winter - the houses, these days, are largely second homes for Romans (Rome is only ninety minutes to the south), as well as lots of Dutch, and Swiss, and Danish (according to mine host). On the one hand, it saves the place from falling to pieces, but at the same time, renders it rather lifeless - I suppose there isn't a perfect answer.

Rain throughout the night, and then we woke to cloudless skies, and brilliant sunshine. Perfect to wander through the town, emerging occasionally from the labyrinthine streets to glorious views across the ravine beneath the town, looking across to the wooded slopes beyond, all rich in autumn colours. Warm enough for a last cappuccino, consumed as we sat outside the cafe in the main square...and then it was time to hit the road...

Tonight's dinner:

Fettucine, with Mussels & Funghi Porcini.

Spezzatino di Manzo.

Coffee Meringue Nests with Ice Cream and fresh Raspberries (the garden is still producing, quite generously)

Recipe: Risotto with Red Mullet

When deconstructed, this is simply a risotto made with fish broth - but the broth that goes into the dish is so good that the end result is quite spectacular! Light, unctuous, and absolutely delicious. This particular recipe is normally associated with Livorno where the red mullet ( or 'triglia' as they're called round here) is dirt cheap, and mullet recipes are generally given the handle 'alla livornese'. I have seen it said that the mullet in this recipe could be substituted by any firm-fleshed white fish - I'm not so sure about that; triglie have a flavour which is particularly full, and give to the stock a richness which I suspect might be missing if cod, say, or bream were to be used instead.

Quick and straightforward, the entire dish takes about forty minutes in total (much of which is elapsed time, when other work can also be done): twenty minutes of which is to make the stock, and another twenty or so to produce the risotto.

For four.

Ingredients: 4 tbs Olive Oil; 1 Carrot, diced; 1 stick of Celery, diced; two or three Red Mullet Fillets, cut into 2 cm pieces; 1 Bay Leaf; 200g chopped tinned Tomato; 5 cups Water; 2 cloves Garlic, finely minced; 1 1/3 cups Carnaroli Rice; 1 wineglass of White Wine; Seasoning; Chopped Parsley (for garnish).

Method:

1. Heat 2 tbs of Oil in a saucepan, and gently sauté the Carrot and Celery, along with the fish pieces, for ten minutes. Stir occasionally, and keep the heat at medium.

2. Add the Bay leaf, Tomato, and Water. Bring to the boil, and then reduce to simmer, for a further ten minutes. Allow to cool slightly, then sieve into a clean pan, pressing the pieces against the sieve to extract as much of the flavour as possible. Put the sieved broth onto medium heat, to simmer.

3. In a large sauté pan, heat the remaining Oil, and gently colour the minced Garlic. Add Rice and stir to coat in the Oil and Garlic for a minute. Add the wine, maintain the heat such that the liquid barely simmers, and keep stirring until all the Wine has been absorbed by the Rice. Start adding broth, one ladle at a time - only add a new ladleful of broth once the previous one has been absorbed.

4. Keep adding broth either until it has all been used up or until the Rice is properly cooked. Depending on the quality of the Rice, this should take twenty minutes or so. If the broth is finished before the risotto is ready, add water instead, until the Rice is cooked.

5. Add seasoning, to taste (none has gone into the broth, so it will definitely be needed at this stage) ans serve, garnished with chopped fresh Parsley.

The rain, it rains...

On and on. Fairly typically for November in Tuscany, it has to be said, and the garden looks very happy for it. Lush and green and soaking. Fortunately not so sodden that I couldn't plant several hundred bulbs in the few rain-free interludes we've had in the past couple of weeks (a couple of hundred narcissus to line the grass walk under the pine trees, to the north of which I've planted two hundred mixed alliums, around the hydrangeas; and hundreds of dwarf irises under the silver birch and on either side of the causeway that leads to the romitorio.) I even managed to cut the grass (all of it - having realised from the forecast that it would be my last opportunity for weeks) on Wednesday, and it looks agreeably soft and well-behaved as a result.

And so, we're largely housebound, either watching the rain through the windows, or else listening to it thundering overhead in the watches of the night. The four-footeds have got over their frustration at the doors to the garden no longer being left open all the time, and in fact are developing a fondness for soft furnishing, which requires constant vigilance to prevent the senior four-footed from curling up on one or other of the new sofas (which he's prone to do at the first opportunity).

It's our first winter actually living in this house - last year, it was a building site right through until April - and it turns out to be agreeably warm and cosy. The Technical Dept is pondering a construction of glass screens to enclose part of the sitting-room terrace; you'd think it would be for our convenience, as a winter sun room...but, in fact, it's because he thinks the four-footeds would appreciate an indoor vantage point from which to monitor the entrance pergola (this is the man, after all, who considered raising the china cabinets on blocks, years ago, when the previous senior four-footed was a puppy, and was dismayed when he grew too much to be able to tunnel excitedly beneath the cabinets, which had been his favourite game when he was very small!).

I'm in the middle of Miles Unger's hagiographic biography of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in between bouts of painting skirting boards (where the brazilians managed to smear them with floor grout), and the Technical Dept is doing...I don't know, really....technical things.

It's all go!

Tonight's Dinner:

Crespelle, filled with ricotta and bietole, in a parmesan bechamel sauce

Pork loin, pot-roast in milk; roast celeriac. (The four-footeds are having sausages, as a special treat in honour of the senior four-footed's eleventh birthday)

Apple sorbet.

Recipe: Apricot & Cinnamon Cake

Adapted from a recipe of Linda Collister (I found her version a little dry, frankly, so I played around with the proportions of the ingredients until I had something I liked), this is an excellent - and quick - light fruit cake. So light, that it risks being consumed all at one sitting!

This cake definitely benefits from being left for several days or so after baking, to allow the richness of the fruit and the cake itself to blend together thoroughly.

To make an 8" diameter cake:

Ingredients: 130g Butter; 130g sugar (muscovado, if you can get it, which I can't in Italy, and so I just use demarara instead); 170g self-raising Flour (again, if you can get it; if you can't then use plain flour, and for each cup of flour, add one and a half teaspoons of baking powder, and half a teaspoon of salt); 1 tsp ground Cinnamon; 30g ground Almonds; 3 medium eggs; 220g ready-to-eat dried Apricots, chopped finely; a handful of slivered Almonds.

Method:

1. Use a hand-held beater to cream the Butter, then add to it the Sugar and keep beating, until light and fluffy.

2. In a separate bowl, combine the Flour with the Cinnamon and the ground Almonds.

3. Add the Eggs one at a time to the creamed Butter & Sugar, beating to incorporate after each Egg has been added, and including a spoonful of the Flour mixture along with the last Egg.

4. Fold in the rest of the Flour mixture, along with the diced Apricots.

5. Put the mixture into a prepared cake mould (greased, if using a cake tin, or the base lined with greaseproof paper, if using a silicone mould) and sprinkle the surface with the slivered Almonds.

6. Bake for an hour at 170 degrees C. Check for doneness by inserting a knife into the centre of the cake and seeing that it emerges completely clean - if not, then bake for a fewer minutes lnger and test again.

7. Allow to rest for five minutes, before you turn it out to cool completely. Keep in an airtight container box for three days before serving.

Restaurant Gauthier, in London...

...was included recently in the Wall Street Journal's list of the top ten places to eat in Europe. It's in Romilly Street in Soho, in the building which was Lindsay House for such a long time (somewhere I recall as falling significantly short of its PR positioning, frankly...the food was definitely 'OK', rather than anything special). Anyway....Gauthier. Technical Department and I were discussing the WSJ listing in the car the other evening, as we drove up to Brancoli, for dinner and to return their lawnmower which we'd borrowed when ours broke, back in August. TD, who had read the WSJ article ( I hadn't) was of the opinion that the Gauthier menu included far too much mackerel for his liking, and that the overall tone of the place seemed to be as a place of worship rather than somewhere just to go and have dinner. (We grew out of the food-as-a-form-of-worship thing many decades ago, and these days, great food should be good enough to cause a short pause in good conversation, but should then act merely as an adjunct to it, and not take over.)

So, it was with interest that we heard that the Brancolis had dined at Gauthier a couple of weeks ago, and had been served rather more protein than advertised in the menu. In the form of two dead beetles (one each....clearly, it was an equal opportunity slip-up) in the base of their wine glasses. They were working their way through the tasting menu, item four (or so) of which was some kind of venison, accompanied by a southern rhône. And a couple of beetles. Both very dead. The sommelier and waiters gathered round and gazed in silence at the offending corpses, leaking redly onto the tablecloth, before efficiently removing them, and then carrying on as though nothing had happened. To the extent that they made no mention of the incident even as they presented the eye-wateringly large bill at the end of the evening. The Brancolis were probably more stunned by the lack of reaction than they had been by the event itself. ..so much so, that they were out in the street before they'd thought to raise the matter (although, equally, since it was a celebration dinner, neither was keen to cause a scene). No apology was forthcoming, no offer of recompense (money off? a bottle of something? an invitation to come back as guests on another occasion?....forget it!). Incredible.

The only explanation we could come up with for the bizarre lack of reaction was that the business model for a restaurant like Gauthier must be that dining there is expected to be a one-off event, and that they don't think their clientele will become regulars (and so they don't need to bother). Which is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy, if you think about it. I know of at least two diners who won't ever be going back! But then, I can also think of two others who won't now consider it even for the one-off option...so, possibly the business model is flawed. Pause for thought, Monsieur Gauthier.

Tonight's Dinner

Ravioli, stuffed with bietole and ricotta.

Sautéed Chicken Breast, in a Rosemary & Lemon Sauce; Courgettes, with Thyme.

Bakewell and Black Plum Tarts.

Recipe: Pasta with Rosemary Sauce

This is one of the best last-minute dishes I've ever found. Perfect for those occasions when prep time has disappeared, and dinner needs to be conjured out of airy nothing in about ten minutes flat! Best of all with fresh pasta (I generally serve it with fettucine...which takes around ten minutes to roll out and cut, with about fifteen minutes elapsed time between the two processes), this sauce is still pretty good even with the stuff out of a box or packet.

The recipe comes from Marcella Hazan, and is to be found lurking amongst the also-ran pasta sauce recipes in Volume 2 of Classic Italian Cooking -I'd owned the book for years before I got round to trying it. Many recipe writers today (and I suspect Hazan herself would be amongst them, these days) would disdain powdered stock as an ingredient; in fact, it is quite brilliant here, and works wonderfully well with the astringence of the rosemary.

The sauce is so quick and simple, you need only start it at the same time as you put the pasta-cooking water onto heat (for fresh pasta) or after you've put boxed pasta into the pan, and you still have a few minutes before it's done.

For four.

Ingredients: 4 oz Butter; about 6 sprigs of Rosemary, each one 4" or so long; half a teaspoon of powdered chicken Stock, or half a stock cube, crumbled between your fingers.

Method:

1. Melt the Butter in a small pan, over low heat; the butter wants just to melt, and certainly not to colour or start to bubble.

2. Strip the Rosemary needles from their stems, and chop very finely. Add this to the melted Butter, along with the powdered Stock.

3. Stir everything together, until the powdered Stock has dissolved into the Butter. At this point, turn off the heat, and stir into the cooked pasta as soon as it has been drained. No further seasoning should be necessary, and parmesan shouldn't be served with this dish, as it would only fight with the delicious flavours already there.