Recipe: Pork Loin Roast with Emmental & Prosciutto Crudo

Loosely translated from Julia Child's classic Porc Sylvie this version takes the recipe south of the Alps, with a slightly edgier flavour to the stuffing, and a sauce which without question will knock your socks off! As with all roasts of this kind, the meat is equally delicious served either hot, or cold the following day, or else carefully re-heated several days later in a 100 degree C oven, wrapped in foil.

For six.

Ingredients: boned and rolled loin of pork, about 5" in length; 75g finely sliced Emmental; 75g sliced Prosciutto Crudo (parma ham); 4 slices of fatty bacon (optional); 2 medium Carrots, finely diced; 2 medium Onions, finely diced; 30g Butter; 2 tablespoons Olive Oil; 1 cup Marsala; seasoning.

Method:

1.Heat the oven to 220 degrees C.

2. With three longitudinal cuts, open the pork loin as though unrolling a swiss roll, so that it forms a flattish rectangle of meat. Season the rectangle, then cover with slices of Emmental, and then slices of Prosciutto Crudo. Roll up the rectangle to re-form its original shape, and tie with string. (If your butcher has left no layer of fat around the loin, then before you string it, cover the loin with the optional slices of fatty bacon)

3. Melt the Butter over medium heat, along with the Oil, in a pan which can subsequently act as a roasting dish in the oven.

4. Colour the pork loin all over (takes about fifteen minutes) in the Oil/Butter mixture, then remove from the pan. Sauté the diced Onion and Carrot for about twenty minutes in the same pan, until wilted and golden, but not coloured. Return the loin to the pan, on top of the vegetables and place the pan in the pre-heated oven.

5. Roast until the meat is done - it should take about forty minutes.

6. Once the meat is done, remove it from the pan to rest for ten minutes or so in a warm oven.

7. Meanwhile, place the pan which contains the now blackened vegetables over medium-high heat and add to it the Marsala. Cook, stirring continuously, until the liquid has reduced to a consistency which starts to look syrupy (as with all sauces of this kind, you need only a spoonful of sauce per serving, so don't be hesitant in reducing with enthusiasm!).

8. Press the contents of the pan through a fine sieve, and add one spoonful of sauce to two slices of cooked loin for each serving. The combined flavours of cooking juices, marsala, and melted cheese are sensational!

If this had been April 1st...

...then it might have made some sense. But it wasn't - and the recent piece of deathless prose which appeared under Heston Blumenthal's byline in The Times online left me fairly speechless, and reaching for a calming glass of something. Hard to believe, but the following (paraphrased, in the interests of sanity) is his method for making what is essentially a rich beef tea:

Step one is to make a standard beef stock, sautéing industrial - but peculiarly precise - quantities of meat and vegetables (21.25 kilos of meat, along with 7.5 kilos each of peeled carrots and onions and - although, surely some mistake here ? Ed. - 7.5 kilos of star anise!), which is all then deglazed using 7.5 bottles of red wine. Not 7.62 bottles, or 8.3 bottles, but a definite 7.5...(At this stage I began to wonder if we were in James Hamilton-Patterson territory, and like 'Cooking with Fernet Branca' the whole thing was just one enormous spoof; but it would appear not).

In step two, this 5.625 litres of liquid is reduced by 2/3 to become 1.875 litres, thus removing 3.75 litres of water - but immediately you then add 28 litres of water...which leaves me wondering why you'd bother with the initial reduction, and not just add 24.25 litres of water instead?

In step three, you make a mushroom stock, using 400 ml of Madeira as the deglazing agent, which you then reduce to 50 ml...to which you then add....um....3 litres of water - so why did he not just skip the earlier reduction, and merely add 2.65 litres of water? And in any event, soon after this he reduces the liquid again to 30% of its earlier volume, thus removing 2.17 litres of the water he's just added. Hmmm.

Then you mix together the two stocks and freeze them to make rectangular slabs, which you then sieve very slowly through a fine strainer, which allows you to separate most of the remaining water from the concentrated juices ...which you then re-freeze and then centrifuge (we all have a centrifuge in our batterie de cuisine, right?) in order to get rid of the frozen water...and then , just to be on the safe side, you put the stuff into your centrifugal evaporator (I think that's that thing at the back of the cupboard, just behind the chip pan and to the left of the cheese fondue set) and leave it there for about four hours, to make sure there's absolutely no water left at all, leaving you with half a litre of thick beef syrup.

Phew!

But, there's more. At some subsequent time, the syrup is mixed with madeira and gelatine, and allowed to set into a jellied lump....which, according to Blumenthal, for presentation purposes, is brought to table and served in a teacup, along with....um.....a teapot of boiling water, which you use to reinvigorate your jellied lump of beef syrup, and turn it into a cup of beef tea. (So, you can cross out all those centrifugal evaporators from your Christmas lists, since it seems that everything from the point where you made your frozen rectangular slabs of combined stocks onwards was a complete waste of time.)

Now, an uncharitable interpretation of all of this might be that HB feels the need to distance his cooking methods from those of us lesser mortals by all these ....yawn....impressive and complicated machinations, in order that he can keep the prices and the queues at The Fat Duck firmly in place. A (marginally)less cynical view might be that this is just a bored child playing with his food...

We relayed the whole process to the lady cook of one of the local restaurants here, and her response was somewhat pithier. Having listened , hands on hips and frowning with concentration as she digested the process, her comment, thrown over her shoulder as she made her way back to her busy kitchen, was merely : "Che Cretino!"

If you want to read the original Blumenthal article, then it can be found here.

Tonight's Dinner:

Tuna Tartare.

Rabbit and Garlic, with braised Fennel.

Fresh Peach ice cream.

It's Ferragosto...

Or, strictly speaking, yesterday - being August 15th - was Ferragosto...except that the event appears to have become more of a concept than an actual date, and the midsummer holiday that it betokens will now stretch way into the middle of next week, having wound down into into ever greater levels of somnulent inactivity over the last half of last week. Everybody has left for the beach, town is empty, and in the shattering midday heat, the street outside has a silence you could cut with a knife.

When we first arrived in Pisa, and discovered that Italy too has a holiday on August 15th, we assumed it was the same holiday as in Greece, where it's celebrated as the assumption of the Virgin and is one of the major dates in the church calendar. When we lived there, it was well understood not to travel on the ferry to Athens in mid August, as we lived on the same ferry route as Tinos, and you could be certain that all boats during that period would be packed to the gunwhales with hysterical and over-excited hordes of the (literally) halt and lame, all on their way to ask for a miracle from the wonder-working icon of the Madonna housed in Tinos Cathedral. Or, even worse, the same hordes, but tired, tearful and disappointed, making the return journey afterwards.

In Italy, however, although the church tries vainly to claim Ferragosto as a celebration for the virgin, nobody takes much notice, and what it has resolutely become is a festival in honour of ice-cream and beaches and not getting up until noon, and of doing absolutely, gloriously nothing as the summer holiday extends into one stultifyingly hot day after another...
In fact, even the name itself seems to pre-date christianity, and refers directly back to a festival of Diana that the romans celebrated at around the same time - even as I write that, I wonder if the name was re-introduced as another of Mussolini's strategies for reminding the Italians of their great classical heritage, but to be honest I'm feeling too lazy right now to go and check...

For us, though, Ferragosto is about lazing around at home, and revelling in the silence of the surrounding town. The two chores of the moment which I'm taking steadily - an hour a day at most, every day, in order to render them tolerable over time - are stripping the Caci tree of its unripe fruit (thousands and thousands of the things, all of which will ripen and drop messily at the end of September if left to their own devices) and dead-heading the lavender and laboriously collecting the flower heads in order to have scented bowlfuls of them around the house through into the winter months. At the moment, the smell from the decapitated flowers is heady and intoxicating, and hits with a menthol intensity immediately on entering the kitchen.

It's a hard life!

Tonight's dinner:

Salade aux noisettes (Lambs lettuce and butterball lettuce leaves, dressed in walnut oil & lemon, mixed with crushed hazelnuts and diced emmental)

Boned chicken, roast with basil and shallots and butter under the skin; roast celeriac.

Limoncello Panna Cotta.

Dr. Johnson...

...might not approve, but we're leaving London for Italy again tomorrow, and frankly it's not a moment too soon for me! The weather has been abysmal over the past few weeks...more like October than August...but it hasn't prevented London from descending into mid-summer doldrums that might be appropriate if we were all flaked out with heat-exhaustion, but which in fact merely renders the place....dare I say it....dull!

In true silly-season fashion, there's nothing on at the cinema appropriate for anybody with a mental age over seven, and much the same could be said for current exhibitions: the choice at the RA is either The Summer Exhibition or a second ranking pre-Raphaelite (no, thanks), and the five and a half minutes we devoted to Jeff Koons' show at The Serpentine was probably two and a half minutes more than it actually merited.

At least in Pisa - where temperatures are scorching right now, and the town will be gloriously empty and silent as the grave, with the locals all having taken to the coast or the hills - days can be spent basking and reading and dozing, with appropriate regular re-fuelling with Kir and chilled prosecco, and sun-filled early mornings and lazy afternoon siestas, and candlelight on the terrace during the long, hot, cicada-filled nights.


We appear to have a contract for the property at Santa Caterina (I'm being cautious, as although proxy signings have taken place, and there seems no reason to think that the whole thing isn't a done deal, we still haven't actually had the formal sitting-round-the-table signing session...and until that Fat Lady sings....she hasn't!). But, in any event, we can go and collect the keys when we arrive on Wednesday, and so can spend the next couple of weeks walking the course and indulging in some serious garden planning. And probably we'll have a few days up at Brancoli, as well, to do our own bit of taking to the hills and enjoying mountain breezes, if there are any.

And then, two days after we come back, the mini-four-footed will be joining us...after which, I'm not sure life will ever be dull again!



Tonight's dinner:

Chicken Salad (using leftover chicken from a fricasée with porcini).

Grilled Duck Breast, with garlic, bay and thyme.

Strawberries and Jersey Cream (ok....there are some things in London that I'll miss!)

Recipe: Lemon Sole Fillets in Marsala Sauce

An excellent recipe! Lemon sole is a fish not famous for its flavour - particularly once the head and bones have been removed - and as a result finds itself at the cheaper end of the fishmonger's counter. With this particular treatment, however, the flavour and texture are dramatically improved, and the rich and unctuous sauce that accompanies the fillets would make you believe the whole thing had been cooked on the bone, and the end result is completely delicious!

Simplicity itself to cook, this dish takes five minutes from a standing start, and can easily be made with no prior preparation once the first course has already been cleared.

For two.

Ingredients: 2 Lemon Sole fillets; quarter cup of plain Flour, seasoned with Salt & Pepper; 40g Butter; 3 tbs freshly grated Parmesan; quarter cup of Fish Stock; quarter cup of Marsala (or medium Sherry).

Method:

1. Coat the fillets on both sides with the seasoned Flour.

2. Melt the Butter over medium/high heat in a large heavy frying pan, and fry the fillets a couple of minutes on each side, until they are slightly browned and crisp.

3. Sprinkle 1 tbs of Parmesan on each fillet. Then add the Fish Stock and Marsala (or Sherry) to the pan. Cover the whole thing with a lid, reduce the heat to low and let it cook for two or three minutes. When the lid is removed, the liquid should have reduced almost to nothing.

4. Plate the fillets on heated plates, sprinkle over them the remaining Parmesan, and spoon the sauce over and around them from the pan.

5. Serve with a green vegetable, like mange-touts or beans.

Recipe: Celeriac & Asparagus Terrine

Couldn't be simpler to make, and the flavour and texture of this dish are superb! Excellent as a cold starter, and certainly good enough to present at a dinner party - with the added advantage that it's made entirely in advance.

For 1 terrine, sufficient for eight slices:

Ingredients: 450g Celeriac; 100g Butter; 500 ml Cream; 4 Eggs; Seasoning; 5 Asparagus spears (sprue, ideally, or spears as slender as you can find).

Method:

1. Peel and finely dice the Celeriac, and sauté gently in melted Butter for ten minutes or so, until properly soft. Add Cream and cook for a further minute or so, until the Cream has thickened slightly. Allow to cool.

2. Cook the Asparagus spears in boiling salted water until just done (but still very much on the al dente side).

3. Liquidize the Celeriac/Cream mixture along with the Eggs; season to taste.

4. In a greased (or Trennwaxed) loaf tin or terrine mould, pour a quarter of the Celeriac mixture, then place two of the Asparagus spears on top; add another quarter of the mixture, and a single Asparagus spear; another quarter of mixture and the remaining two Asparagus spears, and finally finish off with the remaining Celeriac mixture.

5. Place the loaf tin or terrine mould in a bain marie and cook for twenty minutes in a 180 degree C oven, then remove from the oven and allow the terrine to cool down.

6. To serve, run a knife round the edge of the terrine and unmould onto a board or platter. Slice carefully with a very sharp knife. and accompany with a salad of endive or fennel.

To The Royal Institution...

...with Jennie, for a lecture on the Antikythera mechanism. Fascinating. Bizarre. Evidence of technological sophistication in Greece in the first century B.C on a level that would normally be associated with Western Europe, one and a half millenia later. The implications are vast, since it suggests a serious re-think about how technologically advanced society actually was in ancient Greece, and that preconceptions hitherto about relatively primitive living conditions at the time could be fundamentally wrong.

As I've discovered I have been in my disdain until now for microwave ovens as anything other than a means of re-heating cold coffee. They do have other uses. Like making Hollandaise in no time at all, for example - as explained in the '70's by Madame Benoit (who had actually been a pupil of Doctor Pomiane himself, in her salad days). And her method works! A third of a cup of butter microwaved for a minute, then two egg yolks, a little salt and a squeeze of lemon juice whisked in, the whole thing microwaved again for 25 seconds, re-whisked....and voila! And all made from scratch during the time the asparagus is already plated and waiting to be served...

Tonight's dinner:

Egg-white Cheese Soufflé (yes, the egg-white mountain is with us once again).

Pork cutlets with mustard butter; lentils with lemon and coriander.

Apples baked with amaretti and hazelnut syrup.