Prometheus-like...

We have fire!

Giancarlo emerged from his year-end hiatus, a couple of days ago, and neatly and efficiently installed the wood stove in the barn (where it has been idly waiting for the past few months, looking pristine and splendid...but not actually attached to a chimney). It works wonderfully, and although primarily intended for use during the shoulder months of the year...drinks in front of the fire in November, for instance, or afternoon tea in March...we resolutely lit it each afternoon this week and sat before it being very British and 'outdoors' in the middle of winter, hugging steaming mugs of tea and commenting to each other on quite how warm we really were.

The four-footeds were less impressed, and ignored the fire entirely...but they raced around anyway, on the basis that anything 'al fresco' seems like cause for a celebration.

Tonight's Dinner:

Scallops with Almonds, in Parsley sauce.

Raie au beurre noire; new potatoes (yes, we are in London for the weekend, and I have been down to Les the Fish, in Bute Street)

Raspberry Tarts.

Recipe: Pasta Sauce with Mascarpone, Gruyère & Cinnamon

Yes, Cinnamon. When divorced from sugar (and I freely admit, I have a weakness for desserts which include generous quantities of both cinnamon and brown sugar), this is a spice with a beguiling bitterness, which, used carefully, can also be a splendid addition to savoury dishes. Here, it is a mere sprinkling over the dish at the point of serving...but the aroma is unmistakable as the plates of steaming pasta are set down - and the bitterness of cinnamon works well both with the sharpness of the gruyère, and as a foil to the creaminess of the mascarpone and egg in the sauce.

Stevie Parle published a distinctly iffy piece on pasta in The Telegraph recently  - where, amongst other sillinesses, he gave the Southern Italian recipe for eggless pasta, as he waxed lyrical about the tuscan countryside around Radicondoli, where you wouldn't find eggless pasta in a million years, intended as it is for piquant southern sauces such as arrabiata and puttanesca, and not for the unctuous coating sauces of Northern Italy. One bit he did get right - although hardly a revelation - is the fact that different sauces are better suited to particular kinds of pasta. And a creamy sauce such as this one is best served with any of the flat-strip kinds of pasta, such as fettucine, tagliatelle, papardelle...any of those. 


This is definitely a sauce for fresh, rather than boxed pasta (which doesn't mean it will be awful with boxed pasta...just that you won't be doing it full justice). Quick and simple, as well as elegant, this dish works equally well for an informal supper as for the pasta course of a grander dinner.


For four:
Ingredients: Pasta dough, made with 1 cup '00' flour, 1 cup semolina flour, 3 medium eggs, generous pinch of salt, and 1 tsp olive oil; 250g Mascarpone; 50g Gruyère (or similar cheese); 1 tbs Butter; 1 Egg yolk; 1 tsp ground Cinnamon; Salt.


Method:


1. Roll the pasta dough into eight strips, following the usual rolling method, lightly flour the surface, and leave to dry for twenty minutes or so; either cut by hand, for broader strips of pasta, or put through the fettucine cutter on the pasta machine.


2. Grate the Gruyère and mix it thoroughly with the Mascarpone and a large pinch of Salt.


3. Cook the pasta in salted water until it is al dente, then drain it, but reserving a cup of cooking water from the pasta.


4. Place the pasta pan back on the stove, and heat the reserved water in it, along with the Butter. Once the Butter has all melted, return the pasta to the pan and cook, stirring , for a couple of minutes. Remove the pan from the heat, and tip over the pasta the Mascarpone mixture, along with the Egg yolk. Stir to mix well, and then serve in four heated dishes.

5. Sprinkle a dusting of ground Cinnamon over the top of each dish, and serve.
 

Allan Bay - A Discovery.

One of this year's parcels under the Christmas tree was a slim volume by an italian food writer by the name of Allan Bay. The book is called 'Cuochi si diventa 2' (which loosely translates as 'Cooks are made, not born'), and is pretty good. The man himself has an interesting history - having spent much of his adult life selling machinery to manufacture light bulbs, in his mid-forties he decided to become a food journalist, rapidly gained a foothold in a number of reputable italian publications, and before he knew it, had been appointed as Professor of cooking at the University of Pavia. Which is presumably a lot more fun than spending one's days pondering the vicissitudes of light-bulb-making machines.

 His style is irreverent and enthusiastic, and he has a curiosity about food which leads to a number of worthwhile culinary departures, all of which are based on a solid foundation of traditional recipes and techniques. The book is mostly a list of actual dishes, but is interspersed, generally amusingly, with sections of 'rants' (I approve...he calls these items 'Political incorrectness') and  'raves', which are his personal culinary weaknesses... He also has a series of one-pagers which he calls ' Si fa, ma non si dice', which means ' It's done, but not talked about' -  which are commercial ingredients which come in bottles and tins and which most self-respecting cook would never admit to having on their pantry shelves...but, of course, we all do. Things like stock cubes, and Worcester sauce, and Colmans Mustard. Allan Bay's list includes things like Campbells tinned soup, and Nestlé sweetened condensed milk. I thoroughly approve - although, I'm immediately reminded of the disapproval at Belforte that met my admission last Christmas that the rosemary sauce I'd just served for fettucine included a teaspoon of chicken stock powder (Knorr); sometimes, it's better just to lie!

Tonight's dinner:

 Tart of Celeriac, Gruyère & Pancetta.

Salsiccie with garlic-roast tomatoes.

Lemon Curd ice-cream.

Technical Glitch...

Still, I can't sort out the problem I've been having with uploading pictures to this blog. A short description on Google of the problem I was having quickly identified that it was nothing to do with my camera-computer interface (so, no need to waste any more time fruitlessly trying to find the camera manual), but that the problem is actually with Google's Blogger programme....and that many, many other  people have been experiencing this problem with their blogs over the past year and more. Uploading images I've copied from elsewhere on the web isn't a problem, but whenever I try to upload a picture of my own I get a 'server rejected' message....and that's as far as I can go.


Hours spent upgrading things, and downloading other things, and cleaning out things, and checking various different settings has proved completely useless. Various dark mutterings from other 'victims' suggest that this might be Google trying to force bloggers to pay in order to use Google's online Picasa function in order to store their images....I can't comment on that....but if I can't sort the problem out p.d.q, then I suppose I'll just have to stop using Google's blog hosting facility and move Pomiane to a different hosting platform. Which will be tedious...but I'm not sure I have any choice.


Watch this space.

Recipe: Almond Marquises

Elegant, light, dinner-partyable, and delicious. As a dessert form, marquises went out of fashion ages ago - I think the last time I saw a recipe for one was in one of Michel Guerard's books, more than twenty years ago - and IMHO they are long overdue for a comeback. This particular version comes from a collection of recipes from Normandy published in 1976 by somebody called Ray Compas (no idea who he or she was, since beyond this particular collection, there was just one other book of dessert recipes, and that constituted the full Compas oeuvre).

My one word of warning concerns the quality of the langues de chat used to line the ramekins - there are plenty of versions of these biscuits commercially available, and I've found that some of them are so light in construction that they effectively dissolve into the marquise filling, and when you come to unmould the marquises, the biscuit 'casing' has disappeared. Not a complete disaster, but the appearance of the marquises is compromised somewhat, and you lose the 'bite' of the biscuit shell, in comparison with the smoothness of the filling. If you can't find good quality langues, then making them is not difficult - Julia Child has a perfectly reliable recipe in Volume 2 of Mastering the Art .

For four individual Marquises:

Ingredients: 125g Butter; 125g Sugar; 125g Ground Almonds; 250 ml Milk; 1 tsp Vanilla essence; 3 Egg Yolks; approx 150g langues de chats

Method:

1. Cream the Butter with the Sugar (I use an elctric whisk for this); once properly creamed, add to this the Almonds and continue beating until thoroughly amalgamated.

2. In a separate pan (or simmertopf), heat the Milk with the Vanilla, then pour onto the beaten egg yolks in a bowl; mix together, then return the mixture to the pan and continue cooking gently, to make a light custard. Leave to cool, then mix into this the almond-butter-sugar mixture.

4. Grease 4 individual ramekins, and then line the base and sides of each one with langues de chat (cut the ends off with a knife if necessary, before lining the ramekins, in order to have a good clean fit and to ensure the ends of the biscuits don't stand proud of the side of the ramekin).

5. Fill each lined ramekin with the almond mixture; cover the base with remaining biscuits, then place in the fridge for several hours to firm.

6. Run a small knife round the edge of each marquise in order to loosen from the ramekin before unmoulding onto individual serving plates.

And the last Day of Christmas...

...was in fact yesterday, but since today is Ebufana and therefore another public holiday, it feels as though this is still the final gasp of the Christmas break. The tree will come down today, to go out in the garden to be planted, and then that's it for another year.

Now is the best time to buy Christmas decorations, so I've just gone online to find replacements for the ones which didn't survive this year's festive season (breakages which were nothing to do with me, I hasten to add!). And we're still wondering what happened to the ones I bought last January, which we both remember unwrapping when they arrived, but when it came down to it, neither of us could recall where they were then put for safekeeping- some rather beautiful crystal droplets, I remember, that would have looked splendid on the tree (and possibly might yet, another year, if we ever find them again)

Much Christmas largesse, in the form of books by various lesser-known (or not published in the last few decades, at any rate) food writers: Allan Bay; Ray Compas; Simone Beck; Sonia Stevenson (two from her!); Alain Ducasse (which I mentioned in an earlier post); and Elisabeth Luard. The Technical Department must be feeling seriously in need of greater variety in dinner menus. Last night's supper included two new dishes: a starter of poached egg on a potato galette, dressed with a leek-cream sauce.....and dessert was individual almond marquises...both of which were excellent - so, I suppose his strategy works.

Perfect! - the sun is coming out, so I can let the junior four-footed out into the garden, and get on with transplanting things...half a dozen roses are getting a new home, and I need to move one of the smaller peach trees from one side of the North Lawn to the other.

No pictures in this post, as my camera and computer don't want to talk to each other at the moment, and the thought of trying to locate the instruction book for either, right now, is not something I can even bear to contemplate.

Tonight's Dinner:

Pain de Laitue

Shepherds Pie (made with the last of the half-lamb which we bought as a complete carcase from one fo the farmers in Belforte, and roast for dinner over New Year)

Lemon Cream.

Recipe: Cream & Walnut Tart

I've been playing with this recipe for some time now, and it's taken quite a few attempts before being satisfied that I've worked out exactly how to get the result I want - which is a rich, but light cream tart, against the sweetness of which the slight but insistent bitterness of fresh walnuts works perfectly. This tart has all of the luxurious self-indulgence of a white chocolate ganache, but without the cloying richness which tends to make white chocolate tart heavy going after a mouthful or two.

The recipe is both simple and challenging at the same time: there are really only three steps involved, but the process of reducing the cream for the filling will differ depending entirely on the fat content of the cream you use - with italian cream, which is somewhere between single and double cream, I need to reduce it for an hour before I've got all of the water out; but with double cream, if I'm making this in the UK, then it will be sufficiently reduced in about half that time. The secret is to stand over the pan, the first time you make the tart, and keep an eagle eye on it: the cream will be sufficiently reduced at the point where it becomes very thick (the consistency of porridge, really) and starts, very slightly to change colour (which I imagine is the sugar within the mixture starting to caramelise, once all the water has been removed from the cream). At this point, the cream can be removed from the heat, as it will now set properly once it has been poured into the pastry shell, such that after several hours it can be cut into neat slices; if the water hasn't all been removed from the cream, then it will never thicken properly, and when you come to cut the tart, the filling will run all over the place.

It's worth getting it right - the result really is delicious. Even more so if served with a few fresh raspberries.

For an 8" diameter tart.

Ingredients: Shortcrust pastry, made with 125g Butter, 300g Flour, 50 ml cld water, & a large pinch of Salt; 750 ml Cream (see note above); 60g Sugar; 10 Walnuts, either in halves or in large pieces.

Method:

1. Grease an 8" false-bottomed tart tin, and line it with the rolled-out shortcrust pastry. Bake blind for ten or fifteen minutes in a 200 degree C oven, then remove the weights and finish baking it completely for another ten minutes or so, until the base of the pastry shell is crisp and golden brown. Leave aside to cool.

2. Put the Cream and Sugar into a saucepan and bring to the boil over a medium heat. As soon as the Cream begins to bubble, reduce the heat so that the Cream visibly simmers and keep it at that temperature as the liquid reduces, stirring frequently. (The level of heat required will again depend on the sort of Cream being used; in Italy, if I go down to the lowest flame, then the cream stops simmering, but with thicker cream, in London, not only does the flame have to be as low as possible, but I also have to put the pan over a heat-diffuser - the first time of doing it has to be a process of trial-and-error). Carry on reducing the Cream until it is very thick, and begins very slightly to colour. At this point, take the pan off the heat.

3. Arrange the Walnut pieces in the base of the cooked pastry shell. Transfer the Cream to a jug, and carefully pour it over the Walnuts, until the shell is filled (best to pour over the back of a spoon, as this diffuses the flow of the cream, and stops all of the walnut pieces from being pushed to the edge of the tart).

4. Leave to 'set' for at least four hours. Best left in a cool place to do this, although NOT in the fridge, as this will just make the pastry soggy.

Enjoy!