Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (25 page)

This, like macaroni Bolognese style, is a first course that comes in handy in family cooking: you need only a small pot of broth from the day before, so you save the time and expense of making a fresh meat broth. If you prefer the dish meatless, substitute milk for the broth.

Gruyère, also known commercially as Emmenthal, is a cheese that comes in very large round wheels. It has a soft flesh, yellow in color and full of holes. Some people do not like its distinctive smell, which can be rather sharp and unpleasant. However, you should note that during the cold season this smell is quite weak, and in pasta dishes it will be hardly noticed.

I guarantee that this dish is genuine and well tested, as it is based on a recipe I obtained from a family in Santa Maria Capua Vetere. I must also tell you that for a long time I hesitated about trying out this recipe, not being entirely won over by the hodgepodge of spices and flavors. To tell the truth, the dish did not turn out at all badly; indeed, it may appeal to those whose taste buds are not categorically in favor of simplicity.

Take a piece of beef flank and lard it with strips of untrimmed prosciutto, zibibbo raisins, pine nuts, and a little battuto of lardoon, garlic, parsley, salt and pepper. After you have prepared the meat in this manner and bound it with twine to keep it together, put it on the fire with a battuto of salt pork, and finely chopped onion. Turn the meat often and poke it occasionally with a larding needle. Once the meat is browned and the soffritto all absorbed, add three or four pieces of peeled tomatoes. When these have dissolved, add some puréed tomato sauce a little at a time. Wait until the sauce is rather concentrated, then add enough water to cover the meat. Salt and pepper to taste, and allow it to simmer over a low flame. If you do
not have any fresh tomatoes, use tomato paste. This is the sauce for the macaroni, which should also be seasoned with sharp cheese, as is done in Naples. The meat is served on the side.

As for the macaroni themselves, the Neapolitans recommend that they should be boiled in a large pot, with lots of water, and not cooked too long.

This is a much simpler way to prepare macaroni, and the result is so tasty I advise you to try it.

300 grams (about 10-1/2 ounces) of long macaroni are sufficient for three people. Start by frying two large onion slices in 30 grams (about 1 ounce) of butter and two tablespoons of olive oil. When the onion turns a nice golden brown and begins to dissolve, press it well with a wooden spoon against the sides of the saucepan squeezing all the fat out, then discard it. Add 500 grams (about 1 pound) of tomatoes and a good pinch of coarsely chopped basil to the bubbling fat. Salt and pepper to taste. Remember to prepare the tomatoes in advance: they should be peeled and cut into chunks, removing the seeds as best you can (if some remain they will not spoil the dish).

Thicken the sauce with 50 grams (about 1-2/3 ounces) of butter and some Parmesan cheese, pour it over the macaroni and then send to the table. People who like their pasta swimming in sauce will find this dish especially appealing.

Instead of long macaroni, you can also use penne, which in fact absorb this sauce even better.

For this dish, the Bolognese use medium-size “denti di cavallo” (“horse teeth”) whose shape, I would agree, is best suited to make this recipe. Make sure, however, to roll out the dough quite thick when you make
this pasta, so that it will not get damaged while boiling. The Tuscans seem not to take sufficient precautions in this regard. Due to their preference for light food, they have developed varieties of pasta they call
genteel
, with large holes and thin walls, which hardly remain firm during cooking and collapse when boiled—something that is as unpleasant to see as it is to eat.

As everybody knows, the best pastas to use are those made of durum wheat. These can be easily identified because of their natural waxy color. Avoid yellow pastas, which are made with ordinary wheat and then colored to mask the lower quality. In the past, mostly harmless substances like saffron and crocus were used, while today an artificial dye is employed.

The following amounts should be more or less enough to make a sauce for 500 grams (about 1 pound) of pasta and maybe a little more.

150 grams (about 5-1/4 ounces) of lean veal (fillet is best
)

50 grams (about 1 -2/3 ounces) of bacon

40 grams (about 1-1/3 ounces) of butter

1/4 of an ordinary onion

1/2 of a carrot

2 palm-length stalks of white celery, or a little of the tender part of green celery

a small pinch of flour

a small pot of broth1

very little salt or none at all, because of the bacon and the broth are both very flavorful

pepper and, for those who like it, a dash of nutmeg

Cut the meat into little cubes and mince the bacon and the herbs finely with a mezzaluna. Put all the main ingredients on the fire with the butter. When the meat has browned, add the pinch of flour and then cook in broth until done.

Drain the macaroni well; flavor them with this sauce and Parmesan cheese. The sauce can be made even tastier adding small pieces of dried mushroom, a few truffle slices, or a chicken liver cooked with the meat and cut into tiny chunks. When everything
has been combined together, and the sauce is completely done, you can add as a final touch half a glass of cream—this will make an even more delicate dish. Remember, in any case, that the macaroni should not be served too dry, but rather well coated in sauce.

As we are speaking of pasta,
²²
a few remarks come to mind. Pasta must not be overcooked; but let us meditate a little on this. If the pasta is al dente, it will be more pleasant to the taste and more easily digested. This may seem paradoxical, but so it is, for when pasta is overcooked, and not sufficiently chewed, it goes down in a lump, weighs heavily on the stomach and becomes an indigestible mass. Whereas, when it can only be chewed, the mastication produces saliva, which contains an enzyme called ptyalin, and this enzyme helps to break down the starch, turning it into sugar and dextrin.

Saliva has a very important physiological function not only because it helps to soften and break down food, but also because it facilitates swallowing. Furthermore, its alkaline nature promotes the secretion of gastric juices in the stomach while the food is being swallowed. For this reason nursemaids are right to engage in that disgusting practice of pre-chewing mouthfuls of food for little babies.

It is said that the Neapolitans, great consumers of pasta, always drink a glass of water with it to aid digestion. I do not know if in this case the water acts as a solvent, or if it is helpful because it is easier on the stomach than the glass of wine or similar substance which it replaces.

When it is larger and longer than the one used in this recipe, horse teeth pasta is called “cannelloni” in Tuscany and “buconotti” or “strozzapreti”
²³
elsewhere in Italy.

For this pasta 1 am indebted to a very clever widow whose husband, a Sicilian, used to amuse himself by experimenting with certain dishes of his homeland, among them hake Palermo style and poached sliced fish.

500 grams (about 1 pound) of long Neapolitan-style macaroni

500 grams (about 1 pound) of fresh sardines

6 salted anchovies

300 grams (about 10-1/2 ounces) of wild fennel stalks, also called new fennel

olive oil, as needed

Clean the sardines, remove the head, tail and spine; then split them in half, dredge in flour, fry, salt, and put aside.

Boil the fennel, squeeze dry, mince finely, and put to one side.

After you have cooked the pasta, whole, in salted water, drain and also place to one side.

Heat in a skillet a generous quantity of olive oil and the six anchovies until they dissolve (remember to clean and remove the spines from the anchovies before you cook them). Add the fennel to this sauce, season with salt and pepper to taste, and let boil for ten minutes in tomato sauce (recipe 6) or tomato paste diluted with water. Now that everything is ready, take a fireproof platter or baking pan, and arrange the macaroni in layers with in between the sardines, fennel and anchovy sauce. The last layer should reach the rim of the pan. Bake with embers all around, and send to the table hot.

These amounts serve six to seven people.

The gnocchi family is very large. I have already described gnocchi in broth in recipe 14. Here I shall present potato gnocchi, yellow flour gnocchi for stew, and, later on, semolina gnocchi, gnocchi Roman style as an
entremets
or a side dish, and finally a milk gnocchi dessert.

400 grams (about 14 ounces) of large yellow potatoes

150 grams (about 51/4 ounces) of wheat flour

I indicate the amount of flour required for kneading the gnocchi, so that you will not experience what happened to a woman whose cooking
I was observing: the moment she put her wooden spoon into the hot water to stir them, the gnocchi disappeared. “But where did they go?” asked, with anxious curiosity, another woman to whom I had told the story for laughs. Perhaps she thought some little sprite had carried them off.

“Do not be so surprised, my dear lady,” I answered. “This strange phenomenon is perfectly natural: the gnocchi had been mixed with too little flour, and as soon as they hit the water, they liquefied.”

Boil the potatoes in water, or better still, steam them, and while they are steaming hot, peel them and pass them through a sieve. Then mix them with the flour, and knead the dough for a while with your hands, finally rolling it out into a slender cylinder that you can cut into little pieces about 3 centimeters (about 1-1/5 inches) long. Sprinkle each piece lightly with flour. Picking them up one at a time, roll them against the back of a cheese grater, pressing gently with your thumb (your thumb will leave a small depression on one side of each dumpling). Boil in salted water for 10 minutes. Drain and season with cheese, butter and tomato sauce (recipe 6) to taste.

If you wish them to turn out more refined, boil in milk and serve undrained. If the milk is of high quality, you will not need any other seasoning except salt, or at most a pinch of Parmesan cheese.

When you have overeaten and experience a feeling of fullness, you may find a remedy in a dish of cornmeal gnocchi, which are very light and of little substance. The benefits are even greater if after the gnocchi you eat an easily digested fish course.

The best corn flour for this purpose is the coarsely ground variety. Otherwise, it is best to use corn semolina, which you can now find at the grocer. Salt the water and when it boils, pour in the flour a little at a time with the your left hand, mixing constantly with the wooden spoon in your right hand. The corn flour must cook for a good while, until it has been reduced to the point that the mixing spoon stands up straight in it. Then with a table knife shape small pieces of dough and arrange them in layers in a deep serving dish. Flavor each layer with cheese, butter, and tomato sauce (recipe 6) or
tomato paste diluted with water. Make a nice mound in the serving dish, and send to the table hot.

If you’d like to add more flavor to this dish, you can prepare the gnocchi like polenta with sausage described in recipe 232, or like the macaroni Bolognese style in recipe 7.

I present this not as a refined dish, but as one suitable for family cooking.

Take a domestic duck, put it into a saucepan with some butter, season with salt and pepper, and when it begins to brown, add a battuto made with prosciutto, onion, celery and carrot, which you will place under the bird to cook. Remember to turn the duck regularly. Then remove most of the fat, as it will make the dish excessively heavy, and continue cooking with broth and water, which you will added a little at a time and in such quantity as will yield enough sauce to season the pappardelle.