Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (38 page)

Put the macaroni prepared in this fashion into a Dutch oven or under an iron hood heated from above. When browned, serve hot as an
entremets
, or preferably, as a side dish for meat.

Take high-quality lamb cutlets, strip the bone to expose it, pound, smooth out, and sauté in a skillet with a little butter but without any other spices. Season while hot with salt and pepper, and put to one side.

Prepare a rather firm béchamel, add to it prosciutto and salted tongue cut into very tiny cubes, a pinch of grated Parmesan cheese, a dash of nutmeg, one sliced truffle or minced dried mushrooms reconstituted in water. Put this mixture also to one side until well cooled.

Make enough puff pastry dough (see recipe 154) to wrap the cutlets one by one, allowing the bone to show, but first generously coat both sides of the cutlets with the mixture. Once the cutlets are wrapped, brush the dough with egg yolk, and place each piece upright
around the edge of a baking pan. Cook in a Dutch oven and serve hot. They will be praised by all and held to be a dish of fine cuisine.

You may cut the puff pastry using a paper pattern, so that the envelopes will turn out more even. For a tidier and more elegant look, decorate the tips of the bone in each cutlet with purled white paper before sending the dish to the table.

These cutlets, which the French call
cotelettes en papillote
, may be prepared in the following manner, as it is the simplest and therefore not to be scoffed at. Take cutlets of milk-fed veal, strip the bone of meat to better expose it, saute in butter, and season with salt and pepper. Prepare a sufficient quantity of finely minced untrimmed prosciutto and parsley, adding butter and soft bread crumbs to bind the mixture. Generously coat the cutlets on both sides with this mixture and embellish them with shavings of raw truffle.

Take some rather thick paper and cut out a pattern to follow the curve of the cutlets, grease the paper with butter or olive oil on both sides and wrap the cutlets tightly in it, allowing the bone to show. Now place on a grill over a light flame, making sure the paper does not catch fire, then serve. For greater tidiness and elegance, wrap the tip of each cutlet in purled white paper. You can also make this dish with lamb chops, provided they are large enough.

Ferrara sausages are a specialty of that region. They are shaped like “bondiola”
⁵⁴
sausages and weigh about 500 grams (about 1 pound). They are very spicy and flavorful. Unlike other cured meats of this genre, they improve with age, and ordinarily they are eaten when they have matured. When you are ready to use them, wash them a number of times in lukewarm water to get rid of the greasy film that covers them. Put on the fire in a generous amount of cool water and allow to simmer slowly for no more than one and a half hours, wrapped tightly in a cheesecloth so that the skin does not break. Serve hot with a side dish, as you would with cotechino. Sometimes, however, there is no sign of the sauce they are famous for, or if there is some, it is very little.

In large cities, a good cook is, to use a poor simile, like an army general with many well-armed legions at his disposal in a vast well-fortified battlefield, where he can demonstrate the full extent of his military prowess. Furthermore, large cities are graced not only by all of God’s bounty but also by people who make it their business to provide all sorts of little trifles, which even though unimportant in themselves, nonetheless contribute significantly to the variety, elegance and precision of your culinary efforts. This is why, just as you can find thin loaves of bread that, when sliced, slide nicely onto spits together with birds for roasting, you can also find rolls the size of ordinary apples, made just to be stuffed.

With a grater, lightly scrape off the crust from the rolls and in the middle of each remove a disk the size of an average coin making a small round hole. Carve out the inside of the roll, leaving, however, a rather thick wall all around. Bathe them inside and out in boiling milk, and when they are pretty well soaked, cap the hole with the disk you had removed, and which you have also soaked in milk. Then dip in egg, and fry in lard or olive oil, placing them in a skillet with the hole side down, so that they stay shut. Afterwards, with the point of a penknife, reopen the hole, and fill the rolls with a delicate meat stuffing which you have kept quite warm. Reseal the rolls and send them to the table. If you make them right, they will cut an excellent figure on any dinner table.

The meat stuffing, consisting of chickpea-size chunks, is best made with chicken livers, white chicken meat, sweetbreads and the like, and then cooked in brown stock and bound with a pinch of flour. But what you absolutely must have, to make the mixture tastier, are truffles.

Here too, I can hardly refrain from railing against the disinclination we Italians have for commerce and industry. In some Italian provinces, chestnut flour is completely unknown and I think no one has ever even tried to introduce it. And yet for common folk, and for those unafraid of wind, it is a cheap, healthy and nutritious food.

I questioned a street vendor in Romagna on the subject. I described this chestnut cake to her, and asked why she did not try to earn a few pennies selling it. “What can I tell you?” she replied, “It’s too sweet; nobody would eat it.” “But those “cottarone” you are selling, aren’t they sweet? Still, they are selling.” I said. “Why don’t you at least try the chestnut cake,” I added. “At first, distribute them free to the children, give them a piece as a gift to see if they start liking the taste. And then the grown-ups are very likely to come after the children.” It was no use; I might as well have been talking to a stone wall.

“Cottarone,” for those who do not know them, are apples and pears, mostly overripe, that are stewed in the oven in a small pan with a little water in it, while the top of the pan is covered with a moist kitchen towel. But let us turn to the very simple way to make this chestnut cake.

Take 500 grams (about 1 pound) of chestnut flour, and because it easily clumps up, sift before using it to make it soft and fluffy. Then put it into a bowl and season with a small pinch of salt. This done, add 8 deciliters (about 3-1/3 cups) of cool water, pouring it in a little at a time, until the mixture has the consistency of a runny porridge into which you will throw a handful of pine nuts. Some people supplement the pine nuts with chopped walnuts; others add raisins and a few rosemary leaves.

Now take a baking pan where the chestnut cake can rise to a thickness of one and half fingers. Cover the bottom with a thin layer of olive oil, pour in the chestnut porridge, and sprinkle another two
tablespoons of olive oil on top. Take it to the baker to cook in the oven or bake it at home in a Dutch oven with fire above and below. Remove and serve hot.

You can also make fritters with this batter.

This is a very ordinary dish, but it will not displease those who like corn flour, and it will not produce stomach acid. And little children will jump for joy every time mamma serves it hot for breakfast in the winter time.

Corn meal is always best when ground rather coarse.

Place in a container the amount of flour you are planning to use. Salt well and mix with boiling water until it forms a firm dough. When there is no dry flour left at the bottom of the bowl, add raisins or dried Muscat grapes in due proportion. Local raisins are preferable, in certain cases, to the sweet Muscat variety because they maintain a pleasant slight acidity. Take a copper baking pan and put it on the fire with a generous amount of virgin lard, and when the lard starts to sizzle, pour in the dough, which, if kneaded to the right consistency, needs to be spread and smoothed out with a mixing spoon. Coat the top of the cake with a little more lard and adorn with small sprigs of fresh rosemary. Bake in the oven at the baker’s or in Dutch oven with fire above and below. Allow to brown and then remove from the pan. With this mixture you can also make fritters, but leave out the rosemary.

The best cornmeal I know comes from Arezzo, where the corn is carefully tended and dried in ovens.

This is a fancier dish than the preceding one.

300 grams (about 10-1/2 ounces) of corn meal

100 grams (about 3-1/2 ounces) of dried zibibbo grapes or raisins

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

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of pine nuts

3 teaspoons of sugar

Remove the seeds from the grapes, cut the pine nuts in half lengthwise. Grease the pan with lard and coat with flour. In every other respect follow the preceding recipe.

Eggs and sausages together do not make for bad company, nor for that matter does diced bacon. Since the eggs are somewhat bland, and the sausages or bacon are very savory, their marriage produces a taste that delights many, even though we are talking about ordinary dishes.

If the sausage is fresh, cut it in two lengthwise and place in an ungreased pan without condiments, because it contains enough by itself. If dried, cut the sausage into slices and remove the skin. Once the sausage is done, crack the eggs over it and serve when they have firmed up. For every normal-sized sausage, one or at most two eggs will do.

If the sausages are too lean, prepare with a little butter or lard. If you are using bacon instead of sausage, add a small pat of butter, and then the eggs, after you have whisked them separately.

This is a trivial and ordinary dish, but I mention it because sausages, combined with the bittersweet taste of grapes, might tickle someone’s taste buds.

Poke the sausages with the tines of a fork and then place them whole in a kettle with a little lard or butter. When done, add a reasonable amount of whole grapes, and simmer until these have lost half their volume.

If they are to be eaten alone, sausages can be grilled or also boiled whole in a pot with a little water.

When you are having boiled pullet or capon, send them to the table with a side dish of rice, as they go well together. To avoid using too much broth, first blanch the rice in water, and then finish cooking it in the broth made by the chicken. Make the rice firm and when nearly done, flavor it with butter and a little Parmesan cheese. If you are using 200 grams (about 7 ounces) of rice, bind it with one egg, or better still, with two yolks as you remove it from the fire.

If you are serving the rice with a stew of milk-fed veal or veal chops, rather than with boiled chicken, in addition to the ingredients mentioned above add two or three tablespoons of spinach which you have boiled and passed through a sieve. In this way your rice will be green and have a more refined flavor.

If you want to give a more handsome appearance to these side dishes, put the rice in a mold and place in
bain-marie
, making sure it does not harden too much. That would be a serious flaw.

This is another family-style dish, this time from Tuscany, inexpensive and relatively tasty. It will do for lunch, as an appetizer or an
entremets
for a family dinner. I do not know why it is not popular elsewhere in Italy.

Prepare the artichokes in the manner described in recipe 186. After shaking off the excess flour, spread them out in a baking dish where a fair amount of good olive oil is already sizzling. When the artichoke slices have browned on both sides, pour beaten eggs over them, but be sure not to overcook. Add salt and pepper to taste, some on the artichokes and some in the eggs before you pour them in.