The Umbrella Pines by the Villa Giulia
August 19th, 2010
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il bel paese
August 10th, 2010
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What You Can Do With Your Marmalade
May 1st, 2010
So, you’ve read The Book of Love. Now what do you do with yourself? The sequel, The Fragment of Dreams, won’t be released until next April. So how to kill time until then?
I suggest you turn to the end papers of The Book of Love, to the Blood
Orange and Amaro Marmalade recipe. The best place for the marmalade is on toast, as an accompaniment to your morning cup of tea. This is not a marmalade that improves with age, so hop in and eat it as soon as you can. The bitterness that cuts through the sugar fades over time, in a similar fashion to memories of sleepless nights with infants – you only remember the sweetness of their breath, and not the fact that you wanted to leave the bawling infant with the circus.
Should you be sated with toast and marmalade I offer this recipe …
This dessert, like tiramisu, is assembled, rather than cooked and uses savoiardi (ladyfingers) as a sort of building block. It’s a Neapolitan dish from one of my favourite books, Naples At Table by Arthur Schwartz, (HarperCollins). If you’ve lived in Naples or Campania, holidayed there or are lucky enough to know people who were born there and really enjoy cooking, then you’ll recognise many of the recipes in this book. These are the everyday cook’s recipes, many of which I’ve seen made by locals or eaten in Campanian homes, simple recipes yet full of cultural history and mythical associations.
I’ve fiddled with this recipe to suit my tastes – it is an American book, and we do things differently when it comes to food – so if you want another version of it, track down the book.
Delizia Di Marmellata
500g fresh ricotta
2 tablespoons heavy cream
2 tablespoons caster sugar
½ cup of marmalade
¼ cup Amaro or Grand Marnier
¼ cup water
18 savoiardi
Beat the sugar into the ricotta until the sugar is dissolved. Blend the cream into the ricotta so it is spreadable but not runny. Melt the marmalade a little – maybe 15 seconds in a microwave. Pour the water and liqueur into a shallow dish and choose a flat plate on which to assemble the dessert.
Dip the savoiardi in the liqueur and water, rolling quickly and arrange six of them snugly together on the plate. Spread this layer with some of the ricotta mixture and drizzle with the marmalade, repeat the layers finishing with the savoiardi which you glaze with the marmalade. Refrigerate for three to four hours and serve with candied orange peel as a garnish.
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“And, after all, what is a lie? ‘Tis but the truth in a masquerade.”
April 17th, 2010
Title quote, Lord Byron
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An Italian Easter treat
April 1st, 2010
Because it’s Easter and because Lily and William spent Easter together in Italy I’m reblogging the recipe for this delicious traditional Southern Italian tart.
Pastiera Napoletana
I make this tart every Easter, and only at Easter, despite pleas to make an exception “just this once”. I think it tastes better if eaten only at Easter.
Some people would say turkey always tastes better at Christmas, but nothing, to my mind, could make turkey taste better – other than exchanging it for duck.
The pastiera is made in Naples and throughout the region of Campania. Families may make up to five or six to share with visitors over the Easter period and to take on picnics on the Pasqua, or ‘little Easter’ celebrated on Easter Monday.
I make only one, and it’s usually devoured by Easter Sunday.
Georgio Locatelli says of the tart …
‘The combination of ingredients may seem strange but they are associated with ancient Roman celebrations of the rite of spring; flowers, eggs for new life, ricotta from the ewes, wheat and flour from the land…One of the many legends associated with the dish involves the siren Partenope…she lived in the Gulf of Naples and to celebrate the arrival of spring she would come and sing to the inhabitants.
One year, to say thank you for her songs, they offered her local gifts – ricotta, flour, eggs, wheat, perfumed orange flowers and spices. She was so delighted she took them to her kingdom under the sea where the Gods mixed them together into a cake.’
I give Locatelli’s recipe which I have modified.
I use pearl barley instead of wheat as the particular sort of wheat required is only sold in some Italian shops, and only at this time of year, and I am not a purist.
I use a twenty-six centimetre flan tin and I buy the sweet shortcrust pastry.
Line tin, bake blind and cool.
Preheat your oven to around 160 degrees (fan forced)
75 g pearl barley, boiled until tender
500 g fresh sweet ricotta
4 tsp orange flower water
½ tsp grated lemon rind
200 g caster sugar
50 g chopped candied citron (or orange peel)
4 egg yolks
4 egg whites whisked until stiff but not dry
Drain off as much of the liquid from the ricotta as you can. Mix it with the orange flower water, grated lemon rind, sugar, candied citron and four egg yokes. Add the drained barley and mix. Fold in the beaten egg whites.
Fill the pastry flan shell. Use left over pastry to make a lattice over the ricotta mixture. Bake for about an hour or until coloured. If a skewer comes out clean, take it out of the oven, cool in the tin, serve dusted with icing sugar with a strong Italian coffee on the side and a thank you to Partenope.
Georgio Locatelli, Made in Italy: Food and Stories, Fourth Estate, London, 2006
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From Rome to Lucca
March 9th, 2010
“William grabbed the bottle from her hands, put it on the ground where it rolled away, gin splashing out onto the asphalt. He pushed her back up, saying nothing, got back in the drivers seat, pulled out onto the autostrada, gunning the engine, his knuckles clenched white on the steering wheel. The headlights switched on automatically as they raced north, Lily lapsed into a stupor, eyes shut, breathing out pure alcohol. William’s eyes were wide open. They passed the exit to Florence turned west and sped past Pistoia and on to Montecatini, where he turned off the autostrada and onto a back road.”
The Book of Love, Hachette Australia, April 2010
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Lily in Lucca
February 17th, 2010
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A Beautiful Nightshade
February 13th, 2010
Eggplant, melanzane or aubergine – all the same and all beloved by me. If I were allowed two vegetables only for the next year, one of them would be eggplant. It’s a vegetable favoured all throughout the Mediterranean and particularly in Italy. There’s a huge variety, within Italian regions and between, in the preparation and cooking of the eggplant, but the region I am most familiar with is Campania and Naples.
Non Italians sometimes make the mistake of assuming the cooking of the south of Italy IS Italian cooking. It’s not; it is the cuisine the poor Italian migrants took with them when they fled the poverty of the south. Countries like Australia and the US adopted pasta and pizza and now turn out abominations under the label ‘Italian.’ That’s because these foods, particularly pizza, are cheap to make and lend themselves to the modern notion of ‘fast food’. You rarely see eggplant in these pizza/pasta establishments because people go, ‘Eww, what’s that?’ and won’t eat it, preferring vast amounts of cheese and processed ‘meat’.
Eggplant doesn’t yield its beautiful nature quickly, it’s not fast, you need to take time with it. However, if you move up one level from the pasta/pizza cuisine you might find the Eggplant Parmigiana, but you are more likely to find it’s easier cousin the ubiquitous (in Australian pubs, at least), Schnitzel Parma-jarma. This consists of a deep fried piece of beef schnitzel, plonked on a plate and covered in tomato sauce and cheese and whacked under the griller, served with chips and a sad piece of iceberg lettuce. And BIG, half the plate usually.
Again, this is a dish favoured by endlessly hungry young males, although I saw it on a menu at the Parndana Hotel on Kangaroo Island, listed next to their special – the one kilo steak. Yes, a one kilo steak. The publican told me nobody had ever managed to finish one of these, even during shearing season when blokes around twenty, who’d been shearing since six am and had worked up a mighty hunger, came in, sank a few ales, got a bit cocky and ordered this orgy of meat.
But back to the original Eggplant Parmigiana. Its name does not come from the variety of cheese used, as Mary Taylor Simetti explains – ‘Sicilians have a word, palmigiana, that means ‘shutter’ and that stems from the resemblance between the overlapping louvres of a shutter.’* The overlapping eggplant slices resemble the shutters and hence the name. She says Sicilians cannot produce ‘L’ and ‘palmigiana’ became ‘parmigiana’. I love this sort of useless information.
I was taught to make Eggplant Parmigiana by an elderly Campanian woman and the way she prepared it literally took all day – eliminating it from the fast food realm. Her method is a classic example of the cuisine of poverty – take a few cheap, plentiful ingredients and work them hard. She knew about hard work - after raising three of her five children in a one-room house and doing her washing at midnight in a stream at the bottom of the hill. This was a woman who never took her washing machine for granted.
I’ve been around other Italian women, some of that generation, some younger, who butcher pigs and use everything – days of unbelievably hard yakka, grow and bottle their own tomatoes – not as quaint and colourful as the movies would have us believe, and rise before dawn to strip an orchard of olives to take to the local olive press. I’ve been at an olive pick and after half an hour in the sun and wind, wanted to say, ‘Why don’t we just go down to the shop and buy the oil?’ I’d wanted a quaint, rustic experience among the olive trees - a basket on my hip, bare feet, swishing red skirt and smouldering looks exchanged beneath trees ripe with fruit. You know, just like in the movies. But the best thing about picking olives is stopping.
To make the Eggplant Parmigiana, my Campanian friend sliced the eggplant into centimetre thick slices, sprinkled them with salt and left them while the bitter juices were drawn out. Then she’d dry them, place them on racks in the sun for most of the day until a little bit leathery. The next step was to dredge them in egg and flour and fry until golden, making sure there was no excess oil left on the slices. Then she’d layer them alternately with regato cheese and her incomparable tomato and basil sauce, bake in the oven for half an hour then serve. The next day small squares would be served cold as part of an antipasti. It’s a huge effort, one that few people have the time for anymore, but it’s an effort that results, eaten with salad, good bread and wine, in a memorable meal – if you have any energy left to eat.
Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food, Mary Taylor Simetti, Ecco Press, 1989
For more of an insight into life in Southern Italy until relatively recently, I recommend these books – particularly Ann Cornelisen’s two books for her moving accounts of the women’s lives
Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi
Torregreca; Life Death and Miracles in a Southern Italian Village, Ann Cornelisen
Women of the Shadows; Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy, Ann Cornelisen
Old Calabria, Norman Douglas
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More Lovely Bones
February 10th, 2010
The first years of an undergraduate course in archaeology are as dry as a salt lake in a drought. This is how they filter the students. Those who understand the serious disciplines involved, and those whose heads are full of lost civilizations, discovery of.
Anthropology is the same. Years ago I joined the happy throng of first years in the Anthropology lecture hall at university, pen poised and eyes bright. But dreams of Margaret Mead type investigations of some isolated human group rapidly dissipated as the first half of the year was devoted to the study of traditional Aboriginal kinship systems. These systems are as complex as their material culture is simple, and for one such as I – firmly wedged into the unrealistic/daydream slot – quite a struggle to come to grips with.
I like the big picture, details trip me up and I increasingly found myself alienated from both subjects. As students it was driven home to us that archaeology is the study of material culture and any speculations on what the remains of the material culture may signify should be left to those who’d studied and worked for years in the field and were able to formulate educated, cautious theories as to what had happened and why. For example, it is impossible to truly know the inner world of a Neolithic farmer from the fossilised remains of wheat seeds.
You are courting ridicule in the archaeological world if you do publish these speculations. Archaeology has aligned itself, in the last hundred years or so, with science and the objective observation model, (there’s a lot more to it than that, but you can read a book about it if you like). I have a lot of respect for that model – it weans out the charlatans who tell people the Pyramids were built by aliens or that Jesus really wore the Shroud of Turin. I like to use my imagination however, and rightly or wrongly, became wildly impatient with the pure, objective fact approach.
I came across the above picture the other day. It mesmerised me and I tried to find out as much as I could about it. The picture shows the skeletons of two individuals buried together around 5000 years ago near Verona at the base of the Italian Alps. They have been identified as adolescent by their teeth. These are the facts. Any other clue as to their identity, or the reason they were buried in this unusual arrangement has not been found. There are only the dry bones. Of course we can’t say who they were, but it doesn’t take much imagination, (by some of us less disciplined types), to see a very moving image of human love and tenderness.
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Ice Cream Imposters
January 31st, 2010
There possibly isn’t a woman in this country who does not have a difficult relationship with food. Flick through the women’s mags and you can see a dozen conflicting messages about women, their bodies, their role as mothers and provider of meals, their sex appeal, their health and their role as consumers. After spending serious hairdresser time with these mags I stagger out into the light looking groomed, but my mind is reeling. Of all the evils women must be on alert for at all times the number one is carbohydrates. This may change next decade, but for the moment carbs are as unwelcome as an ancient, incontinent dog on the carpet.
But Italy, Bella Italia, the vessel holding our holiday dreams and desires, is the land of carbohydrate – pasta, bread, gelati, and wine just to name a few. I don’t know the stats on this but from observation visiting Italy, (in villages and non tourist areas), you don’t see many fat people. The descendents of the twentieth century Italian Diaspora living here in Australia and eleswhere are far more likely to be carrying too much flesh. Partly because it was mostly famine plagued Southern Italians who migrated. And for them food had become not only important to live but was invested with huge symbolic significances that were hard to leave behind.
In many Italian communities visiting relatives is the main social occupation, there are protocols to this pastime and if you don’t know them it can become tricky. One is to eat everything you are given if you are a guest – it’s the host’s way of saying ‘you are a valued visitor and I am well off enough to stuff you to the eyeballs’. And if you are the host you must have on hand, at all times, enough food to show you are doing well and can participate in this social exchange. It’s a status thing and all cultures have a variation on the theme. Food is no longer in short supply in Italy, although some areas are still marked by struggle, nor in the US or Australia, but the customs continue, and if you take it all seriously, and wish to maintain a link to the homeland, you feed – and you eat everything offered to you.
So this is one reason for the extra heft, the others are best left to the health planners, but I would offer another reason. One is the size of the serves. Italians in Italy eat small amounts of good food, like the French. In the south they eat masses of vegetables and grains, and pasta is reserved for Sunday or for a small first course before the meat or fish and vegetable course. And by small I mean maybe one and a half cups or less of cooked pasta. They drink wine with the meal – not before and not after. The younger ones might use other mind-altering substances but binge drinking is mainly the preserve of Northern European cultures and their once colonial outposts.
Having a strong culturally determined relationship with food means the forces of modern marketing and industrial food companies have found it hard to get a foothold in Italy. They will inevitably get in there and upsize everything, but the modest amounts eaten at meal times means that a gelati can be eaten and enjoyed in the heat for the evening without lashing ones self with a birch twig and drinking only sprout juice the next day
I like pasta, bread and wine, but my favourite carbohydrate of all is gelati. I don’t like ice cream, it tastes greasy and rich. But gelati, which is milk or fruit based, is lighter and more refreshing. If it’s made with cream it’s not gelati – don’t be fooled. In Italy you can have a dollop of cream on your gelati but why you would do this I’m not sure. And in some cities you can have your gelati between two thick slabs of sweetened bread. This has to be eaten quickly I imagine and I’ve only ever seen young men eating this combination. These blokes are probably perpetually hungry, no matter how much they eat.
A famous American ice cream brand has recently opened its first shop on a beachfront in Sydney. I queued with a friend to taste this new and exotic substance but was sadly disappointed. It was just ice cream with a funky name, huge serves and a big advertising budget. It wasn’t one of those rare moments when you taste something and you know you’ll remember that moment forever. My first taste of the Fiore de Latte flavoured gelati from a small gelataria in the back lanes of Rome was one of those moments. And all ice cream and gelato subsequently will be found wanting – the price you pay for cavorting in carbohydrate Eden.
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