More on candying

Scorzette di arancia

I first made these four or five years ago now – I can’t exactly remember when. What I do remember is that I was trying to do it blind, my recipe had no image of the end product, and being all fingers and thumbs and an impatient bull in a china shop, my scorzette (literally, ‘peel’, plural) ended up torn and ragged. They resembled more the peelings of a Christmas satsuma than a refined treat of sweetness and bitterness. I love them, they are such an intense hit of orange and chocolate – they’re a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, distilled and perfected.

Unlike the process for candying whole fruit, or thick pithed varieties like citron or pomelo, this technique is relatively quick in terms of actual cooking – the lengthy bit is the drying before you bathe your peel in chocolate.  A small bag of these makes a great gift; once dry, they keep indefinitely, although they tend not to hang around for long.  They might be a bit too mouth-puckering for sweet toothed children, which just means more for you!

Of course, you don’t need to dip them in chocolate, you can use the candied peel in your Christmas cake, or to decorate cannoli.

Scorzette di arancia al cioccolato

Candied orange peel dipped in chocolate

Thick skinned oranges (grapefruit works just as well)

Water

Sugar

Dark chocolate

Wash the fruit, and then cut the top and bottom off.  

Then, with a sharp knife, slice four or five vertical cuts through the skin and pith, from the top to the bottom (try not to cut too deeply into the flesh, as this makes it harder to peel). Space the cuts roughly evenly around the fruit.

Then, carefully, and getting as much as the pith as possible, peel the segments off the fruit.

I slide my thumbnail into the thickest part of the pith and then tease it away.  Try not to tear them, but if you do, it’s not the end of the world.

Put the sections of peel in a pan of cold water, cover, and bring this to the boil.

Drain, and then repeat this another two times.

This process reduces the bitterness of the peel.

Now make a 50:50 mix of water and granulated sugar. Bring to the boil, and when all the sugar is dissolved, add the peel. The amount you’ll need here depends entirely on how many fruit you’ve skinned, but they need to be covered for the whole cooking period, and the syrup will reduce by 50-60%.

Leave the peel to simmer until the syrup has reduced (which can take up to 40 minutes), and the thick white pith has become translucent, telling you that the sugar has penetrated all the way in.

Remove the peel from the syrup, and cut it into strips about 1cm wide, then spread these out on rack to dry (put a piece of baking parchment underneath to catch any drips).

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Depending on the temperature, humidity and thickness of the pith, this can take a few days.

Once they’re dry to the touch, break some dark chocolate into a bowl, and place this over a saucepan of simmering water (don’t let the bowl touch the water). When it is melted, take your dry strips of candied peel and dip about half to two thirds of each one in the chocolate, and put them on baking parchment while the chocolate sets.

Then store them in something airtight somewhere cool and dry (not the fridge though, as this will make the chocolate discolour).

The fruit can be used for juice, or cut out segments for a fruit salad.

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Un buon pranzo

 

You may have read my account of a weekend in Rome last October. The weather was apocalyptic, I had a full on head cold, but the day of artichokes at Latteria Studio learning so much from Carla Tomesi and Rachel Roddy, was an antidote to everything.  A feast of knowledge and a bloody good lunch to boot.  I have written at length and often about my unseemly love of artichokes, so I shall spare you a repeat here.

In some ways, it was a kind of a torture – spending that weekend surrounded by most loved vegetable flowers; everywhere I looked, they were on offer. And knowing that when I came back to Birmingham, it would be to an artichoke drought, broken only when (and as it turns out, if) I could get down to London’s markets, or when my young allotment plants decide to throw up their own flower buds (I’m still waiting for anything that you could tentatively call a ‘glut’).

I went to be shown a myriad ways to cook with artichokes, in the full knowledge that buying the quantities needed for some the recipes would bankrupt me, especially if I had to get them singly and cellophane wrapped from Sainsbury’s.

One dish in particular stuck in my food brain,  niggling away with thoughts of “will I ever have this again?”  Artichoke lasagna.  A vegetarian layering of pasta, cheese and artichokes.  Spanking hot and with a glass of teeth achingly cold white wine, this will be my death row meal (well, one of them).  Whilst it’s a dish for winter and early spring in Rome, here, if you’re reliant on your own crop, it’ll be a summer treat.  I have been missing this dish since October, dreaming of a day when I am rich enough to not care how many artichokes I have just bought, or somehow, have managed to persuade someone to give me gainful employment in Italy, so I can move there, just for the artichokes.

But then in the perverse way of the world, the UK want into lockdown, the panic buying stripped the shops, and bafflingly, this provided me with the wherewithal to finally break my lasagna fast.  I was told of delitalia, an Italian catering supplier that a) had flour, a lot of flour and b) was now doing domestic deliveries to Birmingham. Of course there was a small catch, just a minor detail; you still had to place catering size orders.  My cupboards and freezers are already overflowing with food from the allotment and ingredients I thought I ‘needed’ at some point.  And it’s not that I’m a hoarder, just that I’ve always regarded Best Before dates as mere guidance for the wise.  So, whilst the product list was temptingly extensive, I had to restrict myself to things that I really would use, and would buy anyway over the next year.  Flour yes, I’m already a third of the way through it (and have turned into the go to ‘flour man’ for my isolating neighbours), oil yes – 5 litres of olive oil will see me through the next year.  And then there they were, jumping out at me as though lit in neon; frozen artichokes, prepared and raring to go.  Minimum order, 5kg.  Yes, I am that much of an idiot.

A freezer drawer was cleared (I had to eat a lot of ice cream that week, a hardship) and now I have what should be a year’s worth of my favourite vegetable, but realistically, I don’t think they’ll see out lockdown.

As they arrived, my first artichoke flower formed on one of the allotment plants.  This I prepped, battered and fried – I wanted to memorialise its perfection.  It was literally a taster, for the main, the lasagna.

I urge you to find a way to make this (even if it means having to buy catering quantities of flour and olive oil).  The version I ate in Rome was Rachel’s, and my memory of the details is not perfect.  So when I get hold of the real thing, I may come back and do an update.  The potatoes were an addition suggested by Italianhomecooking – and he is right, the additional texture brings another bauble to this dish.

As I write this, I am reheating the half I did not eat last night, for my lunch.  There will be some bread too (I have to get through that flour after all) .  It will be just as good second time round I know. All sweet anaesthetic on the tongue artichoke, cheese and carbs.  Un buon pranzo.

Artichoke Lasagna

(This made enough for two large portions)

The recipe will get refined over time – as I was making this up as I went along.  If you are lucky enough to have access to abundant and affordable fresh artichokes, substitute those for the frozen ones, prepped into quarters, as shown in the photos below.  If using frozen ones, check them, some may still have a few tough petals attached, which can take all the fun out of them.

 

Artichokes

A cereal bowl’s worth of prepared artichoke hearts (defrosted)

One small onion, chopped.

1 garlic clove

Salt and pepper

Glug of white wine.

Oil

Put the oil into a large frying pan (which has a tight-fitting lid) and as it warms, add your artichokes,  onion and crushed garlic, and once they start to fry, throw in the wine, quickly turning down the heat, and slipping the lid on.  These need to cook until the hearts are tender and yield easily when stabbed with a knife.

Remove from the heat and blitz 2/3 of the artichokes into a puree with blender (check the seasoning), keep the remaining third whole.

Bechemel Sauce

Flour 25g

Butter 25g

Milk (I used 700ml)

Salt and pepper

Melt the butter, and then add the flour, cooking it, but not allowing it to brown.

Gently, very gently, add milk.  A tiny bit at a time to begin with.

The starch in the flour will suck upon the milk and swell like something from a sci fi film.  If you add too much milk, it’ll be impossible to get rid of any lumps.

When all the milk is absorbed and and you’ve beaten the flour paste into smooth submission, add a spot more milk. Repeat the process patiently, and you’ll end up up a smooth, glossy white sauce the consistency of expensive emulsion paint.  Seaso again, this is vital, as this sauce, together with the ricotta, could make a bland filling if you’re not brave with the salt here.

The rest

Lasagna sheets (I used premade, dry, as I had some in the cupboard, left by a former lodger (the wonderful Simon, who named his son for me), but if you prefer to make your own fresh, go ahead).

3 floury potatoes (peeled, boiled and sliced)

Ricotta (one tub)

50-75g (or as much as you like) Parmesan or Pecorino if you can get it.

Assemble your Lasagna

In a deep pie dish, place a third of your potatoes, artichoke hearts, and the puree.  To this add a third of the ricotta and grated parmesan. Pour over a quarter of the bechemel, season. Add a layer of lasagna sheets.

Repeat another layer of vegetables, cheese and sauce, top with more lasagna sheets.

One final layer, and then pour the last of the béchamel over the lasagna sheets.  You can grate some more parmesan over this if you like.

Into the oven at gas mark 4, for 30-40 minutes, until it is bubbling and golden.  Ideally some of the lasagna sheets will have started to curl and crisp up, for another layer of crunchy texture.

Eat straight from the oven, or reheat the next day (assuming you have leftovers).

Why I stopped then started writing again

I last wrote anything on here in January (the 15th) – nearly three months ago. Writing is a craft I am learning.  To become a good writer, you have to write, write some more, keep writing.  “Write every day” my friend Rachel tells me.  But I stopped.  The words dried up.  Or rather they bottle necked.  I had plenty of words.  Too many words, but there was no sense or reason to them.

The Sicilian and I finished.  After nearly four years.  On the shortest day of the year.  

It was something that had been approaching for months.  I thought that watching its slow and steady approach towards us would shield me from a Titanic moment.  It turns out I was wrong.  I may not be Leonardo di Caprio in this version, but I had a damn good go at being Kate Winslet.

For three weeks, I was fine.  I stumbled through the horror of my dysfunctional family Christmas, I hosted New Year.  There was sadness.  Relief.  

On the 16 January, I found myself at work, in front of the computer.  Crying.  Crying uncontrollably.  Overwhelmed by loss, regret, coulda woulda shoulda, self loathing and doubt, emptiness. Hating my job, my life, myself.

I spent a week on the sofa.  Sometimes in foetal position.  Sometimes not.  I wrote furious, vitriolic, crazed messages that helped no one and produced no answers.  The GP ordered therapy and told me to call urgently if I had any suicidal thoughts.  Dark days.  One night I sat crying on a wall for an hour.  I stopped eating and lost 8 kilos. The dogs got edgy and clingy.  

And for three months nearly, I was off work.  I thought that I would use my time to be productive.  To make the allotment the best in the country.  Become fluent in Italian.  Visit Florence and Rome.  Finish the book.  Decorate the house.  But I did none of these.  I sat.  I gardened a little. I walked the dogs. Every week I would meet my boss for a coffee and try not to cry. The thing that was furthest from and closest to my mind was writing.

I discovered that depression is exhausting and jealous.  It demands all your energy, it allows no room for anything else.  

Fortunately grief and madness faded.  Time did its cliched work.  There are still scabs that I mustn’t pick at and I will have scars, that I shall wear stoically, if not proudly.  And I am left with the need to write, but without the knowledge of what to write about.  Who wants to read the guesswork of some guy from Nuneaton fumbling his way through another culture’s food?  Remember that self doubt I mentioned?

Friends reminded me to cook. To keep up the journey.  To claim it as wholly mine.  Rebrand it if you like.  It was difficult.   I had to stop reading Anna del Conte’s biography, there was too much to remind me of another life.  There were many books I couldn’t finish.  Couldn’t start.  Recipes I couldn’t cook.

Just as Lombardy was starting the most localised of lockdowns, I went to visit my friend Stefano in London.  I went to Borough Market and, as citrus season was in full swing, bought bergamots and citron.  Something began to tilt.  These were wholly mine, and what I did with them was down to me and to no one and nowhere else.  I cooked more, I made the boobs of St Agata,  blood orange curd, bergamot marmalade, candied citron, Agra dolce everything, polpette.  I cooked English food, French food, Sicilian food.  I had a few dates, I met a guy for one evening who’s great (apart from living in Amsterdam, damn this lockdown!).  

As we know, the world then went to pot.  On a Friday (the morning after my date with Mr Amsterdam), my GP and I decided I was well enough to return to work.  On the Monday, the University where I work shut itself down and physically locked the gates.  Officially I work from home, but it’s hard to operate a laboratory remotely.

And then I became ill.  The worst flu I’ve ever had.  Temperature, coughing, fatigue; began to get better and then 8 days in relapsed and spent nearly 48 hours asleep.  This being Britain, I shan’t find out if this was just flu, or the new thing.  I kept out of circulation, a friend walked the dogs.  

This was a month ago now.  Through it I cooked only with what I had in the house.  Things grown on the allotment from the freezer, or pickled or jammed.  Despite the illness, it was a fun experience. On the days that I had the energy, I had the time and the resources to eat wonderfully; alone, yes, but wonderfully.   When I emerged from my isolation, I found the shops stripped bare.  No eggs, no flour, but thankfully, still gin.  So I carried on cooking from my reserves, and kept returning to Italian and Sicilian things of three or four ingredients.  Beans and vegetables, pasta and tinned sardines, stale bread turned into bruschetta with peas and broad beans.  I found cherries bottled in vodka and orange wine.  I made a crostata with marmalade.  Risotto got deep fried as little not arancine.  I found a magnificent sacred heart of a cotagnata from last November.  And I started to plant seeds – this year’s crops for next year’s stores.  My peach tree had two flowers on it.  

The world today is one of sadness, loneliness and strangeness.  But these things in my freezer and cupboards have at least given me some hope again.  The remind me that my past is not all waste and loss.   With hope comes a voice.  The bottlenecked words might have found a release.

So this is not a blog about Sicilian food written by the partner of a Sicilian, rather it is a blog about mostly Sicilian food – the growing and cooking of it, written by a single, adopted-Brummie, because he is greedy, loves the sun, and likes to grow and cook things.  

Today (Good Friday), I made an utterly English Simnel Cake.  It has some of that Borough Market candied citron in it (very Elizabeth David), candied ginger (for extra medieval).  I ballsed up the crystallised flowers, because there is no caster sugar in the shops.  They cracked and shattered, but now is not the time to be wasting eggs to have another go.  I also made the marzipan lamb of Sicily, one of the campest, most delirious things in the world – Jesus as marzipan; my middle aged long sightedness means he ended up all googly eyed, with a distinctly home made look.  My kitchen was both English and Sicilian today.  Two places that my healing Irish heart is very attached to.  Suddenly there were words again.

Roman Holiday (Part 2)

I mentioned in the last post, as an aside, that I’d bought two citron in Testaccio’s market on my flying visit to Rome. Because my hand luggage of books and artichokes needed filling out, and because who knows if I’ll be able to bring wonderful things back from European markets, once Brexit gets done and throws up the walls of insularity around little England.

Citron are the Neanderthal throwback of the citrus world.  One of the ancestral species of citrus fruit who’s genes went rogue, diversifying and hybridising into the pantheon we have today.  They are beasts, swollen, pock-marked, without symmetry, or grace, or panache.  It is unlikely you will ever encounter one in the UK; another fantastic thing that doesn’t make it over the Channel.  But, if you are in Italy in the winter, and you visit a market, you may spot them; steroidal lemons hulking in an almost visible haze of citrus tang.  They’re called Cedro (pronounced Chedro) in Italian, and first impressions can be baffling and confusing. But buy one anyway, and smuggle it back for the thrill of it.

Slice open your citron/cedro, and what you’ll find is several inches of thick white, spongy pith, dense and softly corky, encasing an entirely normal, lemon-sized heart of flesh.  This flesh is the least important part of the whole thing, indeed, most recipes tell you to just discard it immediately.  So, flesh discarded, you’re left with the meat.  You’re not in Kansas anymore.

Now, I bought mine for a specific reason – to practice the dark arts of candying. I have been trying (and mostly failing) to produce crystallised fruit for four years now. It’s a long and drawn out process of sugar syrups and repeated heating and coolings. It involves commitment and attention to detail. Ask the Sicilian, neither of these could be truthfully be included in any list of my attributes. I have managed to turn many clementines and lemons to caramel and marmalade, but never have I produced a solid slab of fruit turned sugar to adorn my cassatas.

But when citron is involved, it all gets a hell of a lot easier.  All that pith, I think it evolved to be candied.  It is the Candying 101 of the candying world.

The process is simple, you take your citron, prick it all over, and then soak in cold water for a week, changing the water every day. This removes any lingering bitterness it may possess about having been relocated from Rome to Birmingham.

Get a big pan of water on the boil and now peel your citron; try to keep as much of the pith and peel intact as possible, aim for hunky chunks.  Slide these into your boiling pan and let them simmer for 20 minutes.  You’ll see a change, the pith will shift from opaque white to the creamy translucence of the cartilage you dig out of a roasted chicken.  The yellow ping of the skin will dull, but, worry not, the flavour won’t

Make up a sugar syrup by dissolving 300g of sugar in 1 litre of boiling water and slip your cooked citron into it.  Immediately turn off the heat.  Now walk away for 24 hours.

For the next week, you’ll be living a deja-vu existence. Take the citron out of the syrup, bring that back up to the boil. Return the citron, turn off the heat and walk away.

At the end of the week, the syrup will be so concentrated that (science alert) it will have sucked all the water from the citron, and replaced it with liquid sugar.  Osmosis will have worked its magic.

Take the slabs of sugar fruit from their bath, and let them drain and dry in the air for a couple of days.  They will now keep indefinitely – sugar is a marvellous preservative, nothing will dare touch these babies. If you can leave them for a few weeks, all the residual water will dry off, and you’ll have solidity, sourness, sweetness. Alchemy.

And what to do with them?  I’d advise having some adventures.  I found an Elizabeth David piece about Christmas Puddings and the importance of candied citron – she was such a show off, but I made it anyway; I gave some to a friend who wants to make a Tudor mincemeat; I sent some to an instagram friend – because I love instagram and the people on it and good things should be shared.  I made a Sicilian conserve that I’ve been wanting to try for ages.  And the rest, the rest – that is reserved for a cassata of cassatas.  I can’t wait.

Parmigiana, and official birthdays.

This was a year of a BIG birthday, with all the accompanying pressures to throw a party. But, I’m not a party kind of persona.  Posh frocks and loud music aren’t my style.  Plus the birthday was back in April, around Easter, with a strong likelihood of bluster and downpours.  So despite demurring and equivocating,  I was eventually pursuaded that I could hold a summer party, an official, Queen’s birthday, if you like.

My allotment site is tucked away on a hillside in Birmingham.  The entrances are out of the way and hidden.  You have to find your way down unadopted roads, or have a key for a gate in the woodland known only to dog walkers and spliff smoking kids.  These semi-concealed gateways conceal the size and beauty of the space.  They lead you to unexpected views over rolling valleys of trees; an incongruously bucolic setting, in the middle of a sprawling conurbation.  There are plots of enviable order and control, where pristine sheds are equipped with wood burners and bunting flutters on verandas.  There are plots given over entirely to callaloo and spuds.  And there is mine, given over mostly to weeds and dahlias.  Most importantly though, aside from all this controlled and shambolic verdancy, there is a clubhouse, complete with bar, pool tables and a glitterball. It seemed the natural place to throw a party; remote and low key, when the idea of throwing a party induces waves of social anxiety. 

I decided to do the food.  I was on a budget, and thought it better to stick money behind the bar than throw it the way of sagged microwaved samosas.  I thought it a no brainer.  Just because the oven was still on the fritz, the freezer was full up with beans and raspberries, and there was the small matter of a full time job, none of these needed to be an obstacle to cooking for 60.  

But for the main, I needed something that could be made in advance and reheated on the day.  Something vegetarian, but with enough umph to fool the carnivores.  Also, something allotment appropriate – allowing me to show off, and say ‘of course, I grew the ingredients’ (well, some of them).

It seemed, therefore, a parmigiana appropriate event.  I cleared out the freezer, co-opted a friend’s cooker and raided Poundland for their entire stock of foil roasting trays.

 

If you’re new to this dish, it is a staple of the south (disregard the name, it’s not from Parma)  If there’s such a thing as a Sicilian pot luck supper, this is what you take.  You see it for sale in cafes to take away with you, but equally, it’s a surefire way of wrestling the aubergines and tomatoes under control, as they start to overwhelm you in August. At the end, you get a rib sticker of a dish, that can be frozen for darker days.

It’s a laborious process – involving a fry-a-thon, with all the accompanying smoke and splatters and grease spots.  It’s an extractor full on, windows flung wide and back door open type of recipe, but I promise you, it’s worth it.

Sliced aubergine is plunged into hot, deep olive oil and cooked to a roast chicken skin brown on both sides.  Drain the slices on kitchen roll and then layer, in a deep oven dish, with passata, basil and mozzarella  When you’ve filled the house with haze, and the dish with aubergine, grate namesake Parmesan over the top and bake until bubbling and brown.

Now, you can eat it straight away, or you can let it cool, then refrigerate and have it cold (or reheated) the next day.  When it will be better by miles! It is best with hunks of crunchy bread that  you use to wipe up the carnelian-red sauce and wrap with strings of elastic mozzarella.

Parmigiana di melanzane. (4 greedy people, 6 at a push).

There are some very complicated versions of this recipe around, with added herbs, red wine, nuts.  Feel free to try them, but I think that the success of this dish is its simplicity.  It is typical of much of the food of Sicily, in that it is home cooking, making use of the best of whatever is available,.  The more flavours and textures you add, ironically, the more you lose.  Like so many Italian recipes, especially in the south, you are actually only relying on three or four main ingredients to get the end effect.

• 6 big, purple aubergines. Sliced lengthways, just over 0.5 cm thick.
• Olive oil (be generous)
• 300g mozarella (ideally buffalo)
• Fresh basil
• 100g Parmesan, grated
• Black pepper
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 litre passata
• Salt the sliced aubergines, leaving them to drip for an hour, then rinse and pat dry (this is not to remove bitterness, but moisture, so that they are firmer when fried).

Now start frying the slices, a few at a time, in enough oil to almost submerge the slices.  They will absorb a lot of the oil, which is part of the end flavour, and texture.  You can, for economy or health, grill or oven bake, but it will be an entirely different dish at the end.

Into a little cold olive oil, add crushed garlic, and gently heat it up until the garlic is on the edge of golden brown.  Add the passata and bring to a simmer for up to 30 minutes, reducing it down by about a third.

Next is the easy bit, Blue Peter cooking. 

Put a layer of aubergine slices on the bottom of your oven dish, then add torn blobs of mozarella, basil leaves, about a fifth of the parmesan,  black pepper and enough tomato sauce to smooth over and cover everything.  Add another layer of aubergines, and repeat the cheese sauce process.

Keep doing this until you have filled you dish (probably 4-5 layers), and finish with a generous helping of parmesan and black pepper.

Bake at 200 degrees C/ Gas mark 6 for 30-45 minutes (you want a browned top and bubbling edges)

Leave for at least ten minutes before serving – longer if you can; overnight ideally.  And before you serve, throw some more fresh basil over the top.

On gluts

With allotments, come gluts.  It doesn’t matter how well you plan your rotation or how large the family is; there will always be times when you have too much; too much to eat, too much to give away, just too much to damn well cope with.  Some things are more prone to this gluttishness than others – runner beans have a mission to run amock, tomatoes conspire in a simultaneous, overwhelming rush of ripening, apples scold you with their lemming like windfalling.  Their fertility becomes a chore, a curse.   There are of course, other gluts that are never onerous.  I never heard anyone complain that they had “too many cherries”, or that they were “over run with greengages”.  And even when over abundance forces you to turn all WI and start pickling and preserving, a three year old jar of raspberry jam is always a delight to discover, whereas a jar of green tomato chutney half its age, never fails to ruin anyone’s day.

So what’s the Sicilian connection here?  Aubergines. Melanzane. That’s what.

Aubergines are buggers in Birmingham.  They are, admittedly, way outside their comfort zone.  So much so, that the only way I guarantee success is to grow grafted plants, prewarned about their life 52 degrees north.  Some years they work, some years they languish and succumb to black moulds and some years they go into overdrive.  2019 was one such year.  If I knew why, I’d be the horticultural love child of Monty Don and Alan Titchmarsh. 

But, I’ve no idea why this year turned out so well. The summer has been decidedly lack-lustre; mostly rain, wind and greyness, with short-lived bursts of yah-boo-sucks extreme heat to remind us what summer could be, should be like. They’re in the same tunnel as some decidedly forlorn tomato plants, more inclined to produce stunted greenery than to reproduce.  Similarly, chillies have reluctantly, begrudgingly thrown out a few desultory pops of heat, but more as a two fingered insult than as a call of nature.

But, for whatever reason, the under-cover aubergines, got their feet under the table and decided to fruit, continue fruiting, and then carry on some more. 

They’re proper aubergines too – all unforgiving stalk spines and corky ingrown blips that shelter woodlice.  They don’t have that glossy, pantone perfection of the supermarket.  More, the look of something stitched together by Sid Phillips in Toy Story.  But, hey, once they’ve been despatched, chopped, homogenised; they’re the best tasting aubergines in my postcode.

So it’s been a summer of caponata, of aubergines stuffed with mint and cheese, of parmigiana (whose idiot idea was it to make parmigiana for a summer party of 50?). And still they come.  The end is in sight, but a glut is a glut, and I’m about to be overwhelmed by Borlotti beans now jostling their way to the front of the harvest line.

Two things then come to my rescue.  Oil and sandwiches. 

An aubergine sandwich is a thing of joy.  It’s also a thing of Palermo; a staple – taking fried steaks of aubergine, adding what ever you like;  cheese? basil? mortadella? tomato? anchovy?  If you want to go full Palermitan, add pannelle. But the aubergines are the creamy, almost meaty base that asks to be added to. Quick, cheap, wonderful.  On the other hand, an aubergine sandwich made with steaks that have been steeped in oil, infused with garlic, chilli or bay.  Well, that’s altogether a more wonderful thing.

Take your glut of aubergines then, slice them into generous 1cm thick steaks which you salt (as much to draw out water as imagined bitterness) and leave for at least an hour.  Then rinse and dry, then fry on griddle pan, scarcely oiled, to get “I did this, aren’t I cool” scorch lines, flip and repeat on the other side.  Take your cooked steaks, and start to pack a sealable jar with them, layering with the herbs or spices you’re using and topping up with olive oil as you go.  The flavours will do all the work here, so don’t use an expensive extra virgin grade, go for a cheaper, blended version. This is heresy as far as the Sicilian is concerned, but he’s not paying my olive oil bill!

As long as the aubergine is submerged below the oil, and the seal is airtight, these things will keep for months, languidly infusing.  In the middle of winter, when in need of a fast and easy lunch, you can slide a couple of these beauties from their slick, and add them to a Scooby Doo style sandwich, piled high on the best bread you have, or can make or can afford, with cheeses, meats, pickles, and enjoy as a virtuous, velveteen delicacy of your inexplicable green fingeredness.

Favourites and more frying

Artichokes encapsulate in their tight buds, the divergence of British and Sicilian food.  Here they are seldom seen, priced as a luxury but rarely treated with respect.  We are charged a fortune for an unopened flower, all too often a bashed and wilted version of its youthful self.  There’s a terribly chi chi store in Mayfair that likes to arrange them in vases, for which conceit you can add on an extra three quid.  And then when it comes to the cooking them, we seem to be impossibly wedded to boiling and effeteness, painstakingly dipping individual petals in hollandaise, until the precious heart has gone cold and clammy.

In Sicily, (and throughout Italy) on the other hand, they are ubiquitous from new year to easter (their season is earlier than our’s).  They are abundant and cheap, the markets pile them high and you buy carrier bags full of them for a few euros.  And there are different varieties and sizes; small elongated purple ones for braising, choke free varieties, swollen steel grey green spheres.  There is even a festival dedicated to artichokes in the village of Cerda, east of Palermo.  They are a delight of spring and central to the food of Easter festivities.

They are my favourite vegetable, unequivocally.  Even asparagus or freshly podded peas can’t compete.  Sweet and minerally, they also create a physical tingle on the tongue – almost as though temporarily anaesthetising it.  But equally, many people remain unimpressed.  The leaf tearing mundanity never compensated for by the merest mention of flesh from their bases, and then the itching powder nastiness of the choke that has to be dealt with before that stone cold heart.  This is why other recipes might convert, ones that don’t demand such investment of time for relatively little reward (if you don’t love artichokes as I do).

Unless you have the luck and finances to be able to shop at Borough Market, the only way most of us in Britain can guarantee enough artichokes to allow culinary frivolity is to grow our own.  As plants they can be ferociously temperamental weaklings, or verdant to the point of being rampantly intimidating.  When young, they can be mown down by slugs, drained of life by blackfly and succumb to trench foot in a cold and damp winter.  But, established clumps are an impressive thing, up to two metres of silvered, scrolling serrated leaves, topped with spiky, prehistoric flower buds, that, unpicked, explode into an imperial purple inflorescence of bee magnet. 

My experience has mostly been of the weaklings.  I have struggled to get them growing on the allotment.  It is exposed high on the side of a valley, and few make it through the winter.  I think the problem has been that I’ve been relying on bought, seed-raised plants.  Which I have discovered, are unreliable and widely variable in vigour and hardiness.  So, the best plan of action is to seek out a friendly fellow enthusiast who has a clump that has proven its worth in both longevity and productivity, and in the spring (March and April), take a cutting of the shoots that appear around the sides of the clump, leaf and root together.  These small clones will still need some love and devotion in their first year.  But good genes should kick in, and if raised in a fertile, sunny, well drained spot, kept free of strangling weeds, and protected with a winter mulch from the worst of the wet and cold, begin to reward in a couple of years with a reliable bounty of loveliness.

Back to the eating of them then.  This is a simple Roman, not Sicilian recipe.  It involves deep frying, which as you know I am very fond of, and salt (ditto).  The name is supposed to come from the time when Rome’s Jewish community was confined to a limited area of the city, and with space at a premium, fried their food on stoves. Artichokes were disdained by their Catholic neighbours, and so the dish, and its cooks conjoined. All a bit tenuous I know, but I’m sure there’s a kernel of truth in there somewhere.

Carciofi alla guidia (Jewish artichokes)

Fill a fryer, or large, deep saucepan with oil 5-6cm deep and heat.  Olive is expensive, and this requires a profligate amount, so unless you’re determined to be authentic, a milder vegetable oil will be just fine, but make sure it’s clean, as old, well used oil can make the food taste bitter and burnt.

  

At this stage, you don’t want chip pan hot, so keep it on a low to medium heat.

Ideally, you want a variety of artichoke that is not spiny, and if all you have are very large and tough ones, they may need steaming beforehand, for maybe 10-15 minutes.

Leave the stem on your artichokes that they come with, taking off just a few millimetres at the base if they’re very dry.  You can also peel very large and stringy stems, just to make them a little more edible.  Trim off the very toughest outer petals and if they’re very prickly, take a sturdy knife and trim the tops off.  

Take your artichokes slide them into the oil.  If you get a ferocious and explosive sizzle, it’s too hot, so take them out and turn down the heat. The artichokes need to cook gently, poach almost, in their bath .  A steady stream of small bubbles is the desired effect, rather than Yellowstone hot spring.  This slow process penetrates through to the heart of the artichoke ensuring it’s cooked throughout.

After ten-fifteen minutes, remove them and let them cool and drain on kitchen paper.

Now it’s chip shop time.  Turn the heat up and open all the windows.

Take your cooled artichokes and splay the petals out to open up the flower.  If they contain an inedible choke, remove that now.  Turn them upside down, and press them down to flatten them out.

Wipe all the oil off your greasy hands, and generously season the splayed out bloom with salt, getting into all the nooks and crannies.

When the oil is hot enough (I have an old fashioned jam thermometer that handily has “Deep Fry” marked on it), return your artichokes to their doom.

This will only take a few minutes, between three and five.

The hotter, faster oil takes the cooked artichokes and turns them to a crisp thing that you can eat in its entirety, no faffing around breaking off individual petals, no overflowing bowls of detritus.  If you’re able to find, or grow them, I urge and implore you to try cooking them this way.

Jars of Darkness

Pickled Walnuts are now counted among the things I didn’t know I was missing from my life.  

I admit that the pickling of walnuts was never on any bucket list.  I do have an inordinate soft spot for beetroot, and onions, and piccalilli, but unripe walnuts?  It’s not a natural jump I’d make.  Indeed, I’m surprised anyone made that jump.

Before they’re ripe, green walnuts are unassuming, misshapen and lumpy.  A thick spongy skin encasing an embryonic brain of a nut, itself milky white and a little repellant.  And they don’t want to be picked – they fight back with a seemingly innocuous juice that hits the air and turns into a staining dye of legendary persistence.

It doesn’t end there, the finger blackening chemical is called Juglone and it harbours even more sinister intentions.  Spread throughout the leaves, bark and roots of the walnut this thing is also toxic, and deployed to literally weed out the competition.  The Romans cottoned on to this particular charm offensive and worked out that green husks meant fishing could be a whole lot easy.  If you poison the water, the whole rigmarole of line and rod is redundant.  Walnuts therefore, are so toxic, that they’re a natural and non explosive method of dynamite fishing.

So, as I say, when it was someone decided to take these particular talents, and then add vinegar, is a puzzle.

However, someone did, and it caught on.  Pickled walnuts are ensconced now in the lexicon of slightly odd, but utterly delicious foods.  I have a friend who adores them, and describes them as multi sensory luxury, their spiced nuttiness enhanced by having to ‘fish around for them in that jar full of darkness’.

Making them is easy (although takes weeks and months of waiting), the hard part may be finding your green walnuts in July.  Grey squirrels love them (apparently immune to death by juglone), so even if you know someone with a tree, there’s no guarantee of a crop.  I found an online supplier in Ludlow Vineyard, who sells and sends them out to you by the kilo, and I know of people who bring them back from holidays in Greece in their hand luggage.  

Pickled Walnuts

Begin by pricking your walnuts with a needle (you may want to wear gloves, I ended up with what looked like a nicotine stained finger for weeks) and then mix up a brine bath of 500ml of water and 200g salt.

Soak the nuts in the brine for a week, then drain, and repeat in a fresh mix for another week.  Wherever they touch the air, they will blacken, the water will also turn the colour of an oil slick .  Don’t be alarmed by its morbid murk.

After these two weeks, drain them and rinse them, then lay them out on kitchen roll to dry for two-three days.  Once dry, they will have turned entirely black, as that poison oxidises.

Mix up a batch of pickling liquor with 1 litre of malt vinegar, with 1cm fresh ginger, a small dried chilli, 2 star anise, a stick of cinnamon, 2-3 cloves and a generous teaspoon of whole black peppercorns.  Add 100g soft brown sugar and bring it to the boil on the hob.

Finally add the walnuts and simmer for ten minutes maximum.

Then spoon the nuts into sterilised jars, and top up with pickling liquid.

Like any pickle, they’ll improve with age, and are ready after a couple of months, but over a year, and they may start to disintegrate into their dark void.

Those unprepossessing lumps you took under your wing in July are now softened and spiced, a natural pairing for cheese or cold meat.

Panna Cotta

A year ago, I wrote about Gelo di Melone, and its worrying kinship with milk jelly. My antipathy towards milk jelly will never abate, never waver.  The worst of it was the way it separated out to leave the thinnest of layers of clear, actual jelly at the bottom, topped by a lactic morass of awfulness.  That sliver was the final insult, I’d have been perfectly happy with just jelly.  But, no, someone had to go and spoil it for everyone else.

So what have I just made?  What am I writing about?  Milk Jelly.

There has been an epiphany.  A road to Damascus moment in Moseley.

I made Panna Cotta.  Cream, milk, sugar, vanilla, turned into wobble by gelatine.  Panna Cotta that reveals the distance between classic, unchanging, delightful recipes, and the joyless reinterpretations churned out by malaevolent post war home economists.  I imagine that Panna Cotta and Elizabeth David got on famously; as she fought against the blandness of British food that had forgotten its history and lost its way, showing us the light of what Europe could offer.  I’m going to check this later!

Literally, it is cooked (cotta) cream (panna); but only just, heated enough only to dissolve the sugar and disperse decadent vanilla perfume.  Then sheet gelatine, that has been turned disturbingly sensual after a soak in water, is stirred through the mix and all is left to cool.

There is a a trick here; the vanilla seeds from the split pod you use will sink to the bottom if you pour your mix straight into its moulds.  The result, when you turn them out, looks like a garnish of fag ash.  I like the effect – it’s a visual in joke that reminds me of the Sicilian’s mum, whose fags and ash are a constant presence in Palermo.  However, should you wish to avoid the effect, let your mix cool, and begin to thicken,  then stir it to produce a more even and artful distribution of seeds.

On its own, a panna cotta is a delight; clean, sweet and milky, emboldened by the exoticism that vanilla always gifts.  Pair it with fruit – perhaps a compote of blackberries, or, even better, some of the boozy cherries from the previous post, and you have something seriously wonderful.  It is not a milk jelly, it is heaven.

Since making it, I’ve been reading up on Panna Cotta.  And I’m glad I did it that way round!  Many and strident are the opinions aired on how to make the perfect panna cotta – how sweet, how creamy, how much double entendre the wobble should convey.  It’s a mine-field of authenticity and cultural appropriation.  Luckily, I bumbled into the thing in my usual gung-ho, act first, think later way, armed only with Two Kitchens, and it was straightforward, easy, almost. I would urge everyone to give it a go.   I always do a milk/cream combo, for custards, ice creams and now, it seems Panna Cotta.  But other versions are out there.

Panna Cotta

(Makes four)

300ml double cream

200ml full fat milk (If you can get Gold Top, splurge, throw caution to the wind)

1 vanilla pod

100g caster sugar (use less if you’re planning to serve with a sweet compote)

3 sheets of gelatine

Mix the milk and cream in a saucepan and warm (don’t boil) on a low hob.  

Split your vanilla pod (try to get a plump and moist one – they’re far more generous with seeds and flavour than the abandoned, desiccated things some places sell)

Scrape out the seeds, and add them, with the pod, to the cream mix.

Add the sugar and stir until it’s all dissolved.

Remove from the heat, and add the gelatine sheets, which you’ve been soaking in cold water for ten minutes.  Give them a squeeze to get rid of any surplus water first.

Leave the mixture to cool for an hour, perhaps longer, until it begins to set, but before the wobble is fixed.

Stir it, to mix the settled seeds evenly back through the cream and then fill individual panna cotta pots (easy to find online).

Ideally, you then leave them to set over night, and when you’re ready to serve, dip the pots into very hot water, which will melt the cream enough to turn them out.

Serve with the fruit of your choice.

Cherries Forever!

The cherries of July were tantalisingly slow to ripen.  This is the tree’s second year of cropping, after being rescued from the ‘dead and dying’ section of the garden centre.  It was neither, and now thrives in its new home, looking out over the leafy Rea Valley in the middle of Birmingham.  It thanks me for rescuing it with an annually increasing abundance of luxury.

The netting went on way back in April (as the local pigeons do not have the willpower to delay their gratification) and I’ve watched and worried as those small, green blobs, swamped by leaves, gradually swelled, and then suddenly reddened at the end of June; blushing, embarrassed by their weight gain.  Even then, I had to summon up more patience; lipstick scarlet deepened into a more luscious, 50s starlet crimson.  The wait was torture, I fretted in the small hours about determined birds and squirrels going on the rampage and stealing the lot.

But the day came.  I could wait no more.  In the middle of July, off came the nets, and out came the bowls as kilo after kilo of (I believe) the best cherries this side of Kent were stripped in one go to deliver the finest finger staining glut of the year.  We ate and ate cherries.  Warm and sweet from the tree they were without compare. I gave cherries to the neighbours.  I made jam. I made a quivering jelly. Still there were kilos of cherries.  This is where having a larder comes in handy, along with a network of Italians used to the joys and challenges of such abundance.  There is booze involved, and time, forgetfulness and, sometime in the future, the joy of rediscovered treasures.

This comes via a suggestion from Stefano of Italian Home Cooking, Carla Tomasi’s original adapted in Thane Prince’s Perfect Preserves.

700ml 40% vodka (that’s the stronger, more expensive stuff, but you’ll be left 50ml over for a couple of Vodka and tonics)

350g Perfectly ripe cherries

125g dried morello cherries

200g granulated sugar

Sterilise the container you’ll be using (kilner jars work, or any container that you can seal with an airtight lid).

Add all the ingredients to your container.

Shake it.

Put it somewhere dark and out of the way.

Forget about it for at least six weeks.

Now, add two generous tablespoons of maple syrup.

Shake it.

Your cherry vodka is ready, but it will get better and better with age (although the cherries may bleed all their colour and begin to look like ghoulish pickled eyeballs straight out of Hammer Horror).  I recently found a two year old jar of figs that had had a similar treatment.  Two years ago, they were ‘ok’, but now, they induce rapture.  Sometimes, there is value and virtue in shoving things to the back of the shelf.

Drink the vodka as a liqueur, eat the cherries with ice cream, or in a grown ups’ trifle, but maybe, not til next year, or maybe even the next.