Pasta alla Trapanese

Summer is struggling.  There are rumours that it will make a break for it later this week and hit 30 degrees.  But today is ‘muggy’ (try saying that with a Brummie accent, the Sicilian finds it comedy gold), windy, cloudy.  A good day to dry your washing, but definitely not a day that could pass for Mediterranean.  That said, it is good enough to eat outside.  Later we are cooking rabbit, marinated in herbs, wine and oil for six hours before the barbecue. But lunch is simpler, as little cooking as possible.  I leave him to it whilst I take the spaniels out.  

Although it’s nearly August, the allotment tomatoes are slow this year, still green and embryonic but the basil is going great guns.  So this is a mix of bought (tomatoes, almonds, parmesan, olive oil) and homegrown (albeit a small contribution from the basil and some garlic). 

This isn’t a pesto, bashed and tormented to destruction, but the ingredients that you would use to make pesto Trapanese (named after its supposed home town of Trapani, on Sicily’s west coast); the flavours are all there, but more distinct and less gritty.  It is not as overwhelming as the jars of basil pesto most of us are more familiar with in the UK, I prefer it.  This is the favourite summer dish of Giovanna, Ale’s cousin, who’s pleas to Eat! Eat! give this blog its name.  He has memories of her making this continuously throughout the Sicilian summer.  So, what for me was a first encounter, was for him a summer norm, familial, so we’re back to that dichotomy of Sicily in Brum again.

We ate this for Sunday lunch with a cold beer and a watchful, expectant audience of spaniels, apparently uncaring that it was vegetarian.  That it is good enough to fool the spaniels indicates just how exceptional it is.  Definitely a summer meal, imagine what it’ll be like when the homegrown tomatoes are ready!

Pasta alla Trapanse

Amounts aren’t set in stone, change them as you prefer – for oiliness, strength of basil or saltiness from the parmesan.

For 4

50g flaked almonds

4 very ripe tomatoes 

1 clove of garlic

50g parmesan (grated)

25g fresh basil

Black pepper

4 tbsps Olive oil

400g dried penne or rigatoni

Put a large pan of water on to boil, and once it is, added enough salt to make it taste briney.

Whilst you’re waiting for this, chop your tomatoes into small 20p size chunks, mix with the olive oil, crushed garlic and a generous pinch of salt in bowl.  Leave them be for a while, as you get everything else ready, the oil and salt will do something to the tomatoes, making them taste stronger, richer, more of summer.

Dry fry your chopped almonds in a heavy frying pan until they are the brown of a Sicilian who has spent the day on the beach, but keep a beady eye on them, as this is perilously close to burning them.  Take them out of the pan as soon as they are done, to stop them cooking any further.

Roughly tear up your basil leaves

Once the water is ready and salted, add you pasta, and cook it for 6-7 minutes.  Check the packet, don’t pay too much attention to it though if it’s telling you 12 minutes.  Although we used Penne today, the Sicilian thinks Rigatoni is better, as it’s larger, and hides more of the ‘not pesto’ chunks inside to surprise and delight.

Once cooked, drain the pasta, then stir through the parmesan, oily tomatoes and basil, along with black pepper.  Serve with a generous crunch  of the toasted almonds over the top.

What starts as a steaming, mouth-scalding dish of pasta in sauce shifts to become a cooling pasta salad as you eat and chat and fend off spaniels,  like some sort of Willy Wonker meal that transforms as you chew.  Textures and flavours dance around each other and alter, the pasta stiffens, the oil is less strident, sweet tomatoes and crunchy almonds come to dominate after the first blast of hot fruity garlic.  If that hasn’t sold it to you, then the spaniels will have your plate.

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Beans (Broad/Fave) and a quick dinner

The first week of June and we’re on the cusp of Broad Bean season (Fave in Italy).  Mine are late this year, and will be a few weeks yet.  When they come though, the sheer abundance of broad beans ensures that there’s always a surplus and always a freezer drawer dedicated to them.  After the initial gluttonous rush of sweet, tiny proto fave around midsummer, there’s a year long supply of fatter, starchier siblings kept on ice.  Each has their merit.  The youngsters for their joie de vivre, the oldens for their persistence and reliability.  Keep them too long in the frost, and they start to lose their green zing, battered into submission by prolonged cold, so I try to remember to root out any hangers on from the previous spring before the next generation arrives.  These tough things need to be derobed to make them more enjoyable – scald them in hot water and then plunge into cold, this makes them easy to squeeze free from their leather jackets.  In small quantities, this isn’t too onerous, with the added fun of being mildly indecent when rogue beans squirt jets of water at you as they’re popped out of their skins.

As with everything, peak broad bean season here is several months after peak fava season in Sicily.  They are the first of many delayed gratifications you’ll experience when trying to grow a Sicilian kitchen on the wrong island.  Unless you’re outstandingly well located, organised, urban and sheltered, the broad beans won’t be making their first appearance this side of Canale della Manica until the latter half of May, at the earliest. The battle is now on. You will want to eat them at their smallest and sweetest before their skins turn tough and bitter.  They will want to fatten, coarsen and brazen it out – fighting for the next generation.  Catching them at their sweetest is one of the joys of vegetable garden in early summer, alongside with peas from the pod, your own woefully spoilt asparagus, and netted cherries thwarting the blackbirds.  They marry perfectly with peas, oil, mint or fennel.  There’s a lovely lunch of sharp cheese (salted ricotta perhaps), mixed in with mint, beans and peas to top toast.  Posh beans on toast.

But I am digressing – there is much to write and say about the joys of the broad bean in the first flush of its youth, but not here. Not today.  Maybe in a couple of weeks, when mine start to make an appearance.

Today is for that emptying the drawer period.  The time that comes before.

This is a recipe that is an adaptation of a much grander (and more expensive) version, simple enough for a week night tea and good enough for showing off too.  It is excellent for the time when you’re winding down last year’s stores in preparation for the fast approaching glut of new things.  Despite this, it has an intensity of summer to it that belies the inelegant, back of the cupboard, bum in the air search for those need to be used up ingredients.  Oily fish and tangy sweet acid tomato, fresh medicinal aniseed and the resolute health giving greenness of the beans.  Four essential flavours that, for me, work perfectly.  It’s a pasta dish, so don’t strive for impossible and instagram worthy beauty, rather pile it up, rolling with steam and dive eagerly in.

Tonno, finocchieto e fave

(For two, as a light meal)

One tin of tuna in olive oil

300 ml passata

2 tsp fennel seed

One bay leaf

Bunch wild fennel fronds

100g broad beans

2 cloves garlic

1 Onion

1 stick celery

150-200g Linguine (depending on appetites)

Start by chopping the onion and celery, as finely as you can, as though for a sofritto

Fry them with the fennel seeds (without colouring) in olive oil, and then add the garlic and bay leaf.

If you need to skin your broad beans, do this whilst your waiting for the vegetables to cook.

When they’re done, add the passata, plus the same amount of water, bring it up to a simmer, and then add your tuna, breaking it into loose chunks.  The better the tuna, the chunkier it will remain.  

Also add your broad beans, a handful for each person. You can keep this sauce cooking on the lowest of heats, reducing (but not even simmering) until you’re ready to serve, but watch that it doesn’t reduce too much.  It needs to stay saucy.

Ten minutes before you’re ready to eat, get  your pasta water boiling and then salted.  

Chop your wild fennel and add to the sauce.

Cook your linguine for 6-7 minutes and just before it’s done, turn the heat up under the sauce.

Drain the pasta, throw it into the sauce, with a splash of pasta water and mix everything with abandon until the pasta is coated with sticky, oily sauce and dotted through with vivid beans and chunks of tuna.

Eat (it goes very well with a bone dry cider).

No pressure!

There are some recipes that I’ve been tip toeing around,  because of their complexity, because of my ignorance; there’s the fear of being branded a cultural appropriater, the knowledge that I’ll get them wrong, but without a reference point to know just how wrong I got it.

So it is with Pasta al Forno.  This is not a formalised recipe, like Pasta alla Norma.  But then, it is THE recipe.  A simple name, ‘baked pasta’, belies a complex, time consuming holy grail of dishes.  YouTube it and there are more Nonna’s out there making Pasta al Forno, than are imaginable.  It is a dish for Sundays, for celebration, a dish of a diaspora, for welcoming home the Prodigal Son. But more than anything it is the domesticity of Italian cooking distilled. It is sacrosanct. I’m terrified of this dish. Because I am not Italian, to attempt this feels fraudulent almost.

But it had to be done. I tried.  And because I’m not Italian, because I don’t have to play by the rules if I don’t know them all, I tinkered, just a little.  Don’t tell the Sicilian.

If you want a lumpen show stopper, something to bring a cheer from the family that will stretch far enough to satisfy the hungriest of teenagers,  this is it.  It is aubergines, ubiquitous to Sicily breadcrumbs, ragù, pasta (of course), more aubergines, cheese, ham, peas (if you like), layered and assembled into something that is satisfyingly homely, maternal and unpretentious despite the effort and detail that goes into it.  You can try to prettify and gentrify but you will fail, and in so doing you will fail to grasp the point of it, as a celebration of abundance, togetherness and sharing.  Only a fool would make this without guests or family to share it with, you’d be eating it for days.

This though is the Palermitan version, or my Palermitan’s version, with added Milanese input.

Of course, there is pasta al forno, and then there is the proper pasta al forno, as made in Palermo.  For starters, there is only one acceptable pasta, anelletti (think spaghetti hoops), most other versions are far less dictatorial.  It was described to me as a ‘leftovers, whatever is in the fridge’ dish, with no real recipe.  I was then told exactly what those leftovers should be.  

So, I’m not going to give recipe of weights and volumes here,  as the scale of this thing should shift to match the size of your personal domestic set up.  

To begin then, start your ragù, ideally the day before you’re making your bake.  (I tend to make ragù in cauldron sized batches that I freeze into meal sized portions – it saves a lot of time and washing up).

Ragù is a complex business.  One that I sometimes feel I have no place or right to start getting involved with.  There are essays and debates and probably wars raging over what constitutes the proper ragù.  The intricacies and complications that have been wound around this sauce are endless.  Perhaps, one day, I’ll write something about these; sticking my head above a parapet for the inevitable onslaught.  But for now, my ragù is a meat sauce – beef or beef and pork mince, with a soffritto of carrots, onion and celery, passata (plus the same volume of water), white wine, garlic, a bay leaf, simmered for hours – as many as you have (as long as it’s above 3).  If it gets too thick, add more water.  I add an anchovy, one of those salted, oily slivers from a tin.  It dissolves and wallops up the umami.  I also add a 50p sized blob of astrattu,  the unique salted tomato concentrate created by the sun on the roofs of people’s homes in Sicily.  This is unlike anything you’ll have come across outside of Sicily.  It isn’t just tomato paste.  It is something other.  You know how a really good sun dried tomato can taste like sweet marmite?  Exaggerate and embellish that thought. This is obviously not an option unless you’re visiting Sicily (although maybe there are places you can find it here that I’ve not discovered yet), so don’t get too hung up on this addition.

 

My ragù is definitely not canon.  The Sicilian I feel disapproves.  But it’s mine, and I think it’s nigh on perfect.

Once your ragù has simmered its way to a suitably decadent richness, turn it off, cover it and let it sit in the fridge for 24 hours, where, like the best of soups, stews and curries, it will use this time for inner reflection and self improvement.

The next day you are ready to begin.

Slice two large aubergine thinly into steaks and fry both sides in deep, good olive oil until browned.  You can pre salt these slices to draw out some of the water, but make sure to rinse and dry them before frying.  While they’re cooking, oil a sprung cake tin, and coat the inside with breadcrumbs.

Drain the cooked aubergine slices and use them to line the tin, leaving any long edges hanging over the sides of the tin.

Chop a third aubergine into chunks and fry these until brown

Hard boil your eggs

Precook your pasta for half the time on the packet (3-4 mins usually).  Anelletti is a bugger to find in the UK, so improvise – penne is fine, if not Palermitan, I use ditaloni, which is a short tube, still not Palermo style, but hey!  Needs must!

Mix together the pasta and ragù, then layer this with the aubergine chunks, ham and cheese (I mix parmesan and mozarella, but caciocavallo, if you can get it, will add Sicilian authenticity), alternating until you fill the tin, and inserting hidden halves of boiled egg in a symmetrical ring.

Fold over any overhanging aubergine, scatter over more bread crumbs and bake in the oven for 40 minutes.

Best eaten the next day (making this a three day project), this is a rib sticker of a meal.  Hearty and calorific, it takes no prisoners.  But as it is delicious, fantastic, smothering, you will welcome, and embrace your captivity.

Fennel, sprung spring and more sardines

The clue here is the name.  Wild.  Unbiddable and unmovable. One of countless umbelliferous plants, this family (Ferrula) has barnstormed a place into human civilisation as one of our keystone herbs.  If you think of any writer trying to capture their version of a mediterranean idyll, fennel looms large – pungent, aniseed, flowers that crawl with drugged and clumsy pin-head beetles.  My favourite is Giant Fennel, whose hollow stalks become the homes for colonies of gargantuan petrol blue bumble bees all over Sicily, from the abandoned terraces of Alicudi to the 2,000 year old ruins of Agrigento.  There, you see, I’m off on my personal Mediterranean idyll, and its fennel. 

But, it is not exclusively a plant of the south, here too it will grow freely, uninvited and tall.  Acid green or lustrous bronze, the two forms both carry the same pungency, and promiscuity when it comes to populating your patch with their offspring.  Sadly it does not come with giant bees, but it still carries that unique flavour and smell; full of volatiles waiting to impart something of themselves into your food.  Without the sun, that Sicilian sun, those volatiles will be weaker, less concentrated, something you will need to consider when deciding your quantities.  And after the exuberant spring fronds, come the flowers and their seeds – medicinal, digestive, essential. 

The fennel of spring comes as an eruption of froth, powered by a delving tap root that is heading to the antipodes.  An established clump of fennel becomes a stubborn and resolute thing, a problem if it’s a weed, a heaven sent blessing when it’s a herb.  And that tap root, prone to snapping and source of all life, causes all sorts of problems when the plant pops up in the wrong place and needs to be moved.  A relocated fennel plant is seldom a happy thing.  They have a strong sense of place, and their place is where they germinated, and no where else.  Rehomed it will sulk and wither, the promised lacy abundance turning yellow and wilting.  Given time, there may be a recovery, a return to vigour, but this is never certain, no matter how green your fingers.  

As soon as spring has sprung, the tight froth of new growth will erupt skywards, that deep deep  tap root powering stalks, fronds and yellow insect magnet flowers up to six feet in the air.  Once it gets there, much of the greenery (or bronzery) will start to die back.  All energy is diverted to height and flowers.  So the window for cooking with fennel leaves is over by July.

There is one recipe, involving pasta, fennel and sardines, that for me more than any other, encapsulates Sicilian food.  It’s ingredients are mostly ordinary, foraged, last hour of the market, store cupboard stuff.  And then the smallest of extravagances are added. The flavours are sublime.  Oily fish shot through with aniseed, sweet raisins, crunchy nuts, heady saffron and starchy pasta.  This is cheap decadence that I could eat every day.  The bucatini makes for a strange first encounter, it’s a hollow, tubular spaghetti – fatter and  tricky to eat.  It’s like a secret test to set true Italians apart from us lesser mortals, their deftness in stark contrast to our air-sucking futility.  But the hollowness allows it to absorb more of the flavours and juices of your Sarde, so it’s worth the extra effort and humiliation.

Pasta con le Sarde (for four)

Sardines (fresh, 2-3 per person or 2 tins, in oil)

Wild Fennel, (a big fist full of a fronds)

25g Pine nuts (toasted)

25g Raisins (soaked in warm water)

25g Chopped almond flakes

75ml Olive oil

Breadcrumbs

4 Anchovies

450g Bucatini

Saffron

Onion

Garlic.

If your using fresh sardines, then clean them – heads off, guts out, fins clipped, back bone out.  If you’re using tinned, the messy work has been done for you

Boil your pasta water, heavily salted and then use it cook the chopped fennel fronds (having removed the toughest, stringiest centre parts) for no more than ten minutes.  Remove and keep your fronds, but keep the fennel scented water boiling and add the pasta, cooking for 6-7 minutes (check the packet).

If using fresh sardines, then keep half of the fillets whole, and chop the rest.  Fry the whole ones in abundant oil, browning them on both sides, and when cooked, take them out of the oil and keep them with your fennel fronds. (you can skip this bit if you are using tinned fish, as they will never have the same crowd pleasing looks).

Now fry your chopped onion with the garlic. Add the anchovies and saffron (steeped in a little warm water), then added the chopped sardines, stir through the raisins, nuts and half of the fennel.

Whilst everything is heating through, test your pasta. Once it’s ready, drain, and then layer pasta, remaining fennel and the fish sauce, garnishing with the whole sardines you kept aside.  Finally shake over a generous amount of breadcrumbs and flash everything in an oven on its top heat for five minutes.

Ever-so-slightly gothic Pasta.

OK, so this is a slightly curveball dish, certainly for most of us who don’t have access to really good fish sellers.  On the whole, I’m pretty well served in Birmingham – we’re a big, diverse city, and our fish market accommodates that – we can even get cuttlefish.  The problem is they sell them precleaned – and they don’t keep the ink sac.  That will make a passable pasta senza nero di sepia, but the nero is really what this meal should be all about.

There is a perfectly good reason that they don’t keep the ink sacs, it’s because they are an armed and volatile liability to have lying around – especially in a domestic setting.  The ink is part of the cuttlefish’s defence mechanism – if danger threatens, then a small release of this into the water creates an instant pea-souper, giving our hero the cover to make a fast exit.  

Take the fish out of water, and the ink out of the fish (it’s in a hard to miss silvery, iridescent pouch), and you’ll find a small ball of black paste.  So far, so innocuous.  However, a little of this ink can go a long, long way. One slip, and you’ll be scrubbing for weeks.  There are more 21st century ways of sourcing your ink – you can sometimes find it presealed into little plastic pouches (like the ones attached to cut flowers), allowing for some containment of the pigmentary danger.  But the real thing will be fresher, stronger and certainly give you a better dish at the end.

So, if you can find intact cuttlefish, ask the fishmonger to clean them for you by all means – but ask them to keep the squid sac for you.  Be brave!  And keep a scrubbing brush close to hand, just in case.

This is one of those ‘scare the horses’ dishes that people will either love, hate, or be too terrified to try.  There’s no doubt that different food cultures are often mutually appalled and repelled by each other’s idiosyncrasies.  British tastes have gone soft of late, so that many of us are challenged by meals based on offal, or when asked to suck the brains from a prawn (but, please, try it – it’s the best bit).  And, well, jet black ink from a creepily intelligent chameleon of the sea…it’s just a bit left field of roast beef and apple crumble.  To be fair, I think the Sicilian responded in much the same way when I first introduced him to Heinz tinned spaghetti.

Assuming you’re feeling adventurous though, and that you can find your cuttlefish, give this dish a go.  It’s such a rich, sweet, BLACK meal.  You can play around with the seasoning to make it hotter or more herby – but at the heart of this dish is the unique ink depth of flavour.  It’s like nothing else – the only comparable depth of I can think of is sea urchins, but this lacks that divisive, love it/hate it iodine whack.  

Pasta col nero di seppia (serves 4)

3 or 4 small, cleaned Cuttlefish, cut into small chunks (size of a 20p piece).

A medium onion, finely chopped

2-3 cloves of crushed or chopped garlic

3-4 tablespoons of tomato puree 

OR

1 tablespoon estratto di pomodoro ( super concentrated sun-dried tomato paste ).  It’s hard to find, but well worth it for added intensity and umami.  If you know anyone going to Sicily – ask them to bring you some back – you can buy it at any supermarket by the tub.  And I’m sure there will be somewhere in London that has it, but I’m still searching.

Water

White wine

Parsley, pepper, salt and tabaso (optional)

Pasta – it should be a ‘long pasta’ – usually linguine.  But we found that jumbo penne is just as good.  The chunks of meat slip inside the penne – like mini cannelloni.

In a wide, deep frying pan (a small wok is ideal) fry off your onion in some olive oil, and when it’s starting to brown, add your garlic.

Add the cuttlefish and after a couple of minutes add a slug of white wine, and the tomato puree or paste – varying the amounts accordingly.

Take the ink pellet from the sac and mix it up in a small glass of water to a liquid.  Don’t wear anything you want to keep for Sunday best.  If you get any of this sauce on you, it’s never coming out!

Add the ink mixture to your onions and cuttlefish and simmer gently for about 20 minutes.

Get the pasta water boiling and salted, and about 8 minutes before you’re ready to serve, part cooking the pasta,  when it’s just under al dente, take a cup of the pasta water and keep; drain and then stir in the pasta to the cuttlefish sauce.

Loosen it with some of the pasta water, the starch will combine everything and make for a smoother, better coating sauce.

Finally, season with parsley, pepper and tabasco for heat. And serve.

It’s black as pitch and shines like a dark pool in an unlit cave. It is both unsettling and hypnotising.  And, it’s totally delicious.  

Hare ragu – how to cook your way back from disaster, helped by Anna del Conte

Until last week I’d never cooked a hare, never eaten one, and only ever seen one darting off through a watercress bed in Hampshire.  And then I get hold of four legs, and set about planning. And almost as soon as I get my hare, I read that their numbers are collapsing, possibly catastrophically.  So with the knowledge that I’m about the serve up an unfortunate statistic in this collapse, my conscience demands that I do the beast justice.

I think I’ve found a recipe that sounds perfect.  The weather has turned autumnal, it’s stormy and the rain is flattening what’s left of the veg plot.  This calls for something part broiled/part roasted, something nutty (toasted hazelnuts in this case), root veg and herby.  Throw in a slug of something red and it’s going to be great,  I double check the cooking times, cover the whole thing in a space-age foil wrap to keep in the moisture and the flavour, and wait.  Kale is prepped ready for a short steam and a fry off in butter.  Table is laid. Fire is lit.

I ballsed it up.

Out of the cosseted roasting tin emerge four rigour-mortised, dirty pink admonitions to my cooking pride. You can’t even cut them, they’re so tough you could make a pair of shoes.  My hare died for no purpose, and it’s my fault.

So, here I am, enabler of the hare’s decline, with three choices: bin, dogs, or an intervention from St Lorenzo – patron saint of cooks

Bin would be criminal; dogs, best chums of mine they may be, do not get fed good (if badly cooked) game.  So prayer it is!

I had an idea to try an bring some life back to my hare by making them into a ragu – the Italian meat sauce, not the tomato ketchup sauce out of jars.  This rescue mission needed time, so I started off using the legs, the veg and the nuts to make a stock, cooking them on the lowest of simmers for several hours, and then leaving it overnight to infuse while cooling.

The next day, I scooped out the legs and the nuts, to strip the meat from the bones, which flaked and shredded as I did so.  By the time I’d finished cleaning them, I’d garnered an overflowing bowl of dark, dark leg meat that was no longer shoe leather, and was on its way to being a different, but better dish than the one I’d originally planned.

Then I finely chopped up onion, celery and garlic and sautéed them off slowly, until soft, but without colouring them.  Note, there are no carrots. I’d run out. The Sicilian hit the roof when he discovered me making ragù without carrots. My defence; “I had no carrots’, was met with ‘then don’t make ragù!’ I carried on regardless and added a jar of the allotment passata (see last week’s post about the tomato glut), another glass of red and a bay leaf and cooked this down further for ten minutes.  And then I added in the hare meat and a splash of red wine vinegar for added sharpness (a trick the Sicilian taught me), checked the seasoning and let it gently carry on cooking whilst I got the pasta ready.

Pappardelle is my favourite – I could lie and write prosaically about starchiness and generosity, but the truth is that it’s the one pasta that forgives my non-Italianess, that doesn’t make me look like a toddler with a fork trying .  To over egg my pasta, I cooked it in the stock that had been created by poaching the hare’s legs for all those hours.  Once sauce and pasta were combined I stirred in some crumbled hazelnuts.

Hare ragu and pappardelle with crumbled hazelnuts – it was outstanding, a proper snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.  It’s gamey of course, and I want to say it’s ironey, but not in a grilled liver kind of a way.  And whilst I may not treat my dogs to good game, I did let them lick the plates (don’t judge me). Cooking pride restored.

And then the next day, I’m flicking through Anna del Conte – and there it is.  A better, and authentic version of my recipe.  Including the pappardelle and the red wine, but without the tomato sauce.  Whilst it would be wonderful to think that this home cook had independently come up with a similar recipe as his food hero, I think the reality is that things stick, especially when written well.  The more you cook and the more you read; the better you become.  And whilst I may never be Italian and may never master the art of eating spaghetti neatly, it turns out I’ve learnt enough along the way to rescue, at least, a cremated hare.

So, thank you Anna del Conte for giving me the wherewithal to rescue my hare from my own incompetence, once again, you have saved the day in my kitchen.  Her recipe is in her Italian Kitchen book, my half remembered version of it is here.

Anna del Conte inspired Pappardelle with Hare.  

50g butter

50g streaky bacon (smoked)

1 onion (finely chopped)

1 carrot (finely chopped, and appeasing resident strict Sicilians)

1 stick of celery (finely chopped)

Clove of crushed garlic

Bay leaf

300ml passata

200ml good stock (chicken or vegetable)

4 hare legs

Glass of red wine

Splash of red wine vinegar.

400g dried pappardelle

Salt and pepper

50g Toasted hazelnuts 

I’ve omitted the section on nearly ruining your hare legs (that bit is entirely optional)

Melt the butter and fry the chopped bacon until it begins to colour.

Add the chopped onion, celery and garlic, and lower the heat.

Cook until the vegetables are soft, but not coloured and then add the hare legs, browning them on both sides.

Turn up the heat and throw in the red wine to deglaze the pan.

Add the bayleaf and the passata and some of the stock, and simmer, covered, for 50 minutes to an hour. Keep an eye on it and if it starts getting to thick and at risk of drying out, add a ladle of stock.

When the meat falls easily for the bone, remove the legs and strip them, before returning the meat to the tomato sauce (chopping up any larger pieces).  Add your vinegar and seasoning and cook for five minutes longer.  You’re aiming for a thick, dark sauce that won’t turn your pappardelle watery.

When you’re ready, cook your pasta in ferociously salted water in the biggest pan you have, for 5-6 minutes.  No longer, as it’ll keep cooking when you mix it with the ragu.  

Drain, and return to the pan, stirring in your hare ragu until the pappardelle is evenly coated.

Sprinkle over the hazelnuts (you can rub the skins off them by rolling them in a tea towel when they’re still hot from a five minute roasting in the oven)

Serve immediately and eat quickly if you’re expecting competition for seconds