Piedmontese peppers

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I have always had a strange love/hate relationship with peppers and a irrational loathing for green ones. I profess to not like raw pepper of any colour however handsome they look and sweet they taste, a ring of raw pepper as salad decoration can spoil my day, but, I love gaspacho and that is full of the little raw fellas. Yes, love and hate. it is all very irrational.

I am also known to be most particular when it comes cooked pepper, for when they are good they are very very good but when they are bad they are horrid.….. Anyway, in short, for years with the exception of ratatouille I avoided cooking and choosing dishes which included them for fear of meeting indigestible lumps or slimy strips.

But, times they are a changin, not, I hasten to add, when it comes to the green or raw ones, but as far as the cooked ones go, I am most definitely experiencing alot of love. This change, hardly surprisingly, has taken place since I have been living in Italy.

From very nearly the first day I arrived in this beautiful, magnetic, complicated, confusing, contradictory island, I have been presented with peppers cooked in ways which blow all my fears and prejudices sky high. Pepperonata, a sort of ratatouille made with peppers, onions, tomatoes and celery so meltingly delicious I dreamt about it. Pepperoni fritti, ribbons of pepper fried with oil and garlic until soft and just a little charred and then doused with some wine vinegar. A tantalising dish of red pepper roasted on an open grill and then dressed with anchovies, oil, capers and topped with chopped hard boiled egg. Red and yellow peppers stuffed with breadcrumbs, tomato, capers, parsley and olive oil and oven baked until their tops were crispy and golden and the peppers and their contents were collapsing and tender.

However, the dish which sealed my pepper epiphany was a plate of Piedmontese peppers cooked for me by a friend one wednesday night about a year ago, she knows who she is.

Sweet, fine specimens of red and yellow carnoso di cuneo peppers were halved, filled with tiny sweet pomodorino di cerignola and sliced garlic, doused in plenty of olive oil, salt and freshly ground black pepper and slowly roasted in the oven until tender and collapsing, gently blackening and deliciously caramelized at the edges. Once out of the oven they were left to have a nice leisurely rest, draped with anchovies. We ate them at room temperature with fresh crusty bread and hunks of parmesan – perfect.

I have made this recipe countless times since, I know it off by heart, but even so, each time I make it I like to refer to my friends recipe or rather her chaotic scribbles in terrible handwriting scrawled in my old diary.

Yet again the recipe is super simple and depends on top notch ingredients, because when you have the best, freshest and most flavoursome ingredients, they are extraordinary and so you can cook something as simple as this and it will taste extraordinary, because that is exactly what it is. A nice addition is to drape a couple of salted anchovies which have been preserved under oil over each pepper half. I love these peppers as an antipasti but they also work beautifully as an accompaniment to some tiny, tender, grilled lamb chops.

Piedmontese peppers

4 fine sweet red or yellow peppers, 4 plump cloves of garlic peeled and finely sliced, about 30 cherry tomatoes, olive oil, salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Anchovies to decorate

Heat the oven to 220°c

Halve each pepper and carefully cut away the white pith and shake out the seeds but try and leave the green stem intact – a totally aesthetic exercise

Season the insides of the peppers with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Put a few slices of garlic in each halve and then cut the cherry tomatoes in halves and tuck 4 or 5 in each one, of course, the number of halves will depend on the size of your pepper

Season each pepper halve with a little more salt and pepper and transfer to a baking tray.

Dribble olive oil quite generously over each pepper halve and then roast in the oven at 220°c for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, turn the oven down to 180°c and roast the peppers for another hour or so or until the peppers are tender, collapsing and gently charring at the edges.

Allow the peppers to cool in the tin for a good long while while before carefully transferring to a serving plate, being careful to catch and precious juices and spoon them over the peppers

If you are going to add the anchovies, drape them over about 30mins before serving.

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