Pleasingly bitter

Cicoria is bitter. Like spinach that’s lost a lawsuit. It’s also tangy, slightly metallic, wild and grassy tasting. The vegetable equivalent of a frolic in a field with a handsome heavy metal drummer who forages and writes poetry in his spare time. There’s also sweetness lurking in the serrated leaves and plump stem, some say spiciness too. But it’s the bitterness that prevails, and it’s for this reason I love cicoria. Which isn’t really surprising given how much I like bitter in my pint glass, my carmine coloured aperitivo, my amaro, my marmalade, my salad, my chocolate, my coffee, my life.

Unaccustomed and unqualified as I am, I going to try to put cicoria into some sort of biological and historical context!  I’ll keep it brief I promise. Then we can proceed as usual! You know the routine, I ramble on about running away to Italy and my tedious existential crisis, detail the Roman meal during which I first I ate cicoria and describe how I succumbed to the advances of the man at the next table – eat, pay, shove – before giving you a recipe.

The cicoria I’m talking about, the dark-green, narrow-leaved shoot above, is a variety of the genus Cichorium intybus called Dentarella or –  for less tongue twisting - Italian dandelion or Cutting chicory. It looks, as you’ve probably noticed, a little like an oversized dandelion with its glossy, slightly serrated leaves. Other varieties of this genus you might be familiar with are puntarelle, deep-red radicchio or the milky white bulbs of witloof we British call chicory. Although related, cicoria is not to be confused with endive, curly endive (called chicory in the US), chicoreè frisèe or escarole. Baffled?  I know!  This is a topic beset by considerable confusion.

Cicoria is the cultivated relative of cicoria selvatica or wild chicory, a food foraged and favored since Antiquity. Wild cicoria still thrives in parks, lay-bys and the undulating countryside surrounding the Eternal city. This interview with Sarah May makes for lovely listening for the cicoria curious amongst you.

In Rome it’s still not unheard-of to find a rogue market stall with an heap of foraged cicoria selvatica! Wild tangled greens: primitive, savage and reeking of another time. But these days you’re most likely to find cultivated cicoria, like the bagful at the top of this post, cicoria as bouncy, unruly and gloriously green as a classroom of five-year olds after a sugary snack and a lesson painting pictures of grass.

Modern Romans, even tiny ones, covet and consume cicoria as passionately as their forefathers, growing, collecting, buying and eating it in enormous quantities. More often than not it’s blanched or boiled – which soothes the bitterness – drained scrupulously and then sautéed or ripassata in olive oil, garlic and possibly chilli: cicoria in padella. It’s then eaten as a contorno (vegetable side dish) or piled generously on warm pizza bianca.

And the meal?  It was nearly eight years ago at a small, idiosyncratic trattoria in Testaccio called Augustarello. A trattoria that has recently reclaimed its rightful position as my favorite place to eat in Rome. Sitting at one of the dozen or so tables in this tiny locale with its frosted windows (to keep prying eyes out) and its bold open kitchen (to allow prying eyes in,) I first ate a dish of cicoria in padella.

There was no epiphany or foodquake, just a glistening tangle of dark-green cicoria: tangy, slightly metallic, wild, grassy and a beautifully bitter balance to the citrus tinged artichoke and tonnarelli cacio e pepe I’d just eaten and the sweet torta della nonna that was to follow. There was sour, salty, unami, bitter and sweet and Rachel was – unsurprisingly – sated and (extremely) replete. I was also cicoria convinced and converted.

Then later that summer in Apulia – the high heel of Italy’s boot – in the company of my love and his motley crew, I ate a plate of Fave e cicoria, an iconic, poor and simple combination bourne out of necessity and very good taste. The fave (broad beans) in question were peeled and dried fave, or fave secche, another food from antiquity, ivory coloured slivers of beans, like misshapen tiddlywinks.

The fave had been soaked, drained and simmered idly until they’d collapsed into a soft, soupy mush, a pale puree reminiscent of chickpeas, chestnuts and white beans. Fave too have a discreet bitterness about them. It’s a pleasing bitterness though, which compliments their soft, floury and nutty nature and elevates it into something particular and delicious. The cicoria - sweeter and plumper than its Roman cousin – was simply boiled, drained and dressed with local  oil.

The plate, half fave-half cicoria, half ivory-half green, half-elemental humus-half bittersweet leaves anointed with golden extra virgin olive oil, seemed, on that hot and heavy night near Leece, a near perfect plate.

This is an extremely simple recipe, but one that requires good ingredients and practice, especially when it comes to getting the consistency of the fave right. They should be soupy really and eaten with a spoon. I for one, still need practice. Bread and wine are important here – aren’t they always – as is excellent olive oil.  Now about that frolic!

Fave e cicoria

serves 4

Adapted from Le Ricette Regionale D’Italia,  Eleonora’s recipe, Elizabeth’s recipe and inspired by this

• 500 g fave (dried broad beans)
• 1 kg cicoria (or other bitter greens: cavolo nero, dandelion or leafy chicory)
• olive oil
• salt

Soak the fave in plenty of cold water for 8 hours or overnight.

Drain and rinse fave.  Put fave in a pan, cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Skim any white foam what rises to the surface. Lower the flame and simmer fave for about an hour or until they are very soft, tender and have collapsed into a thick mush. The consistency should be that of a very thick soup: dense and creamy but still fluid and spoonable. You may have to add a little more water. Season generously with salt.

While the fave are cooking soak the cicoria in several changes of water, discarding any wilted or bruised leaves and trimming away any very thick, woody stalks. Put the cicoria in a large pan with nothing but the water that clings to its leaves, cover the pan and cook over a medium flame until it has collapsed and is tender. This should take about 5 – 8 minutes depending on the freshness and age of the cicoria.

Drain the cicoria and once it is cool enough, squeeze and press it gently with your hands to eliminate as much water as possible.  Warm some olive oil in a saute pan – with a clove of garlic if you wish – and add the cicoria and a pinch of salt. Stir and turn the cicoria in the oil until each leaf is glistening.

Serve a pile of cicoria either beside or over a generous serving of fave with a little of your best extra virgin olive oil poured over the top. Serve with bread or toast and wine.

Don’t forget to soak

It is almost always the case that I’m wearing my dressing gown and one-armed – therefore lopsided – glasses when I put my beans to soak. This is because the beans are slumped next to the coffee, tea, neglected herbal bags (mango passionfruit and vanilla – as hideous as it sounds,) a very peculiar chicory drink I bought when I was pregnant and not thinking straight and the Green and Blacks hot chocolate in the kitchen cupboard. I’m probably slumped up against the kitchen counter in much the same way as my legumes are against the tin of Earl Grey tea when I catch sight of the beans. They stare back, both appealing and reproaching. ‘Two months woman, two months and without so much as a dusting!’ And so as the Moka rattles to its delicious climax and the milk warms in the pan, I tip my white, brown or mottled beans into my largest tin bowl and then cover them with water.

On Monday morning it was pearly white coco beans that skittled into the bowl. Coco beans bought from Giovanni and Assunta Bernabei’s Stall at Testaccio farmers market with Mona. The stall with the sign that reads ‘My name is Giovanni Bernabei.  Ever since 1983, I made a pact with myself to touch no longer with my hands any fodder, fertilizer or any chemical products whatsoever.  So long as I have the strength to raise a hoe, I will labor for those who believe in me and appreciate my produce.’ Needless to say, Giovanni is one of my food heroes.

On Monday afternoon I cooked the beans, letting them lumber to the boil and then shudder away burping every now and then for about 4o minutes until they were soft, tender and surrounded by an opaque pool of unassuming bean broth.

Unassuming but inimitable. This cloudy spoonful is the other reason I buy fresh beans or good dried ones and then soak and cook them myself. This cloudy, starchy, richly flavored liquid is the ingredient that makes bean soups, stews and dishes like pasta e fagioli taste so good. I learned the hard way. Vincenzo made a very odd noise and then buried his head in his hands for some time on observing me slosh the bean water down the plug-hole and then rinse the beans. I think he might have called me a barbarian. He shook his head repeatedly during lunch. I’ve never made the same mistake again.

I used a slotted spoon to remove the first meal’s worth of beans. They were still warm with just enough of the bean water clinging to them to keep them moist. Olive oil, crumbled salt and a twist of black pepper were all they needed. Beside my heap of soft white beans, I had seven black olives, half a small ball of mozzarella and three radishes.

Then yesterday – Tuesday – having been struck by an uncharacteristic but almost overwhelming desire for plump, pink sausages – I think one of my neighbours early morning cooking sessions might have curled up my noise and into my food consciousness or maybe it was just my hormones – I decided a thick bean braise, a bed of beans if you like for under my bangers was in order.

I took, as I often do, a well trodden path. Please forgive me if this blog is starting to feel a little a like a bean deja vu! I took an onion, a clove of garlic, a carrot and a stick of celery. I peeled, diced and then sautéed my harlequin heap in extra virgin olive oil until it was extremely tender, golden and – with much of the water sautéed away – intensely flavoured.  I added the beans and their precious broth, a generous pinch of salt and three twists of black pepper. I let the pan bubble and burp discretely for about 15 minutes.

The beans were ready long before my fat, cheeky-pink sausages from Sartor were. Fortunately for me, beans are forgiving things and perfect for someone with shoddy kitchen manners and awful timing. Both the beans and sautéed vegetable benefited no end – rather like me at about 3 0 clock – from a little rest. I cooked my sausages in the oven, pricking them with a fork first and then roasting them for about 40 minutes or so.

Once my sausages were burnished and smelling pretty irresistible, I pulled them from the oven. I gently warmed the beans, noting they needed another ladle of bean broth in order to achieve the right consistency. That is: thick enough to provide a comfortable bed, but still soft and very spoonable.

Warm bowl, a bed of beans and two fat sausages, Lunch. Now you may well note the absence of half a sausage on my plate. Three slices were eaten whilst plating up – yes I did work in the hospitality industry, 1988 – 90 at Harpenden Moat House: grim weddings, depressing family gatherings and budget Sunday roasts were a speciality – and yes I did burn my tongue.

Sausages and beans, how do I like thee? Let me count the ways. This is such a good plateful: the soft, nutty beans contrasting brilliantly with the fat pork sausages. Ben, Dan W, Harriet and C°, Dan Gunn in Berlin this is one for you.

The beans I used were this season’s, so only semi dried. I probably could have got away with not soaking them, However Assunta suggested I soaked them in cold water, drained them and then simmered them gently for just 40 minutes. Older, drier beans might have needed and longer soak and boil. As beans vary so dramatically, it’s difficult to give definitive advice! I suggest some experimentation, after all, the quest for good beans/ well cooked and a fine bean broth is one well worth undertaking.

A big pan of beans in bean broth will keep happily in the fridge for three days. Just make sure the beans are submerged under their broth. Remove beans with a clean spoon so as not to disturb the clever self-preservation that is occurring in the pan

White beans and sausages.

Serves 2.

• 4 best quality pork sausages
• 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1 medium onion
• a plump clove of garlic
• 1 medium carrot
• a stick of celery
• salt
• 300 – 400 g cooked white beans in their broth (cannellini or coco beans)
• freshly ground black pepper

Peel and very finely dice the onion, garlic, carrot and celery. In a soup pot or deep sauté pan warm the olive oil over a modest flame and then the diced vegetables and a pinch of salt. Saute the ingredients, stirring and turning them regularly, until they are very soft and golden which should take about 15 minutes.

Add the beans and their broth to the pan, stir and then – still over a gentle flame – let the beans bubble away gently for another 10 or 15 minutes. You may need to add a little more bean water/broth. Taste and season again if necessary.

Serve the beans in a shallow bowl topped with two sausages. Eat.

Soup kitchen

As much as I like long Italian summers and as much as I relish preparing summer food, I feel – and look – decidedly more at home in autumn: probably my favorite time of year to cook.

Testaccio market is a dependable way to stir my cooking spirits, but never more so than in late October/early November when the now undeniably down-at-heel but resolutely good and spirited market is bosky and damp with autumn and it’s stalls are overflowing with good things. Here, amongst the boisterous Roman chaos, the chestnuts shine like polished mahogany and young pale walnuts, like the wrinkled faces of weather worn old farmers, beg to be cracked open. On most stalls sits a dusty orange pumpkin, the size of squashed basketball, beside it a knife with which the fruttivendolo will cut you a slice of bright orange flesh to make your pumpkin risotto. There are mushrooms, if you’re lucky boletus edulis, better known as porcini - which means little pigs – with their rust colored caps and fat bulbous stems which are indeed like fat piglets or the chubby legs of my seven week old son. You’ll find fragrant quince, their golden skin hiding modestly behind a strange downy coat, freckled pears waiting to be poached in red wine, apples to be eaten just so or baked with butter and brown sugar, and the first of the winter citrus: lemons, oranges and clementines. Stalls are a patchwork of dark green, orange and splashed with red: heaps of spinach tumble into piles of winter cabbage, cavolo nero and leafy Sicilian broccoli, bunches of carrots with their feathery headdresses nuzzle up to curiously lumpy and undeniably phallic squash and heads of deep red raddicio.

First I bought quinces, which I’ve already told you about. Next mushrooms, not porcini but wrinkled morels, some of which I fryed with an artery clogging quantity of butter and garlic and piled on toast. The rest of my autumnal toadstools went into a risotto, not my best risotto it has to be said, but that’s what comes of cooking one-handed while trying to burp a wriggling baby. Then I bought chestnuts and walnuts, a kilo of both to be, in turn, roasted and cracked, a bag of clementines and a butternut squash for soup.

 

Usually by this time of year I am well up to soup speed and producing at least two large panfuls a week. I have been known to topple into soup frenzy sometime in mid November, sautéing, simmering and pureeing everything that enters the kitchen, overdosing on liquid lunches, swearing I will never eat a particular soup again and then forcing the surplus into my tiny freezer, meaning the door won’t shut and the ice melts. But not this year. A long, hot summer that spilled over into autumn, the arrival of my porcini legged son and my generally shoddy kitchen presence has meant soup progress has been sluggish. The experiments with this soup and a serious quantity of pasta ceci however, have redressed the balance and my kitchen can reclaim – part-time at least- the title ‘Soup kitchen’ once again.

At first this was simply a butternut squash soup. Then one day while foraging – it’s all the rage you know – I happened upon a few cooked cannelloni beans lurking in the fridge. I added them to the orange soup, half while it was simmering and the rest after pureeing so as to leave some beans whole. I have continued to add them ever since. The dense, fine-grained and silky flesh of butternut squash makes really good soup: thick and  velvety, savory and sweet. Add some white beans and it’s even more substantial and hearty. A soporific orange soup studded with soft, nutty beans. Delicious, but could send you and your tastebuds to sleep if it weren’t for the parmesan rind (which I will come too later) and a grating of nutmeg. The parmesan gives the soup a salty savory kick and the nutmeg – my favorite spices, the pirate of a spice world, like the sweet and spicy, dusty and dirty bark of a tropical tree, it’s apparently hallucinogenic to boot – livens things up.

This recipe is more or less the template I use for every vegetable soup I make. It’s a well trodden soup path and one I’m sure you’re familiar with. You sauté the kitchen holy trinity in a mixture of butter and a little olive oil. Once the vegetables are soft, you add the diced squash – a compact, sweet squash is crucial here, a spongy, insipid specimen will produce a spongy insipid soup. Next a glug of wine or cooking sherry for the pan and another for the cook, a parmesan rind and a litre of water. You could of course use stock, but if you have good vegetables that taste proper and vitally as they should, water will do. You let the soup bubble and burp away s for 25 minutes -adding some beans at half time -until the squash is extremely tender. Once the soup is ready, you puree half of it until smooth and creamy and then return it to the pan. To finish, you season the soup with salt and a grating of nutmeg.

Back to the rind.

Left over parmesan rinds, with the inch of cheeses still clinging to them, are magic. Well not magic exactly, but just brilliant for soup. If you add a rind or two (depending on how meticulously you have cut away the cheese from the rind) to the pan, they add a deeply savory, salty, smoky depth to the soup. I keep a bag of rinds in the freezer and then throw one – still frozen as the hot soup will soon see to de-frosting duties – into what ever soup is bubbling away on the stove. Once the parmesan rind has done its duty, it’s the cooks duty to gnaw the now soft inch of cheese from the rind.

Good bread, a green salad, a bunch of grapes and a glass of wine and you have a really nice autumn lunch.

Butternut squash and white bean soup

serves 4

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 30g butter
• 1 medium yellow onion
• 1 large carrot
• a stalk of celery
• salt
• a medium-sized butternut squash – which should yield about 800g flesh
• 100ml dry white wine or 2 tbsp of cooking sherry (optional)
• 1 litre water
• parmesan rind
• 300g cooked cannellini beans
• nutmeg

Peel and small dice the onion, carrot and celery. Warm the oil and butter in a large, heavy based soup pan (which ideally has a lid) and then add the vegetables to it, turning them so they are coated with fat. Sprinkle a little salt over the vegetables and  reduce the heat so the vegetables half fry/half braise until soft – stirring every so often – which should take about 10 minutes.

While the vegetables are cooking, peel, deseed and rough chop the butternut squash. Add the squash to the pan and stir for a couple of minutes so each piece is coated with fat. Add the wine or sherry (optional) and allow it to sizzle for a minute or two. Add add the water and the parmesan rind, bring the soup to the boil and then reduce to a simmer, with the lid slightly ajar, for 25 minutes or until the squash is very tender and starting to collapse. After 15 minutes add half the beans.

When the soup is cooked, remove the parmesan rind and then puree, blend or pass half of it through a mouli and then return it to the pan along with the rest of the beans. Season to taste with salt and a grating of nutmeg.

Chop chop

A few weeks ago, while held hostage by a budget airline and their inevitable delays, and trapped in an early morning departure lounge purgatory at Stanstead airport, I found myself – yet again – clutching an oversized, overmilked cappuccino and perusing the magazine section of W H Smith.

I’m devoted to newspapers, but apart from the occasional Time Out when I’m back in London and the even more occasional fat, shiny decor or fashion tome – the ones that seem a good idea at the news stand but inevitably depress me and only redeem themselves when cut up and used to teach small Italian children vocabulary: sofa, chair, coat – I generally don’t buy magazines. Except at the airport that is. Over the last five years, zigzagging back and forth from Rome to London with airlines that seem determined to squeeze every ounce of joy out of flying, I’ve developed an airport magazine habit.

It’s all extremely random. I’ve bought and then slept under the Economist on more than one occasion. I digested marginally more of Time, but still arrived in Rome with it stuck to my cheek. I’ve spent several flights trying to memorize large chunks of Mojo and Rolling Stone in an attempt to impress Vincenzo and Decanter Magazine, Good Housekeeping (for a bad housekeeper) Gardeners World, World of Interiors and Natural Health (which brought me out in hives) have all been purchased and perused at 35,000 feet. I’m not sure what possessed me to buy 220 Triathlon, but I did: just reading it gave me tendonitis. I nearly regurgitated my cappuccino while compulsively flicking through the car crash that is Hello. I discovered I have a soft spot for Vanity Fair in Italian, Quiz Weekly and maybe more surprisingly, National Geographic while flying over the French alps.

Anyway, on this particular delayed flight, although tempted by the Dr Who Adventures, my cappuccino and I bought a food magazine, the summer addition of Jamie magazine. I’ve actually bought this magazine at the airport before, it’s rather like the inimitable Mr Oliver himself: immensely likable, unpretentious, impeccably marketed, accessible, passionate, pucker. The same can be said for the great food and recipes.

I gobbled it all up giddily, inhaling a BBQ special, the a six page spread on ice-cream, an ode to Fish and chips (the brilliant Mathew Fort I should add) and an article on scones and afternoon tea. I inhaled recipes for chicken tikka masala, pub grub and lunchtime pasta. I zigzagged from England to Italy via France taking in India before crashing back to England again – my tummy rumbled. I started folding down corners, if I’d had post-it’s I would have adhered.

Then something happened. It was when I reached the fold-out Monthly menu – ‘four weeks worth of ideas, ingredients and recipes…‘ My heart sank, a wave of exhaustion drowned my enthusiasm and I realised I didn’t want any of it. Don’t get me wrong, I love trying new recipes, but at that precise moment the mere thought of trying any of the 55 beautifully photographed globetrotting monthly menu suggestions in the next four weeks made me feel dizzy. I realised I couldn’t think of many things I’d like less than Mexican on Monday, Greek on Tuesday, Italian on Wednesday, fish and chips on Thursday, chicken tikka masala on Friday, tuna Provencale on Saturday and a full monty of a Sunday roast on Sunday, all punctuated by equally international lunches, snacks and cocktails. I’d like a cupboard full of the all the basics to produce this themepark of grub even less.

Of course I don’t think for a moment Jamie and his team of writers and passionate food people imagine we are going to cook our way through the entire months worth of suggestions, or even half of them, Or do they? Anyway my head, my stomach and I, all utterly exhausted by all the global food excitement and ‘amazing‘ recipes, balanced Jamie magazine on our face and slept for the rest of the flight.

As the train rattled noisily from Ciampino into Rome, as the 170 bus swerved deeply through Piazza Venezia I realised something: as much as I love smoothing back the page of a new recipe, as much as I relish enthusiastic kitchen experimentation and exploration, new flavours and adventures, most of the time I am more than happy with our familiar, well-loved, habitual platefuls. I am deeply content, week after week, month after month with, lets say, spaghetti and tomato sauce – ideally twice a week, tagliatelle with ragu, a omelette, a rare steak with tomato salad, pasta and beans, pasta and brocolli, fried eggs on toast, a plain cake, mashed potato with peas, plain roast chicken, poached fish with mayonnaise. If this is punctuated once, maybe twice a week by the something new, I am even happier. I am always amazed when people tell me they never cook them same thing twice! I nearly always cook things twice, and if they are good, if they become part of our lives, I cook them 123 times. Maybe now you understand why I only write once a week.

So after all that, it seems appropriate that todays recipe is one of the faithful ones, pasta e fagioli, pasta and beans. Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with this superb Italian classic – I wasn’t until I moved to Rome – pasta e fagioli is best described as a thick, creamy bean soup (on this occasion made with the exquisite mottled borlotti beans that have a soft, nutty, earthy flavour) studded with more whole beans and fortified with pasta. I’ve written about this soup and others like it before – most notably pasta e ceci – because along with pasta e pommodoro, it’s probably one of the things we eat most.

I like making pasta fagioli as much as I like eating it, door open, radio on, it’s a well practised routine. First the borlotti; cracking open their mottled pods to reveal the exquisite pink and white beans. Then the peeling and chopping, first the garlic, then the onion, carrot and celery, three piles; orange, red and green. Next the gentle sizzle of the soffrito and the scent of garlic and rosemary curling from the pan. Raising the flame and hearing a proper sizzle as you add the tomatoes, beans, bean broth and water to the pan. I like listening to the gentle gurgle as the soup simmers happily on the back of the stove, the amusing squelch as you pass the soup through the food mill and the riotous bubble as the pasta cooks in the chestnut coloured panful.

Then you eat. Now this has to be one of the most delicious, nourishing, honest dishes I know. Vincenzo – who has grown up eating pasta e fagioli – calls it the mothership lunch and goes into a contented trance in it’s presence. For us, this is required eating.

Now, I don’t feel I’ve explained the recipe particularly well today, blame it on my post holiday rambling. If you are going to try this recipe you might like to read the pasta e ceci post too.

Pasta e Fagioli

serves 4

• 4 tablespoons of olive oil
• 1 medium red onion very finely diced
• 2 cloves of garlic peeled and gently squashed with the back of a knife
• 1 small chilli very finely chopped
• 1 medium carrot very finely diced
• 1 stick celery with leaves very finely diced
• a sprig of rosemary
• 150g of peeled, deseeded and chopped tomatoes or tinned plum tomatoes
• 500g shelled fresh borlotti or 170g dried beans soaked and precooked for 30mins less than instructed or 500g of tinned borlotti
• I litre of bean cooking water (add water if you don’t have enough)
• a parmesan rind
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 250g dried pasta(we used the snail-like lumache but ditalini or broken tagliatelle work really well too)
  

If you are using dried beans soak them for 12 hours or overnight. Drain, cover with fresh water and cook for about 1 and a half hours or until they are nearly cooked (subtract 30 minutes from your usual cooking time), they will finish cooking in the soup. Drain, keep bean water and set aside.

In a large heavy based pan warm the oil and add the onion and garlic, gently saute until they soft and transparent. Add the celery, carrot, chili and rosemary stir once or twice to coat with oil, and then allow to cook gently for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the tomatoes, stir and leave to bubble away gently for another 10 minutes.

Add the beans, stir to coat them thoroughly and then add the bean water and parmesan rind. Cover the pan and bring to a gentle boil and then turn down the heat cook the soup at a lively simmer for about 30 – 40 minutes or until the beans are fully tender. Tinned beans will only need about 20 minutes.

Remove the parmesan rind and the rosemary. You now want to puree about half of the soup by passing it through a food mill or using a stick blender. Once you’ve done this return it to the pan. Season the soup with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Remember you are about to add pasta so be generous with the salt.

Check the soup for density, it should be liquid enough to cook the pasta in so you may need to add a little more water. Bring the soup to a steady, moderate boil and add the pasta. If you are using fresh pasta , it will only take a minute or so, dried pasta will take longer, check the packet for timing – you need to keep an eye on it and stir every now and then, otherwise it may stick. Stop cooking once the pasta is tender but firm to the bite.

Allow the soup to sit and settle for about 10 minutes before serving. Serve with a dribble of extra virgin olive oil and some freshly grated parmesan if you like.

To avoid post lunch slump after such a hearty bowlful, espresso is recommended

It’s really good to be back, I’ve missed being here, I’ve missed you all. I didn’t mean to stay away so long, I even missed my anniversary on the 7th of this month – 2 years of Rachel Eats. Not that it’s too late to celebrate, or more importantly to say thank you to you all for reading. How about we all meet at the bar in Piazza Testaccio at 8 tonight for a prosecco, I’m buying. Oh and thank you for all your nice comments and messages over the last few weeks, sorry I haven’t replied yet, I will.

And we’re off

To France. We plan to stop in Pisa for Cecina and then Genova to eat Le Trofie al Pesto Genovese with Matteo before hitting the Cote d’Azur on Thursday, in time for my best friends wedding. Meanwhile I’d like to leave you with this. Now it’s hardly a recipe, it’s more of an idea, an introduction really, to an ingredient that seems to be rivalling a long-standing chickpea supremacy in our kitchen: Fave secche (dried broad beans).

They need soaking back to life and then cooking, like chickpeas, gently at a happy simmer for an hour or so until they are soft and tender. Once the fave are cooked they have a distinctive flavour, nutty, creamy, rather like cannellini beans crossed with chestnuts but with a slight – but pleasing – bitter edge. You can use them to make a humus-like pureè which goes beautifully with a pile of bittersweet cicoria or as we’ve taken to doing this summer, the simplest soup. We do this by passing both the fave and their cooking water through the food mill, seasoning this pale creamy puree generously with salt and lots of freshly ground black pepper, and serving it with garlic croutons and lots of raw extra virgin olive oil. Simple and just delicious.

Back at the end of next week.

May 24th

It seems fitting that this post should be as succinct, straightforward and swift – three admirable qualities I’m not generally noted for – as this lunch. It could of course be supper.

Fat, tender white beans, cannellini or haricot, drained and mixed with the best tuna packed in oil you can afford (look for tuna belly which is called ventresca, good Italian grocery shops will sell it by weight from a large round tin), thin slices of spring or red onion, a flick of coarse salt and plentiful extra virgin olive oil.  Serve with bread – or toast if your bread is a little jaded – and the bottle of olive oil nearby in case you need another glug. Fork in one hand, bread in the other, I particulary like the scoop, squash and mop involved in this meal.  Needless to say, a glass of wine would be nice.

The artichokes I preserved under oil are ready, so I popped open the first jar and sliced three of the pale hearts into the deliciously oily heap the Italians call fagioli toscani col tonno.

Lunch. One of my favourites.

This is also a fine antipasti. I’d double the quantities for 4 – 6 people, afterall  leftovers, if there are any, are always welcome. Perfect alongside a dish of olives, a few red radishes and some good bread.

White beans with tuna and onion

Serves 2 (technically !)

• 6oz/150g best quality tuna packed in oil, lightly drained.
• 15oz/400g of white beans (cannellini or haricot) drained – you can of course soak and cook your own.
• a small red onion or 2 or 3 spring onions finely sliced.
• extra virgin olive oil
• coarse salt like Maldon
• freshly ground black pepper.

Put the beans, onion and tuna in a bowl, then using a wooden spoon gently stir and break up the tuna into nice fat flakes. Sprinkle over a little salt, season with black pepper and pour over the olive oil liberally – quite how liberally is entirely up to you. Serve with bread.

Leaves, eats shoots and peas.

I fell out, flipped out of my life in London one miserable Sunday morning in March 2005. An hour later I found myself at Heathrow airport knowing only that I was going somewhere. After an oversized, overmilked coffee and a very odd tasting flapjack (I don’t even like flapjack) in a depressing airport eatery, I established the somewhere, by grabbing, as one would pull a name out of a hat, the nearest Lonely planet guide from the shelf in the bookshop. I stared at the book for some time not quite sure what to think, I had no designs on Italy, no romantic longings or yearnings, no distant relatives and barely a word of the language. Then I remembered that wasn’t the point and went to the ticket desk. I didn’t tell anyone I was going.

I remember very little about my arrival and the first week in Naples except walking and that the raucous, unruly, anarchic beauty of the city felt appropriate. I remember I didn’t lose my luggage because I didn’t have any, and that my room in the hostel ‘6 small rooms’ on the 6th floor of a venerable old building on Via Diodata, was, as my lonely planet promised, cheerful, clean, and as its name promised, small.

There are no stories about delicious meals in quaint trattoria, the authentic Ragù, perfect pizza, Sartù, baked anchovies, the polpo affogati and sublime buffalo mozzarella, not now, not this time, they all came later when I returned to Naples. That first week I was too busy walking, pounding the streets from early to late each day.

The dark, heady, intense espresso, I do remember that, tiny cup after tiny cup, maybe some of the best I have ever tasted and the babbà al rum, balls of sweet yeast dough studded with sultanas, baked then soaked in rum, both of which punctuated my days and fueled my pounding. I remember almost nothing of my day at Pompeii except that I felt comfortable in the ruins and in the company of strangers.

By the third day I ‘d managed to turn my phone on and tell my family and friends at least which country I was in, but no more, not yet, they might have come to scoop me up from my demented grand tour.

My first lucid memory is taking the boat from the glittering bay of Naples to Palermo late on the seventh day. The boat pulled into Palermo harbour at about six thirty the following morning, There were only handful of passengers and apparently no other foot passengers. If there were, then they’d all hidden in their cabins and disembarked from an exit that alluded me. I managed to get lost in the bowels of the boat, ending up on the growling, oily, car deck and making my escape by dodging lorries and running down the vast ramp to a chorus of bemused then angry shouts and energetic gesticulations from the boat and the quay side.

If Naples had felt appropriate, the dignified and decrepit beauty of Palermo at the beginning of spring felt right. I found a hotel just near Piazza Verdi and collapsed on the bed. I slept for 24 hours.

The following day I woke late, confused and ravenous and set off in search of food. Willful and hungry and with little sense of direction, I found myself near the, bustling, shrieking, Vucirria street market, a boisterous and crude place quite unlike the charming Sicilian markets I might have imagined. I avoided the extraordinarily noisy fish market and wandered between the vegetables stalls, many of which were selling just one or two things. It was chaotic, dark green blur, both exhilarating and a bit savage. I remember vast, unruly heaps of violet tinted artichokes, what seemed to be an entire lorry load of potatoes sitting in a vast mound with a boy sitting on top, wonderfully sinister looking fave (broad beans) like green fingers with black nails, piles of peas, gaudy gold zucchini flowers, clear sharp green lettuces, crates of forest green leaves with unruly roots I imagine were chicory, that strange vegetable that looks like coarse hairy celery, the one I still don’t know the name of.

I ate pane e panelle from a crowded stall for breakfast. Panelle are deep-fried chickpea flour fritters, which taste a little like particularly delicious, nutty, fat pancakes. The way I understand it, chickpea flour is cooked rather like polenta, with water, slowly until it is a thick paste. Coarsely chopped parsley is added, then the paste is spread thin, cut into pieces and deep-fried. You eat the golden fritters sandwiched between slices of bread, seasoned with a squeeze of lemon juice. Looking back, wandering around those streets alone, devouring breakfast hungrily, in that particular and notorious market, with barely a word of Italian was a bit reckless, careless and foolish. I suppose they were days that reflected how I felt.

I’ve written about my first proper meal in Palermo before, it was in a rough and tumble trattoria in a crumbling building in one of the shabby labyrinthine streets near Vucirria. The owners weren’t very friendly and the woman split water on my jacket, but I didn’t care, which isn’t like me at all. I was well guided by my guidebook, I ate caponata, the agrodolce (sweet and sour) Sicilian antipasti, which is rather like a loose chutney; cubes of deep-fried aubergine, fennel, onion, courgette and celery mixed with sultanas and pine-nuts and marinated in a palate startlingly agrodolce of oil, vinegar and a touch of sugar. I ate a very salty pasta con le sarde (I had a superb plateful the following day in another trattoria) and far too much wine for lunchtime.

To finish, I had the spring vegetable stew Frittedda, which is amongst one of the most delicious and evocative things I have eaten in the last few years.

I was fortunate, for 6 weeks or so in Spring, when the fresh broad beans, peas, artichokes and spring onions are young and tender enough, you can find this simple and sublime fresh vegetable stew in Palermo (there are variations of it all over Italy in Rome it is called vignarola). Spring or mild onions are cooked in olive oil, maybe with some wild fennel, the prepared artichokes are added and then finally the shelled peas and broad beans along with a little water or wine. The vegetables are then cooked briefly and gently. It is a simple and, when carefully made, sublime dish that tastes like spring, tender and sweet, popping and bursting with fresh flavour.

I finished my lunch, mopping up the last oily juices with more bread and paid. I remember feeling very sated, but for the first time in eight days, extremely sad, very alone and with an acute and swelling sense of panic ‘What the fuck was I doing in Palermo?’ I cried for the first time. I couldn’t walk any more so I went back to the hotel. I called my family, which hardly reassured them, but they were glad to hear my voice. It hardly reassured me either but by this point the panic and tears had subsided, and tucked underneath them was a strong, unshakable sense that however bizarre, rough and grey things felt, I was doing the right thing. I slept for another 12 hours.

Five Years on, I am sitting in our flat in Rome writing this and wondering if you’re still reading. This seems like a good place to stop for now and write out the recipes. I’m sure I’ll pick up where I’ve left off another day.

Today, as you’ve probably gathered, I live with Vincenzo, who, even though he has been in Rome for many years, is dark, proud and unmistakably Sicilian – I am very tall, pale and unmistakably English which makes for much affectionate and not so affectionate teasing. Being here with him has meant that Caponata, pasta con le sarde, frittedda, panelle, those first meals in Palermo, the full flavoured, tender, evocative dishes are now – adapted and shaped to Roman produce – happily part of our daily life.

The frittedda is Vincenzo’s family recipe, his Mum Carmella makes it beautifully. Putting the frittedda and the panelle together is not very traditional but it’s very delicious, the golden fritters make wonderful companions for the green shoots, bulbs, beans and peas.

A good way to celebrate spring.

On a practical note, I wonder if any Sicilians reading will gasp at this panelle recipe and method and then offer advice! Yes please. Until then, this is the way we make panelle. Now the mixture is rather sticky and getting the rumpled squares from the tray to the pan can be tricky, I use a spatula and a fish slice. Once in the pan and the hot oil they fry into neat golden square which are altogether more manageable. As for the frittedda, fresh, tender beans and peas in their pods and the nicest artichokes you can find are worth seeking out.

Last thing, if the broad beans are very young, tender and good you don’t need to pop them out them out of their little coats, but I leave that decision to you and your beans.

Le panelle

• 300 g chickpea flour
• salt and pepper
• 3 tbsp coarsely chopped parsley
• olive oil for frying

La Frittedda

• 6 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 200g of spring onions or mild sweet white onions, finely sliced
• 2 large or 3 medium artichokes
• a lemon
• 1kg broad beans in their pods which will yield about 300g of beans
• 1kg peas in their pods which will yield about 300g of peas
• a handful of finely chopped fresh flat leaf parsley
• A handful of wispy fennel fronds
• 100ml of water or wine

Serves 4

Shell the peas and broad beans and prepare the artichokes by snapping away the dark outer leaves until you get to the pale tender ones. Then using a small paring knife cut away the stringy outside of the stalk and work around the base of the artichoke trimming away the green. Trim the pointed tops of the remaining leaves and cut the artichoke in half. Using a spoon scoop out the hairy choke. Cut each half into 6 small wedges and rub them with lemon and submerge them in cold water with lemon juice to stop them discoloring.

To make the panelle, in a saucepan, whisk the chickpea flour with 500ml of water until smooth, season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Really slowly bring the pan to a gentle boil, whisking all the time, and then cook, always whisking for 8-10 minutes until the mixture thickens, then stir in the parsley. Pour the thick mixture – it will be thick and sticky and you will need to help it along – onto an oiled baking sheet and using the back of a spoon spread and flatten it to a 1cm thickness using the back of a spoon dipped in hot water. Leave it to cool and set for a few hours.

Prepare the frittedda, Heat the olive oil in a large frying or saute pan and then cook the onions over a modest flame until they are soft and translucent. Add the artichoke hearts, 50ml of white wine or plain water. Cover the pan and cook over a gentle flame for 5 minutes. Then add the peas, and broad beans and another 50ml of white wine or plain water. Cover the pan and cook over a gentle flame for 10 minutes and the vegetables are soft. Stir in the parsley and fennel fronds. Taste and season accordingly. Let the frittedda settle for a few minutes which allows the flavours to emerge

Cut the chickpea mixture into rounds, square or diamonds – if it is sticky, don’t worry use a fish slice or spatula lift it from the tray – then shallow fry in olive oil until golden on each side.

Serve the panelle immediately with the frittedda and half a lemon.

Have a good week.

Feeling Thrifty

I never thought I would learn to love old, stale, bread. I never thought I’d get excited about a rumpled paper bag, a brown one that we keep in the basket under the work table to collect the bread orphans, the neglected and badly cut slices, the crusty ends of loaves which Italians call i culi ( the arses !) But I have and I do.

It is because of Vincenzo, the man is as obsessed with using up every slice, crust and fragment of bread as he is with its daily acquisition and the bit of bread balanced on the edge of his plate at every meal. If he doesn’t finish his piece of bread at a meal, it goes in the paper bag. His paternal grandparents had a forno (oven, bakery) in Messina in Sicily. His grandmother Lila in particular, worked very hard and the most extraordinary hours to keep – quite literally – bread on many tables. Bread, was a serious matter and I suppose Vincenzo couldn’t help but grow up knowing the value and importance of it. Bread was never wasted in his family, fresh daily bread may have been a given, but so was the thrifty use of every scrap.

He calls me a wasteful English barbarian by the way.

Vincenzo has brought some of this thrift into our – increasingly nightmarish and desperately in need of attention – kitchen. In summer we often make panzanella, we soak the leftover bread in water, squeeze it dry, tear it into pieces and then toss it with very red ripe tomatoes, onion, basil, a little vinegar and lots of peppery olive oil. We sometimes make Pappa al pomodoro or pancotto both comforting and delicious soft paps of tomatoes, stale bread maybe onion or herbs which have been simmered together until they form a soft creamy mass. We often make breadcrumbs for liberal sprinkling on whatever and then in Autumn and winter we toast slices of stale bread, tear them and put them in the bottom of a shallow bowl and ladle over Ribollita.

Ribollita is a Tuscan speciality, it means reboiled. This hearty soup-stew – of which there are as many versions and variations as there are cooks – is thought to have been traditionally made and eaten on Saturday, a way of using up the left-over white beans from Friday, a lean day. The beans were recooked (hence the ribollita) with lots of onion, often cavolo nero (black cabbage) and vegetables, then served over slices of toasted stale bread (pane raffermo) Each bowlful was then doused very generously with bright green, rich, peppery, Tuscan olive oil.

Ribollita is still made in much the same way today, but now that it is less common to make it out of necessity with the leftovers from religious fast days, the name ribollita is more likely to refer to the fact that this soup – like most minestrone – is unquestionably better when it is made in advance, left to cool, preferably overnight, and then ribollita or reboiled and reheated.

This is a practical, down to earth soup to both make and eat. First a soffritto of onion, carrot, celery and olive oil, then some diced potatoes, a few tomatoes, thyme, your soaked white beans, an uncontrollable little mountain of cavolo nero which withers down obligingly, water, salt. You bring the pan to the boil and lower the heat to a slow simmer for at least two hours, remove, taste, season, taste.

Now a nice long rest, preferably overnight so the flavours can mature and develop and the soup can thicken. When it’s time you gently reheat it and then ladle the soup over toasted stale bread (rubbed with garlic if you like), anoint with lots of extra virgin olive oil a grind of black pepper. Then you wait like a Tuscan for about 5 even 10 minutes before you eats so the bread soaks up the broth, swells under the thick dense soup and becomes so thick you can stand your spoon up in it.

Then you eat, thrifty and delicious I’d say.

A note about the kale – I do hope you can find it, I don’t want to seem annoyingly exclusive about Italian ingredients. If you can’t, you can make a really nice ribollita with ordinary kale or savoy cabbage, but I should say there is nothing like the deep, toothsome, slightly peppery flavour of its blue-black cousin cavolo nero (black cabbage) for this particular soup.

Oh, one more thing, a final note about the bread, it should be stale, two or three or four days old, depending on the type of bread. Italians call stale toasted bread pane raffermo which does not have the negative connotations of our word stale. Pane raffermo means firmed up, hardened, matured which makes the bread ideal for soaking up broth whilst keeping its shape and texture. Good stale bread from comes good bread, bread with texture, flavour and body. Poor quality bread is even poorer stale and will be even nastier and a tragic soggy, gluey, mess under this serious soup.

Umm goodness, I am so long-winded sometimes, you get the picture I hope.

The recipe.

Ribollita

serves 6

• 6 tablespoons olive oil
• onion, peeled and finely diced
• a large carrot, peeled and finely diced
• a stick of celery, finely diced
• 3 whole plum tomatoes, fresh or canned.
• 3 sprigs of fresh thyme
• 2 medium potatoes. peeled and coarsely diced
• 500g cavolo nero, shredded
• 160g dried white beans like cannelini soaked overnight and drained
• 8 slices or crusts of stale country bread with a firm crust and dense crumb
• salt and pepper

In a large heavy based pan (one with at 4 liter capacity is ideal) warm the olive oil over a medium heat and then add the diced onion, celery and carrot and cook gently for about 15 minutes until they are very soft and translucent and floppy.

Add the potatoes to the pan, stir and cook for a couple of minutes. Add the tomatoes and the thyme, stir and cook for another couple of minutes.

Add the beans, stir and then add the vast pile of cavolo nero and try to stir to coat (The cavolo will feel rather unmanageable at this point, the sheer bouncy volume of it, try to turn as best you can and rest assured it will wither down soon)

Pour in 2 litres/ 3 1/2 pints of water, season with salt and then bring the pan to the boil, stirring and turning occasionally. Once the pan has reached a lively boil. turn the heat down to low, cover the pan and leave to simmer for two hours.

Remove from the heat, taste season and leave to sit for at least 6 hours or better, over night.

Once you are ready to serve gently reheat the soup in the pan. Toast the bread lightly, rub it with garlic if you like and then you have two options; You can just lay slice of bread into the bottom of an individual serving bowl and ladle over the soup, dribble with more oil and serve just so; You can do as our friends do in Tuscany. You set the oven to 180°/350F, Lay the slices crusts of toasted bread at the bottom of a large earthenware dish and the pour over the soup. Bake in the oven for 10 minutes then serve into individual bowls making sure everyone gets some of the bread at the bottom, dribble with more extra virgin olive oil, a grind of black pepper and freshly grated parmesan..

You often find ribollita served tepid or just warm here in Italy as the flavours are more pronounced that way.

Chestnut days

To begin…..

a patè of wild mushrooms and chestnuts

After, Chestnut and borlotti bean soup

As I mentioned on Sunday, we have been given a large quantity of very beautiful, deep brown, smooth and glossy sweet chestnuts. I adore chestnuts so I was quite delighted and jumped around. Delight dissolved into mild panic at the sense of responsibility for such a nice gift (I still can’t talk about the last gift, the quinces, I am still ashamed) and the prospect of all the peeling. But that too dissolved and delight returned as we roasted and then gobbled the first chestnuts and I began making chestnut shaped plans.

Growing up in England we had chestnuts, but only very occasionally and almost exclusively at Christmas. Probably in the stuffing, almost certainly roasted in the embers of the fire and maybe, if we were lucky, my Dad would buy my Mum a box of marrons glacès to be offered around. But that was it, our chestnut quota until the following year.  I’m not sure why, we all liked them and my Mum was a thoughtful, seasonal cook and occasional forager. It’s not as if they were an exotic delicacy, we could buy the larger european ones or hunt down the smaller English ones throughout the autumn. Whats more there was a sweet chestnut tree – not to be confused with the horse-chestnut tree which provided us with conkers to be hurled at each other -  at the bottom of our road and Rothamstead park had several vast, old, gnarled trees which shed their prickly husks amongst serrated leaves from October. We just didn’t.

I only really started to cook and experiment with chestnuts when I came to Italy. Italians love and prize chesnuts – afterall they were a staple food here for thousands of years, they deserve to acknowledged – and they do such nice things with them that it becomes quite impossible to ignore, forget or neglect them especially in Autumn, the chestnut coloured months right up until Christmas.

So, the chestnut shaped plans…..

Well, I found 56 recipes I would like to make, most of them Italian or French and many from a lovely small but perfectly formed book by Ria Loohuizen about the history, culture and cooking of chestnuts called, quite appropriately, On chestnuts the trees and their seeds. My mum gave it to me for my birthday 3 years ago, 21 september 2006, I know because she always dates the inside cover.

I finally narrowed it down to 8 recipes – which reads like a rather grand dinner to be held in Umbria sometime in October (I know just the place) – 3 of which I have made before, a patè, a soup, a main course, 2 fine accompaniments involving bacon, a dessert, a cake and the hush……marrons glacè…… I would of course start at the beginning, the patè.

I am not actually suggesting this as a complete meal unless of course you want to see if a chestnut overdose is possible. I imagine each course could be a meal in itself with appropriate bits and frills. Having said that we did go for a chestnut double yesterday and have the first two chestnuts courses for lunch, the terrine, with plenty of nice bread and some pickled gherkins and the soup with a blob of creme fraiche.

But before we go any further….

Preparing the chestnuts

In Italy there are two types of chestnuts one is the small castagna commune (common chestnut) which is small and flat nut because each prickly burr contains 2 or 3 smaller nuts. The other is the (cultivated) larger, plumper marrone which is a single nut in a single prickly burr. The marrone has sweeter, jucier flesh and more of it. I like both.

When buying or collecting sweet chestnuts, look for the nice, hard, unwrinkled, shiny ones, which aren’t dented or cracked. They should have a certain weight, if they are light or soft or rattle they are old and have been kept too long. They will be dry and mean tasting.

The secret to cooking fresh chestnuts is cutting the shells properly so the shell and the tough astringent skin underneath comes away easily. Wash the nuts and then soak them in warm water for 20 minutes so the shells are easier to slash. Using a small sharp knife or a special chestnut knife make a horizontal cut across the curved side of the nut leaving the flat side uncut.

Now, I sometimes boil and I sometimes roast chestnuts before peeling them, it all depends on the recipe. For the following patè and soup I think roasting is best. So, put the slashed nuts (a little more than the required weight to account for the shells) on a baking tray and roast at 200°/400f for 25 minutes. Once they are quite tender and the skin hard and crisp, take the chestnuts out of the oven and wrap them tightly in a tea towel so the chestnuts steam a little and the shells come loose. You can also crush the chestnuts slightly while they are still wrapped so the shells break. After 10 minutes unwrap and peel the chestnuts.

So the patè

Patè of chestnuts and wild mushrooms

Adpated from Ria Loohuizen ‘On Chestnuts’

I’ve made this before and I love it. I want to ramble on about the thick, rich texture of chestnuts and how they are hearty and sweet yet deeply savory at the same time, how well they go with mushrooms, that this feels like food from another time, that I wish I could write poems about chestnuts………. To top it all I used a fresh porcini which was very extravagant but very very tasty.

You can use any kind of mushrooms for this recipe including ordinary cultivated ones but in general the wilder the better. As I have already said, serve at room temperature with pickled gherkins, onions, lots of nice toasted bread and a bottle of rough and ready Chianti. Spread thickly.

• 100g mushrooms
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 small red onion finely diced
• 250g chestnuts cooked and peeled
• 25g good butter
• freshly grated nutmeg
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 5 or 6 juniper berries (optional)

Clean the mushrooms by wiping them with a damp cloth; never rinse mushrooms or they become soggy. Chop the mushrooms finely.

Warm the oil in a frying pan over a medium heat and saute the onion until soft and translucent. Add the mushrooms to the frying pan and let them fry gently for about 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Puree the chestnuts with a food processor, hand blender, mouli-legumes or mash them with the back of a fork,add a tablespoon of warm water if they seem too dry.

Add the soft butter and chestnut purèe to the onion and mushrooms in the frying pan, add a grating of nutmeg and stir all the ingredients with a wooden spoon until they are well incorporated.

Pack the mixture into an earthenware terrine or small bowl and decorate the top with juniper berries.

Leave the mixture to set in the fridge for at least 4 hours. Serve at room temperature.

Now the the soup

Chestnut and borlotti bean soup

Adpated from Ria Loohuizen ‘On Chestnuts’

serves 4 very well

I once ate a wonderful bean and chestnut soup in Umbria. I tried to ask what type of beans they had used but my wonky italian and English accent confused   the waitress who scuttled away whispering ‘fagioli fagioli‘ (beans beans) which didn’t really narrow it down. Anyway the colour of the soup suggested borlotti which made sense as I have always thought borlotti beans have a nutty rather chestnut like quality to them. So I experimented.

I like this soup very very much, the richness and texture of the chestnuts make a wonderfully thick, substantial, velvety soup and the colour…well it’s chestnut, which I think is quite beautiful.

It is a lovely lunch for a cold day accompanied by some toasted bread and a simple green salad for after.

• 30g butter
• 1 medium onion peeled and finely diced
• I slim leek, cleaned and finely sliced
• 1 stalk celery finely diced
• 400g cooked borlotti or cranberry beans
• 400g peeled chestnuts
• 1 litre of chicken, vegetable stock or water
• salt and pepper, nutmeg
• crème fraiche

Melt the butter in a large soup pan and saute the onion until it is soft and translucent. Add the leek and celery and a little salt and let the vegetables gently fry on a low heat for 5 minutes.

Add the beans and the chestnuts to the pan, stir and allow everything to cook together for a few minutes.

Add the stock or water and bring to the boil, turn down the heat and let the soup simmer for 25 minutes.

Pass the soup through the mouli-legumes, blast with a hand blender or purèe with the food processor. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and a grating of nutmeg. Stir.

Serve the soup very warm but not really hot in warm bowls with a blob of crème fraiche.

Practical things

Fresh chestnuts can be kept for days in a cool place or for weeks in the fridge, We can also learn from animals who keep them under a layer of leaves and go leaf collecting or simply lay our chestnuts in box and cover them with a layer of sand. Chestnuts freeze very well once you have peeled them.

The last thing.

The oldest chestnut tree, one of the oldest trees in the world, grows on the Island of Sicily on the eastern slope of the volcano Etna, and is known locally as Il castagno dei 100 cavalli, ‘the tree of 100 horses’. The legend has it that during a thunder-storm the queen of Aragon found shelter for herself and the 100 horsemen who accompanied her on a visit to mount Etna. This magnificent tree, which is estimated to be between 2000 and 4000 years old has been described since the 16th century in the diaries of many travellers, and sketched or painted by artists. When the Scottish traveller Patrick Brydone, who was initially doubtful it was one tree, measured its girth in 1770, he found it to be 62 meters.

Ria Loohuizen ‘On Chestnuts’

Only soup will do.

There is an Italian proverb which says;

‘Sette cose fa la zuppa, cava fame e sete attuta, empie el ventre, snetta il dente, fa dormire, fa smaltire, e la guancia fa arrossire’

‘Soup does seven things, it takes away hunger and thirst, fills the stomach, cleans the teeth, makes you sleep. makes you slim and puts colour in your cheeks’

Soup is also all I want when I feel like this.…

….tiresome aches and fuzzy snuffle, twitching limbs, wildly erratic temperatures and temperament, all accompanied by a rash of self-pity and itchy paranoia that ‘I have contracted something terrible from which I may DIE’ and then the weary disappointment at discovering that even though I feel terrible it is merely a rather common thing…..

So soup it was, borlotti bean soup…..

….a thick and hearty one, you could say progress after yesterday’s chicken broth.

You know the sort of thing I am talking about, I have written about this soup and others very like it with almost excessive regularity here. The robust, rustic bean soups the Italians are so good at, the ones which in essence are just a puree of beans thinned with a little flavoursome stock, studded with more whole beans, scented with rosemary, sometimes fortified with pasta and maybe served with a dribble of raw oil and maybe some freshly grated parmesan.

I forsake the parmesan and oil yesterday figuring simplicity was more appropriate for my convalescence, surprisingly Vincenzo did too. I was about to encourage some sort of soup embellishment for HIS soup for the sake of the photo…..if not oil a parmesan then a blob of yogurt, some snipped chives, croutons…anything, something photogenic, the word garnish crossed my mind. GARNISH….I snapped out of embellishment mode as soon as that word reared it’s limp lettuce leaf of a head from I don’t know where, I remembered what a fine cook once said  ‘say farewell to garnish, just make sure whatever is on the plate is as it should be.’

Which is cosi…A soup proud to be brown and hearty with texture, a soup with no pretensions just the desire to nourish and sustain. A soup that if it were a spa would spurn any scented candle, designer water, soft gowns and towels (which are lovely but so soft they don’t actually dry you), relaxation to music luxury. It would be a rather austere but striking place in the Swiss mountains that encouraged long brisk walks. A place where where buxom, ruddy women wearing white coats would pummel you and give you a proper massage, wrap you up firmly in good coarse towels and a functional brown blanket and instruct you to rest on the terrace with glass of tap water – this is a spa after all, the water has just rolled down the moutain – to breathe the mountain air.

Cannellini beans, chickpeas and borlotti are all fine beans for this recipe, we use tinned, dried and fresh beans depending on the state of affairs in the kitchen, timetable and with our frankly funny seasons.Yesterday it was brilliantly marbled pink and white fresh borlotti which would provide the earthy, nutty chestnutlike body for our soup. Vincenzo was on podding duty…. can I say podding, is pod a verb.……..he was in fact on everything duty, I was horizontal.

I’ve noticed that people are often disappionted that borlotti beans lose there mottled charm when cooked. I don’t, I like the deep earthy russet colour they assume with gentle cooking as much as I love the pink and creamy white marbling they wear when raw.

Vincenzo is a good and patient soup maker. Our bedroom is not so far from the kitchen and I could hear the steady rhythmic sound of him making the battuto- the finely cut up mixture of celery, carrot, and onion produced by striking (battere) them on the chopping board with the knife – I am actually quite surprised he didn’t strike me with something at that point, I was being that annoying and demanding. I could just make out the gentle sizzle of the battuto becoming a soffritto as it was sautéed with the olive oil in the pan…gently for about 20 minutes until it is soft, translucent floppy and starting to look a little thick and sticky.

Oh, two things, which I know are going to sound obvious, it is as much a reminder to myself as you.  First, use really tasty, sweet, earthy carrots, celery and onion, they provide the base of flavour for the soup, if the vegetable foundations are insipid (like so many vegetables are today) the soup will be too. Second, make the soffritto carefully and slowly so the flavours have time to develope and emerge fully.

Back to the recipe, you probably know the rest, the beans are added to the soffritto base along with a sprig of rosemary and a squeeze of tomato concentrate.  The heat is raised and everything briskly stirred so the beans are completely coated with the elements of the base. You stir again and then cover everything with stock or water, throw in a Parmesan rind, bring the pan to a happy boil, reduce to a simmer and then leave the pan to bubble away gently for about 25 minutes (45 for fresh beans.)

Now, remove the rind and sprig of rosemary and set aside a couple of ladelfuls of liquid and some of the whole beans. Now pass the contents of the pan through the mouli or give it a blast with the hand blender to create a smooth gloopy soup. Reunite the beans and liquid you set aside.

Raw oil, some freshly grated parmesan from a big fresh hunk, nice bread.

Ummm….I have written this recipe out so many times and it seems to get more complicated every time….

Wholesome, honest and healing… After a bowl of this I was nearly better…… nearly…….I did need another day resting today……  you know, just in case I was still contagious……a bit more soup…..another film……

Some say this soup is even more delicious with some pancetta or a couple of little pork chops added to the soffritto and allowed to sizzle for another 10 minutes before you add the beans. I agree.

Borlotti bean soup

Serves 4 generously which is as it should be

• 900g fresh borlotti beans unshelled weight – shelled, or 250g dried borlotti soaked overnight and then simmered for 2 hours until tender or 450g tinned borlotti
  
• 6 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• medium carrot peeled and finely diced
• stick of celery finely diced
• mild onion peeled and finely diced
• 100g pancetta diced or 2 small pork chops (optional)
  
• 2 tbsp tomato concentrate
• small sprig of rosemary
• 750ml vegetable or chicken stock or water the dried soaked borlotti were cooked in with more plain water added to make up the 750ml if necessary.
• Parmesan rind
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

Prepare your soffritto of finely chopped onion, carrot and celery, sauteing them gently and slowly in the oil in a large heavy based pan until soft and floppy and translucent. If you are adding pancetta or pork chops add them now and cook for another 10 minutes turning in the vegetables every now and then.

Then you add the tomato concentrate and a sprig of rosemary, stir, and then add fresh, precooked or drained tinned borlotti.

Stir again and then cover everything with stock or water, throw in a Parmesan rind. Bring the pan to a happy boil, reduce to a simmer and then leave the pan to bubble away gently for about 25 minutes (45 if you are using fresh borlotti).

Now, remove the rind and sprig of rosemary and set aside a couple of ladelfuls of liquid and whole beans (and pork chops if you added them). Now pass the contents of the pan through the mouli or give it a blast with the hand blender to create a smooth gloopy soup.

Reunite the beans and liquid you set aside (and pork chops if you included them) and season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Serve the soup in warm bowls and allow it to settle for 10 minutes before serving as it tastes better warm rather than hot.