Anyone got a runcible spoon?

As anyone with an allotment or fruit trees in the U.K. will know, this has been a Mast Year for trees producing nuts and fruit - meaning an absolute glut of produce. The weather conditions conspired to make everything go into overdrive and as a result boughs are bent under the weight of apples, plums, pears, everything. I had to take off half the unripe plums to stop the victoria plum's branches snapping under their weight. People literally cannot give away their apples for free because everyone has far more than they can use.

There is one exception in our garden - my beautiful little quince tree in a pot. We had a wind storm just after the blossom opened and they blew off without a chance to be pollinated, so it's another year without fruit for me. But not, it seems, for others.

Somewhat overripe but scented quinces

I was lucky enough to get a bag of quince from a guy with heavily cropping tree in our old neighbourhood. They are like large yellow pears with an amazing smell and a dense texture. I kept sticking my head in the bag to sniff them because it was just so delightful. It's a hard scent to describe, but it's fruity and perfumed at the same time, and nothing else is quite like it.

 I had made quince jam before but I wasn't happy with the slightly gritty texture. You know that underripe pear sensation, where it's a bit granular? It's like that writ large. I had clearly not done something right, but all the blogs and articles I read about quince said either that you needed to push it through a mouli, that it just was slightly grainy, or that if it's grainy you're doing it wrong but without any further information of how to do it right. So I decided to make quince jelly instead - like the membrillo you can buy in Spain to have with manchego and other hard cheeses, but not quite as tart. Let's be honest, any excuse to eat cheese is a win.

 I roughly chopped the fruit - which took some doing, those things are rock hard! Between the pesto making and the quince my arms are going to be bulging with muscles at this rate. (One can dream). I put it in a large pan with some water and simmered it until mushy - it took about 2 hours. One of the nice things about making a jelly rather than a jam is you don't have to peel and core anything, just whack it into chunks and let it cook down slowly, so it's a nice easy way to make a preserve.

Rather enthusiastically bubbling quince

Once it had cooled, I set up my straining bag and its holder. Or rather, I didn't. I couldn't find the damned straining bag anywhere. I looked in all the sensible places and several not so sensible places, to no avail. Mark suggested the mighty Cliff's Hardware, which is a tiny shop that sells everything you can possibly think of. Although they assured me they usually had jelly bags they were out of stock at the minute.

As an aside, I hope everyone has a Cliff's in their life.  The sort of place where you can hold up the broken bit of dishwasher or esoteric connecting pipe and they'll reach behind their counter and say "like one of these?" and you will be able to fix whatever it is, even if you do have to go back twice more for further advice. It's a bit like a halfway house between Mr Hooper's store and Luis's fix it shop on Sesame Street - they don't do the repair but they sell you the stuff so you can, and explain what you need to do if you're unsure. The staff are unbelievably patient, friendly and knowledgeable. Timber, plumbing, tea cosies, bird seed, bedding plants, hay for your guinea pigs - Cliff's Hardware has you covered.

With this rare lapse by Cliff's, I still had not straining bag. Mark offered a trip to Harrogate to buy one from Lakeland, which would have included a bonus trip to Betty's for a fondant fancy (my personal favourite) but as he was in the midst of painting the kitchen I declined. Better to get that done than my domestic experimenting. I had found a metre of muslin in my search, though, so I ran up a spectacularly bad but still functional drawstring bag on the sewing machine. I really should remember the bit about measuring twice before I cut once. Oops.

We're in the middle of decorating,
 of course it's a mess

With the mush of 2kgs of quince shoved into the bag suspended above a large bowl, I left it to drip through the fabric overnight. It didn't do much, so I wrapped a couple of tins of tomatoes in clingfilm and used them as weights to get more liquid through.

The result as a scant pint of juice, give or take. I added 400g of sugar to the liquid and simmered it to reduce until it reached 104.5 degrees Celsius. That left me with a single jam jar of crystal clear pink jelly - not much to show for 2 kg, 2 hours cooking, 18 hours draining and then half an hour simmering with sugar, is it?

But throughout that time the house smelled amazing. And to be honest I wasn't making quince jelly because we needed a decent supply of it, I was doing it because it seemed like fun. 

I should have stopped a little before 104.5 as the quince jelly is very firm. Then again, the Owl and the Pussycat dined on slices of quince, so it's probably meant to be like that. At least, that's what I'm now claiming.

So there we have it - one glowing jar of scented beauty, to be put aside until the Christmas cheeseboard brings cheeses worth such an effort.

The owl and the pussycat went to sea 
In a beautiful pea-geen boat...
...They dined on mince, and slices of quince, 
Which they ate with a runcible spoon 

 

 

 

Bringing The Holiday Home With Me

 

 Obviously one of the many reasons to holiday in Italy is the food. What's not to love? Seafood, pasta, pizza, risotto... the whole country is awash in marvellous things to eat. It would be daft not to make the most of it.

Inspired by my very excellent mate Kirsty's habit of going to a cooking lesson when she's on holiday, I booked Mark and I a morning of making the traditional Ligurian pesto and focaccia in a restaurant in the stunning town of Sestri Levante, a short ride on the local train from our hotel in Rapallo. 

Lovely restaurant in Sestri Levante

Yes, I've made pesto before, but it was just more fun doing it with the local ingredients - a scant tablespoon of pine nuts, mounds of fresh basil from Pra', Ligurian olive oil from cold pressed Taggiasca olives, and their preferred a mix of parmesan and Sardinian pecorino. Of all the things we ate in Italy, the warm focaccia lavishly coated in freshly made pesto was pretty much the best thing, and believe me there was some fierce competition! 

All the essential supplies

The charming  Davide insisted that a glass of wine was a very necessary part of making pesto. I remember my Dad saying something similar in Canada in the 1970s - if he didn't have a cold beer in one hand, the barbeque just wasn't going to cook properly. I wasn't entirely convinced that was true for pesto being made at 10:30 in the morning, to be honest. Breakfast Wine is not something I want. However, Davide said wine was what powered the pestle and mortar - without a sip of wine to keep you going as you pound away, you won't have the oomph to make a smooth and delicious pesto.

Like I say, he was a very charming fella. 

See? Charming!

 I was very surprised how little salt and pine nuts went into the recipe. It was maybe half a teaspoon of coarse salt with half a plump garlic clove and the pine nuts that we pounded into a cream to start with. Then it was picking the leaves off mounds and mounds of basil, thumping the bejeesus out of it in a big heavy mortar with a marble pestle, and then thumping some more. The grated cheese was added a tablespoon a time with yet more pummelling in between. If I did this often I'd have muscles Rosie the Riveter would be proud of. Three or four tablespoons of cheese later and we were finished.

Davide said the oil must never be added to the mortar because the marble (or stone) is porous and will absorb it. We scooped all the paste onto our pestles like a glowing green basil gelato cone and put it in jars to be topped by olive oil. Apparently, the pesto is mixed with the appropriate amount of oil when it's going to be served. Otherwise, as long as it was covered with a layer of oil to prevent oxygenation, it was fine as a fairly stiff paste.

Having a brilliant time 

 
When we got home I was keen to try out making pesto - nearly as keen as Zach was to eat it! I have a very small Mason and Cash pestle and mortar I use for crushing spices,so I had a go with that.

Nightmare.

The bowl was far too small and the pestle far too light to crush the leaves thoroughly. It took muscle power to break it down, and muscles aren't what I'm known for. I'm more of a limp noodle than a powerhouse and it was absolutely exhausting.  I am never doing that again.

Luckily there was a very big stone pestle and mortar in the sale due to one of Amazon's spurious reasons for an event (I can't even remember what that one was called, but it wasn't Black Friday) so I bought myself that enormous thing* and had another go.

Seriously enormous, weighs a ton

 

However, all that weight means the heavy pestle does a superb job of bashing the poor basil into submission.  It took less than a third of the time of the small one and was a great deal more fun. It was also rather intimidatingly loud, for which I probably owe my neighbours apologies. And poor Luke who was nearby and nearly jumped out of his skin.

Having tried pesto with the traditionally shaped Trofie pasta (very narrow twists) and with breadsticks and focaccia, I fancied a go at trying to replicate a delicious lunch I'd had in Santa Marguerita. It was big billowing sheets of fresh pasta with loads of pesto on top. It looked messy and awful, but it was so light and delicious. 

Least appetising, most delicious

 

I've not made pasta with 00 flour before, but as I was trying to do it all with the proper Italian ingredients I bought flour to have a go. Bloody hell, that stuff is so much harder to work with than plain flour! It was so very stiff I wondered if I'd got the proportions wrong. I was using Angela Hartnet's 400g to 4 large eggs and a tablespoon of olive oil. I rolled half of it out to thing, long lasagne sheets ribbons and cooked them for around 3 minutes.

I'd been a bit overly free passing homemade pesto around my friends and neighbours to have the quantity  the restaurant served on the pasta, but it was still absolutely delicious. The pasta was light and silky, the pesto was strongly herby with just a gentle kick of garlic and it all felt like a bowl of happiness. Z and I agreed we'd definitely have it again, although with regular flour next time unless I take up an interest in weight lifting in the meantime.

There was the other half batch of pasta dough left over, so a couple of days later Zach and I had homemade tagliatelle with a puttanesca sauce, one of our favourites.  It normally takes less time to make the sauce than the pasta takes to cook, but that isn't true when cooking fresh pasta -  fresh pasta is done in two to three minutes. It's still a ridiculously quick sauce and punches far above its weight in the effort vs flavour ratio. We enjoyed it very much. (Mark, the Philistine, chose fried chicken tenders and chips instead. There's no accounting for taste)

I love puttanesca

*If I am ever found dead in my kitchen, there's a fair chance it will be because I dropped this damned thing on myself when trying to put it away. It weighs a ton and could probably fell an elephant. 

Flying The Flag On Holiday

Mark and I have just returned from a wonderful week in Rapallo, a coastal town not far from Genoa in Liguria. It's a lovely old town full of beautifully painted buildings in the tromp d'oeil style so typical of that area. It's also Not The Pretty One, supposedly. At least, not in comparison to its neighbours Santa Marguerita Ligure and Portofino - which as Mark pointed out, tells you how thoroughly spoilt the Italians are for beauty, if they can regard a gem like Rapalla as the "meh" town of the region.

Rapallo in the early evening

 
 I have lots to say about the food and the beauty and the food and the people and also in particular, the food, but it's something else that I want to write about today. 

As anyone living in the UK will know from the news, there are the flags of St George popping up all over the place in England. Not just flags attached to lampposts but naff spray-painted red crosses onto mini roundabouts in the road, and any other available white surface. It's either declaration of pride and love of England or a dog whistle to show non-white or non-English people that they aren't welcome, depending on your news source.

So I was surprised to see the flag of St George flying absolutely all over the place in the Genoese region. And it's for an absolutely brilliant reason - It's not our flag anyway.

We have to go back to the middle ages. There's England, trading in the Mediterranean far from home. We had no reputation to speak of. No one was intimidated by us; our traders, merchants, pilgrims and vessels are all easy targets for any pirates, bandits or opportunists who see easy pickings. England was getting her butt kicked in the Mediterranean arena, and it was expensive. What she needed was an ally - help from someone too fearsome to be messed with who'd offer England protection.

This is where Genoa, The Republic Of The Magnificents, came in. Genoa was extremely powerful, wealthy and well-armed. It had colonies across the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea. The city was a major power from 1099 through to the 1700s, first through might and then through banking. It was Venice's main rival as a trading power and had a formidable reputation.

For a 'substantial' annual fee, Genoa allowed England to fly the Genoese flag of St George, knowing that anyone seeing that flag will not want to incur the wrath of the republic known as La Dominante and La Superba. (Italian republics really went in for nicknames. Just look at The Eternal City and La Serenissima)

For literally hundreds of years England paid Genoa for the right to fly their flag. Hundreds of years .From Richard the Lionheart to the mid 18th century. We only stopped paying when Austria invaded Genoa. The mayor of Genoa in 2018 jokingly requested 247 years of back rent for the flag the English now think of as theirs.

I love this. When Tommy 'Not a racist, honest, guvnor' Robinson had his march in London the other week and there were countless images of people wearing the St George's cross flag as a cape, I like knowing that it's the flag of somewhere else. That we had to pay protection money to use the flag because our own name didn't count for much. When they talk about pride in their country while flying a cross of St George, I don't think 'borrowed muscle' is the pride they mean. 

That brought me to another public item on display - signs. I like signs in new places. I did see something else displayed in Liguria that delighted me - a handwritten sign, emphatically underlined and over punctuated, outside a street-side pizzeria in the tourist town of Santa Marguerita.

It was everything in one pithy sentence - the cultural difference between the Brits and the Italians, how common it was that this misunderstanding occurred, and just how frustrated both British tourists and Italian waiting staff found the behaviour of the other side. 

Line Has No Value

Line Has No Value is almost a declaration of war to a country with a penchant for queueing. There is nothing a Brit won't turn into a queue given the opportunity. When a bunch of people are waiting for something, we don't just rush in like some pack of savages, we form an orderly queue and shoot daggers from our eye while harumphing should someone attempt to push in. (This doesn't apply when getting on the Tube in London for some reason.)
 

The number of patiently queuing potential diners getting huffy that they aren't being seated, and the sheer impossibility of actually speaking to someone to request un tavolo when you could indicate your wish without having to exchange a word...  You know it has to be substantial if a sign written in Sharpie with two underlining and four exclamation points needs cellotaping over your cafe name.

I bloody love the Italians. And not just for their food. But mostly.

 

When In Rome

When I was a teenager I believed I'd been born in the wrong place.

I believed in souls and bodies in the Cartesian dualism mode back then; that souls were slotted into bodies as if they were assigned dorm rooms. What can I say? I was a teenager in the 80s; I believed a lot of stupid stuff. Particularly things could be used in a romantic narrative of soul mates, miracles and true love. If a story was beautiful enough surely it must be true. 

I was born in Chester to a family living in North Wales and I grew up living in a small town in Southern Ontario. This was clearly an error on the part of the universe. I didn't like small towns. I was supposed to be going to theatres and ballets and live in a major city because everything good about the world could be found in a city. I was supposed to be French, ideally. I was meant to be eating amazing food and within reach of great art and inspiring architecture. 

When I moved to the U.K. in my late teens I made getting to Paris my main focus, and I went as often as I could: 7 times in 6 years.  Finally, I was visiting a place that spoke to my soul. I loved Paris, but I wasn't sure it loved me. I was too noisy and uncool.

And then, 9 years from arriving in the U.K, I had a long weekend in Florence. Oh. My. God.

My soul wasn't French, it was Italian. Loud, messy, demonstrative, passionate, food-obessessed - not to mention holding a full motorbike licence for my Vespa. Obviously I was Italian! 

I don't believe in souls and duality anymore. I'm resigned to being a Canadian/Yorkshire woman in her mid 50s. I've been through enough with this body to know it is me and I am it, we aren't separate. But I still think Italy is pretty much the most wonderful place I can think of, other than my own garden. Florence, Rome, Venice, I adore them all.

There was marvellous story on the BBC News website this week that reminded me why I love Italy so damned much and why it's such a good fit for me. It gets worked up over the sort of tiny details that I also get aerated about.

There was a recipe on the BBC Good Food website for Cacio e Pepe, that most Roman of pasta dishes. This recipe caused a Roman restaurant committee to write a letter of protest to the British ambassador. The recipe described Cacio e Pepe as "a speedy lunch", which was felt to diminish this deceptively simple classic, but most egregious of all it included butter and parmesan.

Cacio e Pepe is spaghetti, pepper and pecorino cheese. Here's what the Italians said:  

• "We are always told we are not as good as the BBC*... and then they go and do this. Such a grave mistake." 
• "What Good Food published with butter and parmesan is called Pasta Alfredo. It's another kind of pasta." 
• "You have to yield to Caesar that which is Caesar's." 
• "Our tradition is based on food. So if you touch the only thing that we have..."

A letter to the British Ambassador. I am not kidding. God, I bloody love the Italians.

In remembrance of trips to Rome over the years and to correct our country's offence against Roman culinary history, last night I made Zach and I Cacio e Pepe the Roman way. That is to say, correctly. (Or at least I sincerely hope so)

Cacio e Pepe for 2

Put a kettle on to boil water for the pasta and then add it to a pan with a hefty dash of salt. Only fill the pan about halfway. The trick is to not use too much liquid as you want to water to get a good amount of starch in it. 

Add spaghetti or linguine or similar to the pan, stir to prevent it sticking and cook it for 3 minutes less than the instructions on the packet. It will finish cooking as the sauce builds.

Finely grate about half a wedge of pecorino romano, so probably 60g to 80g for two people.  It does need to be finely grated; regular grating is prone to get clumpy when we hit the emulsifying part. Put it in a bowl with plenty of room for stirring.

Grind a lot of black pepper - about 1.5 - 2 teaspoons full. Toasted that in a dry frying pan over a low heat until it releases its fragrance but take care not to burn it.

While the pasta cooks, add several tablespoons of the pasta water into the pepper and swirl it around a bit, then another few tablespoons. Once the pasta hits that 3 Minutes To Go point, do not drain it. Use tongs to lift the al dente pasta into the frying pan and toss it about in the pan, coating it with the pepper and starchy water, which will emulsify into a creamy start of a sauce. 

You need to guess a little about the amount of water, but go for less rather than more. It's easy to add a couple of tablespoons to a thick sauce before serving but not to thicken a thin one.

Add several tablespoons of the remaining pasta water to the mound of finely grated pecorino and stir it until it makes a thick smooth paste. Take the pasta frying pan off the heat and let it rest a moment to lose a little heat. If you add the pecorino paste while at simmering temperature the sauce more likely to split or get claggy, so do take that half a minute or so.

Using the tongs to toss the pasta and pecorino paste together in the pan until glossy and coated in the silky sauce. Serve with a little extra ground black pepper on top.

It really is a very easy and straightforward pasta dish, but tastes so much more than the sum of its parts. And of course anything that makes me think of Rome is a good thing. 

Ciao, amici miei!

* although the BBC got the blame because of the domain name BBCGoodFood, it actually sold off the Good Food site a couple of years back so it's not actually the Beeb's fault.

Celebrating Mum's birthday in Rome in 2008