My fucking food bag: Mantuan Carnival cakes

The rough translation of frictilia, I suppose, would be ‘fritters’. This is the term that ancient Romans used to describe strips of dough fried in lard, a popular treat during the yearly Saturnalia, or feast of Saturn, a direct precursor of the modern carnival. The sweet – which exists in many cultures – has survived in Italy until the present day, with small variations and under an almost bewildering number of regional names, including merveilles (‘marvels’) near the French border, bugie (‘lies’) in Piedmont, frappe in Rome, strufoli or cenci (‘rags) in Tuscany, crostoli in the North-East and from there into Croatia and as far as Poland. In most other regions they are chiacchiere, or chit-chats.

My grandparents lived near Mantua so for my family they were the lattughe, literally lettuce leaves. Nonna made them every Spring and it was one of my favourite sweets but it’s only recently that I tried to re-create them, and only this year that I finally got them exactly right. It’s not because they’re hard to make, on the contrary: but I wasn’t just trying to make any one of the many variants. Rather, the one from my childhood. The one I would recognise.

This is a very humble dish. it is not difficult nor expensive to make but it takes labour and time, as befits its origins. As I’ve said many times before, the cuisine of the Mantuan province is historically ‘of the Prince and the pauper’, and festivals in particular required that the same rituals and dishes be accessible by rich and poor alike. None more so, perhaps, than Carnival.

To make lattughe you need to prepare a dough that sits halfway between pasta and pastry: a mixture of eggs and flour enriched with relatively small amounts of butter and sugar and flavoured with lemon peel, Marsala wine and vanilla, which you will then need to roll very thin. That last aspect in particular is what sets the lattughe apart from other variants, along with the frying in beef dripping – another pauper’s ingredient that is still found in many dishes of this region, including bread.

On we go. These are the ingredients:
300 grams flour
3 eggs
30 grams of butter
50 grams of sugar
5 grams of baking powder
Pinch of salt
1 vanilla pod (or essence)
1 lemon peel
1 shot of Marsala wine or equivalent liquor
Beef dripping (or vegetable oil) as needed

Preparation:

Sift the baking powder and flour, mix with salt and sugar, form a well in the middle in which to break the eggs and add the butter, peel, vanilla and Marsala. Mix, then knead until the dough is hard and smooth. Mine ended up looking not unlike like a cauliflower.

Leave it in a bowl covered with a tea towel for half an hour or so.

As I made a double batch, I helped myself with a pasta machine to roll it, but you can use a regular pin, so long as you aim for pasta-like thickness. This is more or less what we’re looking for.

Cut the pasta into strips. The traditional shape is a rectangle of 10x5 cms in size, with two parallel incisions in the middle.

You now have the option of feeding one of the corners into the opposite slit, to make a sort of bow – it has no other function than to give some of the lattughe an interesting shape.

I did about half that way, the other half I left as rectangles.

To cook, heat up the oil or dripping in a saucepan or frying pan. It needs to be hot enough for the dough to cook instantly. Dunk a strip and count to 4 Mississippis (or, in this case, “Fiume Po”), then turn it over for a split second on the way to taking it out of the pan and into a dish or bowl which you previously lined with a paper towel. They should look something like this.

And taste something like this.

No wait that’s still how they look. But you know what I mean. Enjoy, and buon carnevale.

My fucking food bag: Torta sbrisolona

Brisa in the Mantuan dialect means crumb, a derivation from the Latin brisiare – to break into crumbs – also found in the French verb briser. However, sbrisolona means something rather more colourful than the English culinary term ‘crumble’. At once descriptive and affectionate, it’s closer to ‘big ol’ crumbly’, if I had to attempt a translation.

Big ol’ crumbly was a regular part of my diet when I visited my grandparents, who lived in the south-eastern corner of that province. Cuisine in this part of Italy is ‘of the Prince and the pauper’, meaning that historically farm labourers and the aristocracy ate largely off the same menu, although of course the latter got to pick more than one course per meal and never went without. Still, it’s true to say the most well-known Mantuan dishes originate from the ingenuity of its peasants. This is certainly the case with the sbrisolona, whose earliest documented traces date back to the 16th century and refer to a cake whose main ingredients were nothing if not humble: dripping, cornmeal and nuts.

Upon reaching the table of the family that ruled over the dukedom, the Gonzagas, the original recipe was upgraded by replacing the dripping with butter and the nuts with the noble almond, as well as by adding that most wonderful of new-world spices, vanilla. These ingredients survive today in varying proportions, leading to more rustic or more genteel versions of the sbrisolona. At the rustic end, you’re required to break the cake by hitting it in the middle with your fist. At the genteel end, you can cut it in slices using a knife. If you can imagine such a thing.

The recipe below sits somewhere in the vicinity of the ‘punch this cake’ end of the spectrum. It has as much dripping as butter, and as much cornmeal as flour. Both are necessary in order to produce the ‘true’ sbrisolona, rather than a generic and anonymous crumble. And that is often the thing about the peasants’ table: it’s just much more interesting.

The sbrisolona is a cake for all seasons and latitudes. Light, it is not, but on the other hand – being essentially a piece of edible masonry – it also keeps for a very long time.

Having generously greased a cake dish of a diameter of let’s say 30 cms or thereabouts, we proceed to assemble our ingredients.

200 g cornmeal (the fine kind, Healtheries makes the most common kind in New Zealand)
200 g flour
200 g sugar

(The sbrisolona was also known as the “cake of the three cups” because it required a cupful each of the three main ingredients above. Go with the same quantities, anyway.)

150 g beef dripping (the hard, not the liquid kind – also known confusingly in North America as lard, even though they aren’t the same thing. Crazy Yanks.)
150 g butter
200 g almonds, coarsely ground
2 egg yolks
Pinch of salt, teaspoon of vanilla essence, zest of 1 lemon

While melting the dripping in a saucepan and softening the butter, mix the two flours, sugar, salt, almonds, lemon, vanilla in a bowl. Make a well in the middle and add dripping, butter, yolks, comme ça:

Mix with your hands, messily. You won't get a dough but rather a crumbly series of lumps. You'll think you've done it all wrong.

Turn on your oven to 180°C. Transfer the mixture into your cake dish, without pressing it down too much.

Cook for 45 to 60 minutes, until the top is golden and the edge looks slightly burnt. Let it cool.

If you find that it's too hard to cut it in slices, congratulations: you have made the perfect sbrisolona. However: if you used a dish like the one pictured as opposed to a sponge cake-type tin with a removable bottom, you’re unlikely to be able to lift out the cake. Therefore, don’t punch it in the middle or you’ll just hurt yourself. Use some sort of sharp tool instead to make a crack in the surface. The cake should break into shards, like so.

The shards are not unlike what some outside of Italy call biscotti (which for us is just the word for biscuits) and that in Italy we call cantucci or cantuccini. These are also almond-based and are consumed traditionally by dipping them into vin santo – literally ‘holy wine’ but really a Tuscan style of dessert wine similar to Malvasia. Therefore, it won’t surprise you to know that you can also dip fragments of sbrisolona in a dessert wine or even, I’m told, grappa. But I just take them neat.

Enjoy. Merry Christmas.

On a decidedly less jolly note, I wrote a piece this week for Overland on polite Nazis and the violence of speech, following an appalling episode that occurred last week.

My fucking food bag: the universal, infinitely scalable miracle recipe for gluten-free pizza (feat. carpaccio)

I’m here to tell you that I have found the perfect recipe for gluten-free pizza and focaccia. But first, by way of starter, this.

Vittore Carpaccio’s Sermon of St Stephen (1514) is alleged to be the inspiration behind the naming of the raw meat dish created by chef Giuseppe Cipriani in 1950, at the time of an influential exhibition in Venice of the painter’s works. The Sermon, said Cipriani, reminded him of the colours of the dish, which is one of the simplest in our cuisine. Hence, the carpaccio.

Firstly, you slice a cow very thinly. You need to make arrangements with your butcher about this. They’ll need to put a 400 gram sirloin steak in the freezer for a couple of hours, so it’s firm enough to cut into slices of around one millimetre or so. I got mine cut even thinner, but in hindsight it was probably overkill. This is what 150 grams of the stuff looks like.

You squeeze a couple of lemons, mix them with 75 mls of extra virgin olive oil. Pour generously over the meat. Add salt and pepper. Garnish with rocket (if you have it – I didn’t) and slivers of Parmigiano (we've been over how you're not allowed to accept substitutes).

You can serve immediately or keep in the fridge for up to a day, in which case the slices will darken in colour and look more like cooked meat. Which I suppose is handy if you have squeamish guests.

In spite of the appearance of the word ‘sirloin’ in the recipe, the dish is very cheap as you can feed four people with roughly $12 worth of meat at today’s market prices.

Now, why is this preparation safe, some of you may ask. Beef steak is a safe cut, as it doesn’t come into contact with gut bacteria. By contrast, no part of the chicken is safe to eat raw. By all means, ask your butcher to confirm this though.

Now ,for the gluten-free pizza base I must thank David Clegg, who proffered the recipe when I asked around on Twitter after a series of failed attempts. David in turn sourced it from the Coeliac Disease Facebook group. We have a dear friend with the disease and wanted her to fully partake in the shared ritual of home-made pizza feasting. But even if you’re just intolerant – I’m not here to judge – or love gluten but would like the try the quickest and easiest pizza recipe known to humankind, I suggest you give this a try. It’s almost bafflingly good.

There are two ingredients:

1. Gluten free flour, or rather baking mix. I use Healtheries, which costs $8/kg.

2. Plain yogurt.

The recipe itself is a miracle of simplicity and is infinitely scalable. You use as much yogurt as you do flour. That’s it. In the following example, I’ve used one cup of each.

First, you put the baking mix in a bowl. Add a teaspoon of salt per cup. Mix. Then add the yogurt. Mix with your hands. No kneading is required. It will take you two minutes if you stop halfway to consider the state of human affairs. Otherwise, less than that.

The resulting dough will look something like this.

Leave the dough to rise in a cool, dark place for – haha, fooled you, it doesn’t need to rise either. It’s ready to go as is. Turn on the oven at 200°C. Spread the dough into a disk over a tray lined with baking paper using your palm and fingers, and some more baking mix if it’s too sticky (but it shouldn’t be, unless the yogurt was unusually runny).

Apply your topping of choice, using available ingredients and your imagination, or as discussed here and here. This is a standard margherita.

The look doesn’t convey how soft it is inside. It tastes rather like pizza al taglio as opposed to the thinner kind I’ve tried to reproduce before. Without topping, it makes for an ugly but delicious focaccia. I suspect it could be turned into gluten-free crackers, too, although there are probably better ways of achieving that particular life goal.

I haven’t calculated costs exactly but as customary in this series it’s a very cheap meal, especially compared to the cost of those ready-made bases that look (and taste) like spongy frisbees.

As always, enjoy.

I have a new article up at Overland – on the subject of whether it is time we nationalised Facebook – to coincide with the magazine’s subscription drive. Check it out.

My fucking food bag: pizza marinara

It’s called marinara because it was the food of Neapolitan fishing crews, but after this point the theories vary: it was either the flavoured bread they took out on long expeditions, or a pizza sold on land. According to this latter version, ironically the marinara would be a pizza minus the fish: that is to say a pizza with anchovies, only without the anchovies, sold to impoverished fishermen at times of high fish prices and not dissimilar in this to that great Sicilian dish, the ‘pasta with sardines at sea’. As in: ‘Why are there no sardines in this pasta?’ ‘They are at sea.’

There is an ancient pizzeria in Naples called Port’Alba, and it is here that, as the legend goes, a pizzaiolo first decided some time in the 1730s to use humble garlic as a substitute for the noble anchovy. Regardless of whether you credit this theory or not, the basic fact remains that for centuries pizza marinara was poor people’s food, its ingredients being the cheapest one could imagine at those latitudes: flour, water, yeast, tomato, garlic, salt, olive oil, oregano. So in today’s instalment of my fucking food bag – where I don’t send boxed ingredients to your home, and you still get to cook yourself, but hey, at least it’s free – I’m going to take you through this very simple preparation.

There really is no point in making a pizza marinara. You have to make two. Unless you have tiny hands, kneading pizza dough for a single, thin disc is frustrating and a waste of effort. So the ingredients are for a half-kilo dough that makes two bases, but instead of making the second pizza I’m going to teach you how to make focaccia with potatoes and rosemary while I’m at it.

Ingredients:

500 g of flour
70 ml extra virgin olive oil
Salt
Sugar
Fresh baker’s yeast (10 g)
Oregano
Garlic (2 cloves)
Lukewarm water (275 ml)

Let’s pretend I hadn’t taken you through the pizza process before. It was years ago now. Also I may have tweaked the recipe somewhat.

Get yourself some fresh yeast. I buy mine in 1 kg bricks at Moore Wilson’s in Wellington – did you know? baker’s yeast freezes fine – but most supermarkets in the country that still bake their own bread sell it in 100 gram lots for a dollar, though sometimes you have to ask. You need just 10 grams, which you’ll leave in a cup of lukewarm water and sugar (one teaspoon) while you clean your cooking surface and assemble the other ingredients.

Put 500 grams (four cups) of flour in a mixing bowl, mix in two teaspoons of salt and add 50 ml (roughly three tablespoons) of olive oil. Now, seriously: it has to be extra virgin. It barely costs more than non-extra virgin anyway and makes untold difference.

At this point the yeast should have started frothing in the cup. We’re looking for this sort of effect. If it’s very fresh, it will audibly fizz.

Chuck the yeast in, add as much lukewarm water as you need to get to 275 ml. It’s important that you do this. Don’t skimp on the water. You don’t want a stodgy dough.

Now you mix the lot with a spoon or other implement in the bowl, until the liquids are well absorbed.

Then you move the rough mixture onto a lightly floured surface and knead the dough. I’m not going to tell you how – just remember to push with your palms rather than mix with your fingers. The mixture at this point should be soft but sticky. Knead and add a bit of flour if necessary until it stops sticking to the kneading surface and your hands, but not so much that the dough loses its lightness and elasticity. I cannot over-emphasise this part. It’s the only thing standing between you and champion pizza-making.

At the end, we want a ball like this, which we’ll put back in the bowl to rise in a dark, warm place for an hour or so, or until it has doubled in size.

In the meantime, crack open a can of boiled peeled tomatoes, add a pinch of salt. I pulp the tomatoes with a mixer these days, so it becomes a smooth sauce. You’re only going to need a third or so, use the rest for cooking something else or freeze it to make more pizzas. Cut the garlic cloves quite thinly. Now is also a good time to turn the oven on and pre-heat the hell out of it. Hotter the better.

Once the dough has risen, split it in half. Stretch one half into a disc of the diameter of your largest oven tray using your hands, a rolling pin or gentle persuasion. You don’t need to grease the oven tray, unless it’s one of those deep, thick ones. However, for thin pizza it’s much better to use a thin aluminium tray if you have it. Personally I’ve stopped mucking around with pizza stones altogether.

Add the sauce – four, five tablespoons – and spread it on the base. Sprinkle oregano. Lay out the garlic slices. As for the oil, the highly codified rules of authentic Neapolitan pizza demand that you pour it using a copper vessel with a long spout in a spiral motion starting at the centre. A drizzle is sufficient.

Slide it into the oven for as long as it takes. If you have a good oven, it will be as little as 8 to 10 minutes. In a wood-fired oven at the prescribed surface temperature of 430°C it’s supposed to take no longer than 90 seconds. Our kitchen oven is very sluggish, hence the paleness – but you have to take it out when the bottom is done.

This is it: consume. It’s great summer fare, light, tasty, good to take out for walks or throw at vegan friends. Admittedly I buy some of the ingredients in bulk (flour, yeast), but I’ve costed it generously at $1.20. Those impoverished Neapolitan fishermen really knew how to stretch the budget.

Speaking of which, we’re going to use the rest of the dough. (Although it too freezes fine.) I’ve started making thin focaccia again, using the entire surface of the tray for half a dough – as thin as pizza, in other words.

There used to be a place in Piazza delle Erbe in Verona where you could buy excellent pizza by the slice but one of their specialties was focaccia with potatoes and rosemary I've tried to recreate ever since. The ingredients – bear with me here – are potatoes and rosemary.

You slice a medium-to-large potato very thinly. Justine suggested I used the slicing blade of our grater this time, and it worked well. Spread the base as per the previous procedure – you don’t need to grease the tray this time either – lay out the potatoes, sprinkle the rosemary, do the spiral-motion thing with your olive oil. Then add salt. Rock salt is perfect here. In New Zealand this kind of salt still sells for extortionate prices in small spice-style containers, but you can also find it by the bag at human rates. Grind some on top and slide in the oven. It should take even less than the pizza to cook.

This will set you back another dollar or so, is also vegan and highly delicious, though it can take a couple of tries to locate the perfect cooking point.

Let me know how you get on.

My fucking food bag: fresh gnocchi with a sauce of some kind

I am a very boring cook. My role in the family is largely to make staples – bread, biscuits, pizza, focaccia – during afternoons spent with the children. I enjoy the repetitiveness, the way it fills out time. It’s also a great help for the grocery budget, for such basics are where you can make the greater savings. Culture helps here in that the Italian cooking repertoire is all about stretching the food budget. What are even delicacies like ravioli or cappelletti but an elaborate device to make use of food scraps?

What you give up in exchange is time, or labour which is the same thing. My irritation at their use of social media folks as organic advertisers notwithstanding, I understand the attraction of My Food Bag – sort of. If I were the person in the household in charge of varying the diet, I might appreciate the parcels of food delivered to my door. Ultimately, however, I object to the transaction: it’s the convenience of having to cook yourself for the price of eating out. I am culturally conditioned to find this far too extravagant.

My own food bag plan would probably come down to six words: start buying flour in larger bags. Also: I’m not delivering that.

Lately I’ve started making fresh gnocchi, and I offer the procedure today to fulfil a pledge I made to fellow antiquarian blogger Ms Moreau, so all complaints should be directed to her. It’s a very budget-conscious preparation, as not only the ingredients are fantastically cheap but it requires virtually no equipment (chiefly: a pot, and fire). Just as importantly, gnocchi are very nice and children generally like them. You can even stuff vegetables in the gnocchi themselves, and the little blighters won’t suspect a thing.

Ingredients: four cups (500 g) or flour; two size 5 eggs; two teaspoons of salt; 1,300 grams of potatoes. This is actually a double batch, as it saves time to make two lots at once since the preparation is quite fiddly. Also: it may seem a bit odd but I actually put gnocchi straight in the freezer, rather than consuming them fresh – this helps with setting aside the time, and provides all-but-ready meals when needed since you just chuck them in boiling water anyway. There’s no need to thaw them out.

If you want to impress your friends, just halve the quantities and prepare on the day. The procedure is exactly the same.

First you put a pot of water on, then scrub your potatoes. Do it well, and it will save you from having to peel them later.

What potatoes look like. Remember, this is the quantity for a double batch.

Put the potatoes in the pot as soon as the water starts boiling. The time taken here depends on the age and type of the potatoes (older, floury ones require less boiling). Test the consistency of the biggest potato with a knife, which should find very little resistance. In the meantime, you will have mixed three cups of flour with the salt, and added the eggs.

Yes, I own a camera

Now, if you own a potato ricer, use that as it will separate the skin from the pulp. Otherwise, peel and mash. This is my heavy-duty ricer, sturdy enough to make mericonda.

Either way, you’ll end up with something like this.

This is the time to lay out the board or surface you plan to use, the remaining cup of flour and a lightly floured tray or plate that fits in your freezer. Get out a sharp knife and a fork as well. Your hands are about to get quite dirty.

Now mix the ingredients, first in the bowl, than on your working surface, until they form a soft, wet, slightly gelatinous ball. It’s really not very attractive.

Take a small ball of dough and place it on the working surface. What I do here – instead of incorporating flour into the dough at the start – is to add the remaining cup a little bit at a time while rolling the gnocchi out, as needed. This ensures I won’t add more than required to prevent them from sticking, as ideally you want to taste the potato more than the flour.

(But make sure you don’t skimp on the flour either. The first time Justine and I made gnocchi, back in Italy many years ago, they all stuck together into one giant glop.)

Roll the bit of dough out into a worm. Using a knife, cut the worm at regular intervals, roughly the width of a finger.

Using a fork, scour the square surface of each gnocco – where you made the cut – to give them the characteristic shape (it will provide folds for the sauce to cling to). Alternatively, you can use a special implement designed for this purpose. If you own one of those, please close this web page immediately.

Place the gnocchi on the floured tray or plate. Once full, move to the freezer for 20 minutes or so. As soon as the gnocchi have hardened, they will no longer stick together and you can put them in a plastic bag. In this state, they will keep in the freezer for a very long time and don’t take much room. The double batch should make two lots of roughly 800 grams each, good for two meals for four adults. Or eight meals for one adult. You see how this works.

To cook, boil a pot of water, add salt, dunk in the gnocchi. When they come to the surface (it won’t take more than five minutes, even from frozen), they’re good to go.

Gnocchi are good with most sauces that go well with fresh pasta. Pictured is a basic butter and sage sauce. Even if you splash out for Parmigiano, it makes for a very cheap meal.

Alternative preparations: you can incorporate boiled seasonal vegetables into the dough. For instance you can make orange ones using pumpkin, or green ones using spinach. I’m told children enjoy this. What we did enjoy at school when I was a lad, and were served mushy gnocchi on Thursdays from the school canteen, was to carefully lick the tomato sauce off them one by one and put them back on the plate, thereby pretending that they came with no sauce to begin with. I couldn’t tell you why we found this funny but we did. Also, we still ate them afterwards.