A very Renaissance Dessert

Today I am baking a "Lucca Ring Cake". The recipe dates back to 1483, and is a simple yeast cake with raisins and aniseed.

As a prior student of Renaissance History and daily life, it filled me with excitement to think I am cooking something that Lucrezia Tournabuoni may have eaten (I assume she didn't cook it herself, what with the slaves back then...).

It reminded me of the study tour I did in Tuscany six years ago where we ate at a restaurant in Siena with medieval recipes... The original gnocchi recipe involved cheese rather than potato.

But Lucca especially is a fascinating city. With one of the still standing full city walls that wrap around the city in a ring, and the Piazza Anfiteatro -  an oval shaped public square, this city can seem a quaint and like a near medieval disney land for tourists seeking the sights, smells and general experience of an Italian town. However, Lucca rivalled Florence for power, and wars were fought from the walls with Siena and Florence. However, after the 1300s it was passed around between the Genoese, Florentines, Pisans and Veronese like a venereal disease.

I once met twins at a school who were in Kindergarten - their names were Siena (female) and Lucca (male), I wonder if the parents knew how much fighting occured between them.

But back to the Lucca Ring Cake, it is currently happily doughy and resting under a tea towel.

Daisy

Ragù alla Bolognese - Update

It's now 3:50pm on Sunday. We've had the ragu and it was delish. Allowing the ragu to rest overnight and then reheating it in the oven seems to have allowed the juices of the ingredients to be released and so the end product was not overly salty at all.

We also made our own pasta, which I think also helped to diffuse the saltiness of the ragu.

So, I think the ragu alla bolognese ricetta tradizionale is a winner!

Italian Cooking and Religion: Part II — It’s just not kosher

I thought I would share a realisation that has only dawned on me as we cooked our ragù alla Bolognese: Italian food, at least as it has so far emerged in our regional meals, is surprisingly treif (that is, ‘not kosher’).

Cured pork products — such as prosciutto, pancetta, culatello — abound in Italian cuisine and are obvious examples of treif ingredients in Italian cooking. However, there are many other ingredients and culinary practices that render many traditional Italian dishes trief. These ingredients are likely to be less-obvious to the gentile eye. For example consider some of the marine ingredients that are out-of-bounds: eel, clam, crab, lobster, which together feature as the principal ingredient of almost fifty dishes in La Cucina. Each of these sea critters is treif.

Also, the wine we have been cooking with and drinking during these months of Italian regional cooking is also likely to have been treif. So too, much of the beef we’ve used has been treif (because only certain cuts of beef are kosher).

Furthermore, some cooking practices that are favoured in traditional Italian cooking also fall afoul of kashrut, the dietary laws by which kosher food is identified. Most notable, I think, is the Italian technique of cooking meat with butter and milk. Very treif.

Consider the way we prepared the ragù alla Bolognese. We used mince drawn from a mixture of round and sirloin — both of which cuts are treif. The mince was added to the already sautéed pancetta (another treif ingredient). We then added treif wine and cooked the lot with a large dose of milk. The result was a lovely, but very much un-kosher, pasta sauce.

What inferences might we draw from this (very) short survey of the relationship between kashrut and Italian cuisine? This survey indicates that, to a great extent, the gentile and Jewish Italian communities have been and are culinarily distinct. Why is this? I imagine the religio-politics of Italian cultural history feature in the answer somewhere. The question, though, is too substantial a query to be answered on this blog. We should just make a mental note: if ever we invite observant guests to join in our regional Italian meals, stick to vegetarian options.

Ragù alla Bolognese

And so we have arrived in Emilia Romana. To the outsider’s eye, Italian cuisine in this region is dominated by Bologna and the culinary gift it gave the world: Bolognese meat sauce—ragù alla Bolognese.

Curiously, La Cucina does not contain a recipe for ragù alla Bolognese. This is strange because the publisher of La Cucina, the Academia Italiana delle Cucina, is the same organisation under the auspices of which the ‘official’ ragù alla Bolognese recipe was decreed in 1982. Apparently the Bolognese chapter of the Academia spent a great deal of time researching ragù traditions before codifying the traditional recipe and depositing a notarised copy of it with the Bolognese Chamber of Commerce in the The Palazzo della Maercanza.

The Palazzo della Maercanza
There are many websites purporting to provide transcriptions of the codified recipe. We have used the following recipe, which, by the weight of internet consensus, seems to authentically reproduce the codified recipe.

Ingredienti
gr. 300 di cartella di manzo
gr. 150 di pancetta distesa
gr. 50 di carota gialla
gr. 50 di costa di sedano
gr. 50 di cipolla
5 cucchiai di salsa di pomodoro oppure gr. 20 di concentrato triplo di pomodoro
1/2 bicchiere di vino bianco o rosso
1 bicchiere di latte intero

Procedimento
Si scioglie nel tegame la pancetta tagliata a dadini e tritata con la mezzaluna; si aggiungono le verdure ben tritate con la mezzaluna e si lasciano appassire dolcemente; si aggiunge la carne macinata e la si lascia, rimescolando sino a che "sfrigola"; si mette il 1/2 bicchiere di vino e il pomodoro allungato con poco brodo e si lascia sobbolllire per circa 2 ore aggiungendo, volta a volta, il latte e aggiustando di sale e pepe nero; facoltativa ma consigliabile l'aggiunta, a cottura ultimata, della panna di cottura di un litro di latte intero.

At points, we departed from the above recipe. We doubled the quantities and slowly cooked the whole mixture for much longer than recommended (ours slowly simmered on the lowest heat for four hours). The cooking time, we think, was necessary to reduce the mixture down to a more usual ragù consistency (I suspect Italian mince might not have as much liquid in it as the mince we bought at Bondi Junction yesterday).

The recipe has produced a ragù of lovely texture and colour. The ragù is nothing like the horrible grey (or orange) mass that some people who have used the recipe have complained of. I was also glad to see that no additional butter, lard or oil were called for (the rendered pancetta providing more than enough fat). I am a little concerned at how salty the mixture is, but we have cooked a day in advance so perhaps it will mellow overnight. We will post an update tomorrow, after lunch.

Some photographs, taken in our kitchen this afternoon:


The principal ingredients: pancetta, mince, onion, celery, carrot, wine, highly concentrated tomato paste and milk.

As usual, the frying pancetta smelled like the unwashed kit of the local rugby team being stewed.

The finely diced vegetables are added once the pancetta fat has rendered down. Gently fry until the onion becomes translucent.

The mince is added to the pancetta-vegetable mixture.

Once the mince is lightly browned, the wine and concentrated tomato paste is added. Soon after, the milk is gradually added and stirred through.

The mixture at 2:00pm.

The mixture at 6:00pm.

Italian Cooking and Religion: Part I — Why 'La Cucina' is like the Bible

In the beginning there was the word and the word was La Cucina. Our regional Italian cooking adventure began with this cookbook and I think now, after some six or seven months of cooking from its pages, we should pause and reflect on the cookbook and how well it has performed.

For my part, I have found the cookbook (so far) to be a mixture of the instructive, the enlightening, the quaint and the bizarre. For example, I now know that pizza di verdure is best served the day after it is made, reheated in a frying pan with a little oil. I have admired the many different uses to which bran can be put. I have enjoyed the effects of the mixture of Germanic and Italic cuisine in the border regions. I have been ever shocked at just how much butter, cream and lard appear in everything.

The cookbook has a special place in our hearts. Yet, from time to time, it lacks enough specificity to deal with real-world cooking problems, such as that vexed question, how big is a ‘large’ sweet potato? And so we have found ourselves dipping into other sources, looking at other recipes for instruction. It’s not that we have lost faith. It’s just that we have realised one book cannot hold the answer to everything.

And for those reasons, I have come to the realisation that La Cucina is like the Bible. We accept its central place in setting out the important foundations of the culinary traditions we are looking at; yet, at the same time, we realise that some of the recipes are, as it were, ‘out of touch’ with our modern views. Mammella di mucca (cow’s udders cured in brine) is as incongruous in twenty-first century Australia as is the biblical injunction not to wear clothes of mixed fabrics.*

I also hope, that, like the Bible, La Cucina gets better as it progresses and that the ‘new testament’ recipes from the central and southern regions are less austere and more lively than most of the northern regions’ offerings.

* Instructions on the preparation of mammella di mucca can be found on p 43 of La Cucina. The biblical injunction referred to comes from Leviticus (of course) 19:19—‘Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.’

Size does matter...when it comes to Sweet Potatoes

When I saw the recipe for a sweet potato cake for our Venice lunch I thought "awesome - vegetables and sugar together". The recipe looked so simple - some flour, sugar, eggs, bit of butter, apples and raisins... and four large sweet potatoes.

I didn't think about having a  conversation with myself full of double entendre about "what is large?" I just went down to woolies, bought the four largest sweet potatoes I could (totalling to 2.2kg) and went through with the recipe. The result was mashed sweet potato that had been cooked for an hour and was a bit brown around the edges.

When I unclipped the spring cake tin, the cake sunk by about an inch and spread on the plate.

So it made me think - what is large?

Well it turns out a very similar recipe suggests 2 cups of cooked peeled sweet potato. Once again, the book needs to be verified.

Buon Natale - Veneto

Trentino/Alta Adige

Trentino, it would appear, has had the kind of Austro-Hungarian/Italian battle of ownership that Alsace Lorraine has had. Originally conquered by the Romans, it was then taken by The Hapsburg Empire in 1363, and remained under Austrian rule until the end of World War I when it was given to the Italians. Mussolini, who was not afraid of extreme changes and rewriting history where it suited him, began the Italianization (which should always be written in Italics) of the area. During World War II, it was used by the Nazis as the Operation Zone of the Alpine Foothills. It is now an Autonomous Region of Italy.

But what about the food?

We are proud to say that the entree of Potato cake (giant potato hashbrown) and Radicchio salad were both BUTTER FREE. To continue the amazement, the main was also SENZA BURRO! We're practically losing weight by eating this...

The Meal consisted of:
Potato cake - which as Sikeli described as "Fancy McDonalds Hashbrown" and, lets face it, who doesn't like Maccas Hashbrowns?

Potato Cakes

Radicchio salad


Beef Goulash & Spatzle (Gnocchetti di farina) with Red Cabbage Timbale

Followed by Melissa's amazing Apple strudle

Lega Sud

Many of you would know about the Lega Nord, the crazy right wing political party in the North of Italy that wants to cut the peninsula in half to separate the north from the south. The reasons for this are based on economics and immigration from North Africa.

I however, after eating food from 4 regions -  Piedmont, Liguria (actually Liguria was good), Valle D'Aosta and Lombardia - have come to the conclusion that I would like to create a culinary Lega Sud, where Italian food focuses on the regions of the South and separates itself from the North. The Northern cuisine, afterall, is focused on French cuisine, with far too much butter and not enough tomatoes or oil.

April - Lombardia

Lombardia's capital is Milan. It's cuisine has more rice (Arborio is the type used in Risotto) than other regions, and butter is used more so than olive oil, due to it's border with France.

Our Meal

Saffron Risotto

Roast Beef cooked in Milk

Apple Charlotte - before being cooked.

Throughout the preparation of the meal, we continued playing Blokus, which is in no way related to Lombardia, but is great fun none the less.

March - Liguria

Here are some things we know about Liguria*:

1. It is Christopher Columbus' birthplace 

2. Traces of the Neanderthal Man were found here

3. The city was awarded a gold medal for military valour in WWII for its struggle against German occupation 

More importantly, it's the land where foccacia, meringues, pesto, panettone and other such yummy things originate.  After all, Genova is the capital and Liguria is best known for the Cinque Terre aka the Italian Riveria and as such, knows how to have a good time.

And so do we. Or at least, we know how to eat. 

So, the menu for Liguria was: 

1. Triofie al Pesto (both nut and nut-free versions for yours truly)

2. Veal roll-ups and stuffed zucchini 

3. Olive oil raspberry cake with meringue topping (not from our Cucina Italian cookbook but thanks to Martha Stewart)

Yum yum in my tum... 

*Souce: Wikipedia (ie read: disclaimer for not-my-fault-if-this-is-not-strictly-factually-true). 

February - Piedmont

February - Piedmont

Boun appetito!

The first of our twenty regional dinners came as Sydney was enjoying the last throes of summer. Daisy was about to renew her teaching studies, Melissa had returned to Australia after amazing adventures abroad and Stephen was in his first few weeks of his doctoral studies in pure mathematics. As for me, I was just about to bid adieu to the College of Law - finally.

We selected as our first region Piedmont, home to the Shroud of Turin, Garibaldi and, as we found to our delight, some delicious cuisine.

We dipped our toe in the food of Piedmontese with Melissa's wonderful entree of capsicum served plump, succulent and lightly grilled in an enticing bruschetta style. Our main was a superbly cooked hunters chicken prepared by Daisy, which was a sensation of hearty tomatoey, oniony, chickeny goodness. Stephen and I offered a chocolate pear cake - a dense creation of slowly cooked pears and Italian cocoa, which emerged from its baking dish with a satisfying plop.

And thus began our adventure into the regional cooking of Italy.