Borlotti Minestrone with Arugula Pesto

April might seem a strange time of year to be stocking up on dried beans, but that’s what I’ve just done. That’s when Rancho Gordo offers the new season’s crop of its excellent heirloom beans. Besides, around here, April produces enough wet, chill, windy days to make us grateful for occasional warm, solid, rib-sticking dishes.

Accordingly, I just bought six pounds of beans: four old favorites: Cranberry (aka Borlotti), Domingo Rojo, Midnight Black, and Santa Maria Pinquito; and two varieties new to me this year: Snowcap and Whipple. To début my new supply, I wanted to use some of the cranberries in a big vegetable soup.
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Rancho Gordo’s own cookbook, Heirloom Beans, has a recipe for Borlotti Minestrone with Arugula Pesto. It is quite untraditional, even for this highly variable Italian vegetable soup. No tomato, potato, carrot, celery, or – an Italian essential – pasta. Instead, it has two ingredients I’ve never seen in minestrone: bulb fennel and cabbage; and, for serving, a nut-less pesto sauce based on baby arugula. Interesting, and surely worth a try.

The recipe calls for two cups of cooked beans, so that was my first task. Following RG’s basic bean cooking recipe, I soaked a cup of cranberry beans in tepid water for just four hours. When they’d doubled in bulk, I softened small amounts of chopped onion, celery, and carrot in olive oil in a big soup pot, stirred in the drained beans, and added fresh water to cover them generously.
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I gave them five minutes at a hard boil, covered the pot and simmered it, stirring occasionally, until the beans were tender. They were so fresh that that took only an hour. Then I salted them. Meanwhile, I’d prepared the other vegetables for the soup. Clockwise from the beans in their broth, below, are: half a head of Savoy cabbage, sliced; about half a cup of sliced onion; three chopped garlic cloves; half a pound of cut up green beans; and a whole medium-sized fennel bulb, sliced.
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After washing and drying the pot I began putting together the soup.

• The onion, garlic, fennel, and a pinch of salt went into the pot first, with some olive oil, and cooked for 10 minutes, until they began softening.
• Then came the cabbage, with another pinch of salt, to be stirred and cooked for 5 minutes, until it wilted.
• Next, I stirred in 5 cups of chicken broth (made from bouillon cubes), brought it to a boil, turned down the heat, and simmered the pot for 15 minutes.
• Finally, in went the green beans and cranberry beans with their broth.

Fifteen more minutes of simmering, a little salt and pepper, and the soup was done.

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It was still only late afternoon, so I pushed the soup pot to the back of the stove until dinner time, and moved on to making the pesto.
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To start, its recipe wanted three cloves of garlic to be pounded to a paste in a mortar. This pounding was alleged to make the garlic “mellow and sweet,” but my garlics refused to cooperate. The best I could achieve was smashing and squishing. Oh well.

I tossed the garlic pieces into the food processor along with 4 ounces of baby arugula, ½ cup of chopped flat-leaf parsley, and a pinch of salt. I processed that until it was nicely chopped. Then, with the machine still running, I drizzled in ⅓ cup of olive oil. Stopped the machine, scraped down its sides, then added ½ cup of freshly grated parmigiano and 2 teaspoons of lemon juice.
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That looked like quite a lot of pesto, considering that the soup itself was to serve only 4 to 6 and the pesto was only to be dolloped on top of each bowlful. But we’d see how it all worked out.
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Here is a bowl of the minestrone before the pesto went in. Served just like this, it’s a good, sturdy, down-home dish, with an unexpected set of flavors from the fennel and cabbage, which matched well with the richness of the beans.
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Tom chose to forgo the pesto, seasoning his bowlful with the classic minestrone additions of hot red pepper flakes, olive oil, and grated parmigiano. That was fine for him. I, of course, a great lover of arugula, had to try the pesto, so I added a medium-sized blob to my bowl.
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Stirred in, the effect was fascinating. The herbal tang of the arugula, the piquancy of the garlic, and the salt-sweet-fruitiness of the parmigiano all blended in, intensifying the character and complexity of the soup. I’ll call it a successfully different sort of minestrone.
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A word of caution, however: Since there was so much pesto, I more than doubled the amount of it that I added to my second bowlful. At first the soup tasted even better with it, but once finished, the garlic’s pungency flared up wildly. Its “afterburn” stayed on my palate for hours. Maybe I should have worked harder at pounding those garlic cloves? You can have too much of a good thing.

Finnish Easter Bread

All through my youth, big family breakfasts on Easter morning featured my Polish great-aunt Mary Szynaka’s sweet raisin bread. I started baking her loaves myself as a young teenager, creating a recipe by following her around in her kitchen and writing down what she was doing.

In later years, as I learned more about cooking and cookbooks, I explored holiday breads from other countries and cultures. For many of those I turned to recipes in Bernard Clayton’s The Complete Book of Breads. One favorite of mine was his Finnish Easter Bread, or Pääsiäisleipä – a tall cylindrical loaf fragrant with orange, lemon, and cardamom. Then, somehow, it slipped out of my repertoire; I haven’t made it for decades. Time to bring it back this year!

In keeping with Finnish springtime tradition, Clayton’s recipe is scaled for baking in a one-gallon milking pail; or more conveniently nowadays, a pair of two-pound coffee cans. Having none of those, nor a big family to feed at Easter breakfast, I settled for one-quarter of the quantity, to be baked in a soufflé dish.
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Early in the morning of the day before Easter, I started the recipe by making a sponge, combining yeast with a little evaporated milk and flour in a large bowl. Stirred together well, the mixture sat in a turned-off warm oven for 45 minutes while I measured out all the other ingredients. It duly doubled in size and covered itself with tiny bubbles.

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I took the sponge out of the oven and beat the flavorings into it: grated lemon and orange peel, ground cardamom seeds, granulated sugar, golden raisins, chopped blanched almonds, melted and cooled butter, and an egg yolk.
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Next came the flours, to turn it into a firm dough – about half as much rye as white, plus a little plain milk – to be thoroughly kneaded, the bowl covered, and returned to the warm oven to double in bulk.
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The recipe expects that first rising to take 45 minutes. My dough took at least three times that long; I don’t know why. It didn’t seem to change much in texture, either.

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I punched it down, mauled it about, worked it into a reasonably smooth ball, and set it into the buttered soufflé dish for its second rising.
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That too took much longer than the recipe expected. It was a good thing I’d started so early in the day! Again, the dough never rose as much as it should have. I was getting worried at that point, but maybe it would rise vigorously as it baked in the 350° oven.
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It didn’t. The little loaf tested done in 30 minutes and came out looking reasonable, though to my recollection it was denser than those I’d made years ago. Also nowhere near as tall, but maybe I’d taken too large a soufflé dish? Well, it was what it was. I brushed the top with melted butter and let it cool on a rack.
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I wrapped the loaf carefully and left it on a windowsill overnight. Early on Easter morning I unwrapped it and cut a few slices for Tom and me to test, along with our first cups of espresso.
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It wasn’t bad. Just enough rye flavor to give it a rustic crumb, mildly sweet, lightly scented with lemon and orange, with a little crunch from the almonds. (The cardamom not so much. I fear my cardamom pods were too old.) Though not exactly like the breads I’d made in the past, it was certainly good enough to appear at our traditional late morning Easter breakfast of grilled kielbasa (my Polish heritage), hardboiled eggs, fresh horseradish, and for me, a nibble of chocolate Easter bunny.
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I’ll add that light toasting and slathering with butter did wonders for the bread, heightening all its flavors and relaxing its density. Despite the worry it gave me in the making, I have a feeling that another loaf of it will appear on my table even before Easter next year.

Gosht Do-piaza in an Indian Dinner

Lately, it occurred to me that I hadn’t made any dishes from my Indian cookbooks for quite a while. Tom and I like those subcontinental flavors very much, and my refrigerator holds several kinds of Indian spices, chutneys, and pickles. It was definitely time to use some of them before they went stale. Ergo, we’d have an Indian dinner one night this week.
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For the main course, I chose a recipe from Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking that I’d been curious about for some time: Gosht Do-piazi, or Meat Smothered with Onions. Lamb is the meat called for, along with a huge quantity of onions – equal in weight to that of the boneless lamb. And there is an odd procedure for cooking those onions, as explained in the headnote:

To keep the overall flavor mellow and delicate, raw (not fried) onions are folded into the meat after it is cooked. The onions lose their raw sharp taste and become sweet and glazed, without losing their crispness, by steaming in the wonderful vapors of the meat.

That sounds good, but would it really work? We’d see. There were some other things in the recipe instructions that I found odd too, as I’ll explain. With interest somewhat tempered by skepticism, I proceeded with the recipe.

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In a heavy-bottomed pot, I lightly browned minced fresh ginger and garlic in olive oil, then stirred in ground turmeric and red Kashmiri pepper.  After 10 seconds of frying the spices, I added one-inch chunks of boneless lamb shoulder and mixed them in well.

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Then I had to lower the heat, cover the pot, and let the lamb cook “in its juices” for 15 minutes, stirring often. By that time, Sahni says, “the moisture should be totally absorbed by the meat, leaving behind the oil. The contents of the pan will look quite dry.” Only, mine didn’t. How could they have? Cooked like that, lamb gives out its juices, it doesn’t draw them back in.
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Nevertheless, I proceeded, which was to add salt, pour on boiling water, cover the pot, and simmer for 1½ hours until the meat was very tender “and [my emphasis] the liquid has turned into a thick sauce.” What? What?? The pot was too tightly closed for the liquid to reduce by itself, and there was nothing in there that could thicken it.
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The thin gravy that was there looked and smelled fine, though, so I resisted an impulse to thicken it with cornstarch. Instead, I was able to set the pot aside for a while, to be finished shortly before serving time.

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Meanwhile, I prepared a vegetable accompaniment for the lamb, Sahni’s Aloo Mirch: an easy sort of stir-fry of parboiled potatoes and green Bell pepper, attractively golden-tinged by ground turmeric.
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I also prepared a small appetizer for the two of us: onion pakoras and samosas stuffed with potatoes and peas (purchased, not homemade), which I heated up in the oven and served with the selection of chutneys and pickles shown above.
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After we enjoyed the fritters, it was time to finish the lamb dish. I put the pot back onto a low flame, and when it was fully warmed, tossed in the big batch of thinly sliced mild red onions.
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I mixed them into the meat and covered the pot again. Here is the next recipe instruction:

Increase heat to high for exactly 15 seconds (to build up steam), and turn off heat. Let the onions steam, undisturbed, for 5 minutes. Under no circumstances should the pan be opened during this time, because that would cause the steam to escape, thus leaving the onions raw and hot.

Strange, I thought, but I did exactly that. Didn’t work. My stove burners can go very high and hot, and my pot’s lid was very tight, but it was plain at the end that no steam had appeared. The liquid was merely bubbling, and the onions looked untouched.

I couldn’t see us eating the lamb with onions in that condition, so I turned the flame back on, covered the pot again, and cooked it gently for about another 10 minutes, until the onions had softened somewhat. Then, finally, served the dish.
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In the end, the gosht do-piaza wasn’t bad. The lamb was well-flavored and succulent, nicely perfumed by its spices and even by its short acquaintance with the onions. The gravy liked having warmed parathas dipped into it. Even the many, many onions were tasty enough, in small quantities.

I guess I’ll never know how it should have turned out, because it’s not a dish I’ll ever try again. But I might make aloo mirch again sometimes. Those potatoes and green peppers were quite nice, and very easy and straightforward to prepare.

La Finanziera

La Finanziera ­­is a – possibly the – signature dish of Italy’s Piedmontese cuisine: a mélange of formerly humble meats, now a great gastronomical prize. Tom and I discovered it while traveling in the region, many years ago. It was so impressive that, back home, we developed our own version, using ingredients available here, for our first cookbook, La Tavola Italiana.

For a dinner party we’d be giving this week, Tom had a special magnum of 25-year-old Barolo that he wanted to serve, and a Finanziera would be its perfect accompaniment. It’s a very labor-intensive dish to make, but not at all difficult once the ingredients are prepared. So we set to it. From the butcher we acquired veal stew meat, a veal sweetbread, a veal kidney, a chicken breast, and chicken livers. (Fully authentic versions also use cockscombs and various calf giblets that aren’t sold in this country.)

Working together, Tom and I started preparations in the early afternoon of the dinner party day. Below are a half-pound chicken breast, half a pound of chicken livers, a three-quarter-pound kidney, and a one-pound sweetbread.
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The chicken needed only to be cut into strips. The livers needed only some trimming. The sweetbread had to be blanched before being cut into bite-size chunks. The kidney needed extensive knife work to dislodge the knobs of fat and connective tissue at the core before being cut into the same size chunks.

The stewing veal was destined for meatballs. We ground it to a paste in a food processor along with two ounces of prosciutto and a large shallot; mixed it by hand with a slice of white bread, salt, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, and an egg; and rolled it into one-inch balls. Below are the meatballs, meats, and two additional ingredients from jars: three ounces of cornichon pickles and six ounces of marinated porcini mushrooms.
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Then came the cooking itself. One after another, I floured a batch of the meats and passed each of the nuggets to Tom. He browned them quickly in hot butter and oil in a skillet, then transferred them to a wide, deep pan in which a cup of homemade broth was simmering. More butter and oil for the skillet, then the next batch of meats. When they were all in the large pan, we deglazed the skillet with wine vinegar, poured its contents over the meats, and stirred in the cornichons and porcini.
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The pan needed only ten minutes of gentle simmering, covered, and then it could be moved to the back of the stove and left there until the evening. Whew!
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While our guests were finishing the appetizer course (asparagus croûtes, which I’ve written about here), all I had to do for the Finanziera was bring the pan back to a simmer, stir in ½ cup of wine vinegar and ⅓ cup of dry Marsala wine, and cook it uncovered for a final 5 minutes.
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That Finanziera was heavenly, if I do say so myself. Not that I needed to: the guests fully agreed. It’s a dish so complex as to be almost indescribable. Each meat retained its own particular flavor, but all were enriched by the blended essences of the others, piqued by the tang of vinegar and pickles, and sweetened by the lush Marsala. Each bite was a tiny palatal adventure – such as the effect of a bit of porcini and a bit of sweetbread nestling together on a fork. Many such combinations created almost a kaleidoscope of taste pleasures.

The 1999 Barolo was a superb wine to accompany these multiplex flavors. It offered its own kaleidoscope to match them. Tom has written about this great Barolo on his blog.

It all would have been perfect if I’d only been able to get cockscombs!

Changing Crustaceans: Lobster to Crab

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This dish of crabmeat was inspired by a recipe that had attracted me when I was looking for something a little special for a simple seafood dinner. The recipe, Butter-fried Lobster, from the Grand Central Oyster Bar cookbook, is certainly simple: all it wants other than butter and lobster are parsley, salt, and sherry. That sounded ideal.

For two servings I’d need half a pound of cooked lobster meat – in large pieces. Rather than the effort of picking apart a very large whole lobster in order to get chunks of the necessary size, I looked for packaged cooked lobster meat at my fish store. I found a pint container of it, half buried in shaved ice, but the price was stratospheric – about as much as a good-sized standing rib roast of beef.

Also nestling there in the ice was a smaller container of jumbo lump Atlantic blue claw crabmeat. It was definitely expensive, but at a fraction of the cost of the lobster meat, it seemed almost a bargain. And, truth to tell, Tom and I prefer crab to lobster most of the time. I bought the crabmeat. Here is the half pound.
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I knew I’d have to make some adjustments to the recipe for the size of the crabmeat nuggets. The first step was no problem: I melted butter in a pan, added the crabmeat, covered the pan, and heated it for a few minutes to warm the meat.

The next instruction was to turn the heat higher, add a dose of sherry and some salt, and sizzle the lobster chunks “until nicely browned on all sides.” That I couldn’t do with my comparatively small chunks of crab. They’d have fallen apart before browning.
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But that didn’t matter: the sauté in butter and Manzanilla sherry were all the crabmeat really needed. I served it on lightly toasted slices of bread to catch its juices, then topped each serving with sprigs of parsley. As an accompaniment, I’d made a rice pilaf with green peas, using fish stock from a bouillon cube.
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The dish was ambrosial. Blue claw crab is naturally sweeter and more delicate than lobster, and this crabmeat just gloried in its luscious bath of butter and the touch of sherry’s sweet spiciness. It was the simplest way I’ve ever served crabmeat and, arguably, one of the best.

Pasta with Leeks and Celery

“That could be anything from very good to quite terrible. It’s hard to tell.”

Thus spake Tom when I asked him to read through a recipe I was considering, and say whether he thought it would make a dish we’d enjoy eating. This magisterial comment was quite in keeping with my own indecision about it. But, finally, curiosity overcame uncertainty.

The recipe, called Torquato’s Penne with Leeks and Celery, is from Faith Willinger’s book Red, White, and Greens: the Italian Way with Vegetables. Torquato, we learn, is the author’s favorite farmer at her favorite vegetable market in Florence – a talkative fellow, evidently, with 20 recipes named after him in the book. This was the first of them I’d tried.

The sauce has four major ingredients: celery, leek, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and pancetta (standing in for a purely local salt-cured pork product called rigatino.)

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And not very much of them. For half the recipe, I diced about an ounce of the pancetta, chopped a cup of celery and a half cup of leek, and grated a quarter cup of cheese. That was the crux of our uncertainty: Would those few, simple foods combine to make magic, or would they just sit next to each other alongside the pasta? Well, we would see.

To start, the pancetta, leek, and celery were to sauté together for a short while with no fat other than what the meat rendered. Because my pancetta was unusually lean, I had to add some olive oil to prevent sticking.
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Then I was to add a cup of hot water and simmer until the celery was tender. Covered or not wasn’t specified. That didn’t look like much liquid at all, so I mostly cooked it covered. Next, I took out one-third of the contents, both liquid and solid, and pureed them in the mini processor.
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The puree went back into the sauce pot, to be stirred in along with a little chopped parsley, thyme, salt, and pepper. It looked rather forlorn in the bottom of that large pot, but the reason for its size was about to be revealed.
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The sauce waited while I cooked my pasta – rigatoni: a larger, more substantial pasta than the recipe’s penne, which I didn’t have on hand. When the pasta was only about three-quarters done, I scooped it out of the water and transferred it to the sauce pot, along with a slosh of the pasta cooking water.
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Now I was to turn on the highest heat for three to five minutes, stirring until the pasta was almost done, adding more cooking water as necessary. The idea was for the sauce to surround the pasta and still be slightly liquid, since there would be grated cheese added to thicken it. Here I was in a quandary. The rigatoni needed quite a lot more water, and several minutes longer cooking, to be ready. The sauce was still pretty thin, but I was afraid that more cooking would overdo the pasta and further reduce the already scanty amount of sauce.

Well, I stirred in the cheese and cooked for a required minute more to melt it. It really didn’t thicken the sauce very much, but the pasta was ready to eat.
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I’d have to say the dish tasted about the way it looked – pale, plain, mild, simple. These were good imported rigatoni, so they contributed something to the flavor, but I fear the dish would have been better balanced if I’d had the smaller-sized penne. As it was, the leeks and celery weren’t strong enough on their own to make a forceful sauce, even with the assistance of the pancetta and cheese. Maybe Torquato’s vegetables were more full-flavored than my grocery store produce.

However, here’s a good postscript: The leftovers made an excellent frittata. Frittatas are a specialty of Tom’s. He beats an egg or two with some grated cheese, stirs it into the chopped up whatever-we-have, and sautés the mixture in olive oil until it makes a firm cake. That treatment works with most savory leftovers, and it turned this mild dinner disappointment into a next-day lunch delight.

Braised Pork with Fennel and Potatoes

The last time I bought a fresh ham from my butcher, it was so huge that, before roasting, I carved off several thick chunks of meat to freeze for the future. Now, months later, I was down to one 10-ounce piece. What would make an interesting dinner for two, using this tiny slab of pork?
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After some extensive browsing in cookbooks – always a pleasant occupation – I  chose a recipe from Alfred Portale’s Simple Pleasures. Or, to be accurate, one-quarter of a recipe. Portale’s Braised Pork with Fennel and Red Bliss Potatoes calls for 2½ pounds of boneless pork loin to serve 4, which means 10 ounces per person. It’s been many years since Tom and I could handle that much meat at a sitting, so my little chunk seemed just the right amount for us.

Even better, I happened to have all the other ingredients needed for the scaled-way-down recipe. In the back, below: homemade broth, black pepper, white wine, olive oil, and salt. In the middle: halved red potatoes, the pork, and wedges of bulb fennel. In front, tiny quantities of tomato sauce, celery, garlic, carrots, toasted fennel seeds, pearl onions, thyme, rosemary, and bay leaf.
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(Really, the onions should have been quarters of a very small ordinary onion, with enough of the root attached so they’d hold together, like the fennel. But my other onions were so big, one would have overwhelmed the dish, and I had pearl onions in the freezer.)

First I seasoned the pork with salt, pepper, and fennel seeds; browned it in olive oil in a deep baking dish; removed it and set it aside. In the same olive oil I sauteed the onions and fennel wedges for six minutes, then added the celery, garlic, and carrots for a few minutes more.
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Next came the white wine, to deglaze the casserole. After reducing the liquid a bit, I returned the pork and added the tomato sauce, potatoes, herbs, and broth.
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Covered loosely with a sheet of foil, the dish went into a 325° oven. The full recipe called for an hour and 40 minutes of baking, with adjustments to the heat if necessary to keep the contents barely simmering. Since I had no idea how long my tiny pot roast would take to tenderize, I checked it frequently. I did have to raise the heat to 350° after a while, and the meat did take about as long as the full-sized piece would have.

I removed all the solids from the baking dish to a plate in the turned-off oven while I reduced the liquid on a stove burner. The recipe said to strain that gravy into a sauceboat for serving, but I just poured it over and around the pork.
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This turned out to be quite a tasty dish; even more so than I’d expected. The pork was tender, toothsome, and faintly spiced from the fennel seeds. The fennel wedges mostly retained their own tart-sweet character, good foils for the rich pork. The potatoes had happily absorbed the good juices. All the components worked together to make an attractive set of flavors just a bit different from those of the individual ingredients. A “simple pleasure” indeed!

Lamb “from the Stewpot“

I’ve discovered a wonderful old Abruzzese recipe for cut up lamb shoulder: Agnello “a cutturo.” You can’t call it a stew, because there’s no liquid at all in it and only one vegetable; it isn’t a braise, because the meat is never browned. The raw ingredients just go all at once into a casserole, to simmer on the stove until the lamb is tender. Essentially effortless cooking – and amazingly good.

I found the recipe in the Lamb volume of the Time-Life Good Cook series, which credits it to a book called Le Ricette della Nonna, by Nice Cortelli Lucrezi. The Time-Life translator’s headnote says the region’s outdoor-living shepherds would cook it in a stewpot hanging from three stakes over a fire; hence the name. (Seems almost like cannibalism, doesn’t it, for shepherds to be eating lamb?)

Here are my ingredients for a serving for two persons: chunks of lamb shoulder meat; chopped onion, parsley, and sage; oil, lard, salt, and pepper.
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For a stewpot, the recipe suggests using an enameled iron casserole. I have a medium-sized black clay casserole of Colombian Chamba ware, which is ideal for long, slow cooking, so I simply layered everything into it.
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Covered and left to itself on a low flame, the pot cooked along for almost two hours. I was a little worried at first by the complete absence of liquid, so I checked periodically, but both lamb and onion released plenty of their own moisture. Only at the very end did I have to add a little hot water to be sure of there being enough of the nubbly gravy.
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That gravy was important, because the recipe’s serving instruction was to place thick slices of firm-textured white bread on the plates and top them with the entire contents of the casserole. Which I did, adding only a few sauteed green beans for an accompaniment.
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We enjoyed this simple preparation very much. The lamb was succulent and fork-tender. Those tiny amounts of parsley and sage, together with the sweetness of the almost-pureed onion, had given the meat a surprising little vegetal accent, just a touch tangy. And the gravy-drenched bread made a worthy companion in its own right – a nice alternative to potatoes or noodles. Altogether a most satisfying everyday dinner.

Blue Cheese Tartlets with Pears and Walnuts

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Today’s food story is about a pair of mildly interesting savory tartlets that I rescued out of a seriously bad recipe in a disappointing new cookbook. How’s that for a downbeat, off-putting opening? Bravely read on.

The recipe’s combination of ingredients sounded great, especially since I had gorgonzola dolce in the refrigerator, Bosc pears in the fruit bowl, and chopped walnuts remaining from my Christmas cookie baking.
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Shown here are quantities for two four-inch tarts, half the recipe. That five ounces of gorgonzola looked like an awful lot to get into the small, shallow tart tins, and the pears were pretty large too. I was dubious, but we’d see how it went.

Not well, is how it went. The ingredients for the pastry crust, when I looked closely at them, were absurdly small: ⅓ cup of flour and 2 tablespoons of butter. I use that much to make a single tartlet. It was time to take some initiative: I doubled those quantities.

After chilling the pastry I rolled it out and fit it into the tins. There was only a little bit extra. Next was to add the pears, which I’d peeled, cored, quartered, and “slivered.” They made an impossibly large quantity: one pear’s worth of slivers completely filled the two tins. Then I heaped on as much of the ‘zola as I dared to: less than half the amount called for. I still envisioned it overflowing the tins as they baked. Finally a small – very small – handful of walnut pieces.
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But wait: there’s more. I was to mix half a beaten egg with three tablespoons of milk, add salt and pepper, and pour that into the tins. They wouldn’t accept all of it.

The final indignity was that, while the recipe said the tarts would be puffed and golden after 15-20 minutes in a 400° oven, mine took 30 minutes. And never puffed. Well, at least they overflowed only in a few spots.
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And they were tasty enough, though the three main flavors only coexisted: they didn’t combine into anything new and interesting. I wonder if my creamy gorgonzola dolce wasn’t a good choice. It’s a cheese that, on its own, matches wonderfully with fresh pears, which is why I chose it, but a firmer, dryer, sharper blue might have had a better effect here.

Still, it’s unconscionable for an important cookbook to include such wildly disproportionate quantities. Didn’t the publisher’s editor know anything about cooking?

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Now here’s the Horrid Reveal: What cookbook contains such a trap for the unwary? I sadly say it is the long-heralded, eagerly awaited, finally-issued-in-English, Bruno’s Cookbook, by Martin Walker and his wife Julia Watson.
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My regular readers may remember several posts I’ve written about Bruno Courrèges, the Perigord village police-chief detective and brilliant amateur cook in Walker’s series of mystery novels. In every book Bruno cooks for friends, lovers, neighbors, and colleagues; and his procedures are described so thoroughly that I’ve been able to reproduce 10 of his dishes in my own kitchen (See here, here, here, here, and here.)

I was thrilled when the cookbook finally came out, and eager to see how my versions of the recipes compared to Bruno’s. But the book includes only two recipes with the same names as mine, and some of their ingredients are different. What a disappointment! It does include some recipes implied to be Bruno’s that I don’t think appeared in the novels. It also has several purely British recipes attributed to Bruno’s whilom lover Pamela, “the mad Englishwoman,” that I don’t recall her serving in the stories.

The pity is that, in the novels, Bruno makes so many other good dishes that are not in the cookbook. Just a few examples: his own foie gras, both mi-cuit and poelé; his own pork sausages; écrevisses à la nage; venison casserole; roast pigeon; truffle soup; even gravlax and gazpacho. I would have loved to have his recipes for these.

I have to concede it’s a beautiful book, lavishly illustrated with both culinary and countryside photographs, interestingly structured in sections with headings such as Hunter, Butcher, Baker, Forager, Winemaker. But the contents (~90 recipes) are fairly thin, compared to what they could have been. And from my initial experience, I’m going to have to give very close attention to the details of any more of its recipes I’m considering making.

Roasted Cabbage with Raisins

Though Savoy cabbage is the titular vegetable in the new-to-me dish I just tried, it has plenty of vegetable companionship: Carrot, leek, parsnip, and turnip roast along with it. The recipe is from Tom Colicchio’s Think Like a Chef, and the book makes it clear that this chef thinks very highly of roasting – almost anything.

He says that the very word “manages to conjure comfort food and adventurous cooking simultaneously, along with an image of gorgeously browned edges and caramelized flavor.” What could be better for dinner on a cold January day?

This chef also expects people to be big eaters. Here are the ingredients for two servings – half the recipe’s worth.  I was lucky to find a small Savoy cabbage, weighing only 1½ pounds. Around it from the left are thin slices of carrot, white turnip, leek, and parsnip. Quite evidently from this and other recipes in the book, Colicchio also loves his root vegetables.
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By hand, all that slicing would have been a tedious job. Here that was unnecessary, thanks to this blessed vertical mandoline slicer. You put a vegetable into the chute on the left, push down the plunger at the top, and perfect slices fall into the box at the bottom. No fingers can possibly be harmed by the wickedly sharp blade, and it is fast, fast, fast.

All the ingredients then get some preliminary sauteeing – at first, about five minutes for the leek and root vegetables. (Though I stirred them often, I confess that at one point I had the flame too high, so the edges of some of the veggies almost burned. Luckily, it didn’t seem to harm the finished dish.)
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While that first cooking was going on, I tore all the cabbage leaves into large pieces. Made quite a pile! What you see at the back are a few sprigs of fresh thyme and a tablespoon of golden raisins being softened in hot water.
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I added the cabbage to the skillet in batches, letting each wilt a little. Then I added a lump of butter, the thyme, salt, and pepper and continued cooking, stirring, for another three minutes.
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Last, I added the raisins and put the skillet into a 400° oven to roast. I stirred the mixture around every 10 minutes until all the vegetables were tender, which took 40 minutes.

It came out looking like a rustic vegetable hash, which of course it was – not beautiful but a moist and aromatic symphony of browns. Richly savory and satisfying, but far more than we two could finish at a sitting. What we could eat that evening, we enjoyed very much.
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I thought this was an interesting dual procedure. The direct heat from the skillet quickly begins to caramelize the vegetables; and then the ambient heat in the oven slowly releases their moisture, softens them, and fully brings out their various sweetnesses. If that is how a chef thinks, I ought to try thinking that way myself.