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Image Rick Harris, CC Attribution Share-Alike 2.0
Remember I went to Boston and my internet didn’t work? The whole trip felt like a massive technology fail, from my iPhone camera with the scratched lens to the iPad that didn’t want to connect to the hotel wifi. Not to mention that on the way out I missed a plane for the first time in my life and found myself stranded overnight at Logan airport. There was something deeply weird about the whole experience: I used to live in Providence and so I spent quite a lot of time hanging out in Boston. I wouldn’t say I knew the city well, but I did know my way around and had some favourite places to eat. So to spend several days there and be repeatedly lost and disconnected was an odd feeling. I should know Boston but I guess I don’t any more. So there’s something appropriately vague about my eating impressions of the city. I was staying downtown, far from my old haunts in Cambridge or even at the cheaper end of Newbury Street, and so I generally went where people took me. Luckily, I have well-connected friends who hooked me up with some amazing food. Read the rest of this entry »
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Italian food expert K came to stay last weekend and he arrived with a plan: he’d been reading about the spicy Calabrian sausage nduja in last week’s Telegraph and thought we should try it out. (I should stop here and and remind readers that K just moved to the UK and possibly didn’t realise the implications of buying the Torygraph. Also he was seduced by a freebie that came with the weekend paper. Let’s not judge, we’ve all done that.) Anyway, by good fortune, I went to the Brighton Fiery Food Festival right after we spoke and came across a Calabrian food stall hawking several different kinds of nduja. Either this was the universe telling me to buy nduja or the Calabrian food lobby has a seriously good PR department.
The nice man from BreadTree told me that Calabrians think it is high time people got over their love of chorizo and recognised nduja as the best spiced pork sausage in Europe. To prove his case, he offered two main types of nduja: Nduja di Spilinga and Nero di Calabria. The first was a satisfyingly deep red colour (on the left below) and clearly rich with oil and dried peperoncino chillies. I liked the look of it immediately. Slightly more expensive was Nero di Calabria (on the right), which is organic and made from the famous Calabrian black pigs. I bought some of each for taste test purposes. Read the rest of this entry »
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Last weekend was Brighton’s Fiery Foods Festival, an event that you can imagine is close to my heart. I’m not really invested in the boy-boy machismo of chilli eating competitions and I could do without the live music component of the day, but I am unreasonably excited about wandering from stall to stall, buying jars of this and that spicy condiment, and grazing on hot foods from around the world.
I have to say that this year’s festival was noticably weaker on the street food front. Whereas last year I ate amazing som tam (pounded for me while I watched, with levels of each ingredient open to debate), delicious Nigerian spinach and egusi 
(not spicy but there was hot sauce available) and more, this year the hot food was a bit insipid. There were stalls of the kind you see at every street event – burgers, sausages and so on – that have nothing to do with fiery foods, and then horrible corporate versions of Mexican food. We did eat some lovely Thai BBQ but I worry that the economic situation is driving out the small businesses that are a huge part of this kind of event.
On the positive side, the stalls selling artisanal ingredients and condiments were a joy. It’s always lovely to meet the people who make foods and in most cases at the festival, that’s exactly who I was talking to. Enthusiastic about their products and happy to talk about suppliers, recipes and more, the makers of these products made for a food blogger’s dream day out. And, of course, these delicious products are all available to buy online. Here are my top five: Read the rest of this entry »
Ok, I know this blog can be a little bit, shall we say, pork-centric. And I admit it: I love me some pig. But I think it is only fair to say that maiale al latte, or Italian pork roasted in milk, is one of the world’s great dishes. I’ve always been slightly obsessed with the way that the milk cooks down to almost nothing, leaving not so much a sauce as a pile of rich caramel nuggets. It’s like savoury dulce de leche, which can only be a Very Good Thing.
I actually came to cooking this dish yesterday in a roundabout manner, via a bag of sorrel. I’d gone to the hippie market on Friday for some vegetables and cheese, and came across big bags of sorrel. I don’t see sorrel in such quantities very often, so I bought it without a clear idea of what exactly I was going to do with it. When lovely Glasgow friends D&J came down for the weekend, I decided that sorrel pesto was the way to go, and thus, that I was cooking Italian. Sorrel pesto is grassy, lemony and sharp, so I wanted something a bit more comforting for a main course, especially given the appalling rainy weather we’ve been having. (Poor D&J had imagined that Brighton in July would mean lying on the beach, walking on the Downs and boutique shopping in town. Instead we huddled indoors with the weekend newspapers and several bottles of wine. Granted, this was not in any way unpleasant, but still.) I hit on maiale al latte as a dish that’s both shockingly simple to make and delicious enough to feed to company.
Now, there are various accounts of maiale al latte that seek to complicate it. Some recipes add aromatics and herbs at the beginning, from garlic and juniper to bay leaves or rosemary. Others seek to render the final sauce more visually appealing by whisking it with cream or wine. To these modernisers I say feh! As Marcella Hazan’s classic recipe in The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking demonstrates, the true wonder of this dish is its simplicity. The only ingredients you need are pork, milk, butter, salt, pepper. It’s barely a recipe really and yet the results are sublime.
Maiale al latte
- 1 leg of pork (or other cut that will stand up to long cooking)
- 2 1/2 cups of whole milk
- butter and/or oil for frying
Season the meat with salt and pepper but don’t go overboard – the flavours will concentrate as the sauce reduces! Brown the pork all over in the butter and/or oil in a heavy pot. Add a cup of milk, stir while it boils, and turn the heat down low. Cover the pot, leaving it slightly ajar and simmer gently for about an hour until the milk has cooked down to curds and fat. Turn the meat now and again. Add another cup of milk and go through the same process, then do the same with a half cup of milk – this will take less time to cook down, obviously. With a big chunk of pork leg, I cooked it for about 2.5 hours in total but if your meat requires less cooking time, you can either take out out it early or use less milk. Remove the pork, let it rest for a few minutes, and then slice it. Spoon over the ‘sauce’, which should be lumpy, brown, and yet unutterably delicious.
Adapted from Marcella Hazan’s version, serves 4.
I’ve spent most of this past week with old friends K & L. I met them in Providence, RI more years ago than any of us care to remember, but since then we’ve been barely missing each other in our various moves around and across the Atlantic. We lived just a few blocks apart in New York – except I moved there after they left – and both spent time in the Midwest – but only overlapped for a year. Although I speak to K on the phone more or less daily, we only get to cook together every couple of years, which is beyond wrong. K is one of the best cooks I know, with Italian cooking skills from his family that I’m massively jealous of (seriously, the man makes the best gnocchi ever) and an amazing feel for ingredients. The first time we cooked together was a wonderfully disastrous attempt to make the volcano chocolate cakes that were fashionable in the 1990s. Something went horribly wrong and we ended up with what was basically a vat of liquid chocolate ganache. But, you know, delicious liquid chocolate ganache that we totally ate anyway. Most everything I’ve cooked or eaten with him since then has been perfect, so I’ve been looking forward to the culinary possibilities of his visit.
Friday was L’s birthday so we wanted something suitably festive for dinner. K suggested doing a version of Paul Bertolli’s strawberry sorbet recipe that we’d made once before in Michigan. The recipe is brilliantly easy: no ice-cream maker required and no ingredients beyond fruit and a bit of sugar and water. I’m not a great maker of desserts so simplicity always appeals. Plus, it’s the middle of English strawberry season and I’ve been thinking about the combination of strawberries and black pepper since I read Miss Cay’s jam recipe and brought back the most amazing Madagascan black pepper from Paris. It was all coming together…
We futzed around with Bertolli’s recipe a bit: since neither of us likes our sorbet terribly sweet, we cut down the sugar and added in a bunch of black pepper instead. We also cut down on the water, since it already seemed liquidy enought. The basic technique is so simple that you could probably play with it a fair amount. Since we were celebrating L’s birthday in England, and during Wimbledon to boot, we thought it only correct to serve the sorbet with Jersey cream and shortbread biscuits. (Er, this might undermine the ‘not too sweet’ part but hey, it was a special occasion.)
Yesterday’s dinner was a locavore’s delight. Now that spring is in full flight, it feels not just possible but pleasurable to cook from the local produce that’s turning up in the shops. I started off in our local butcher, which is the kind of fantastic place that not only stocks locally sourced, organic meat, but where the butchers will happily go and cut you just what you need, and offer advice on how to cook what you’ve bought. I was drawn to the lamb, which all comes from small producers in the South Downs. It’s toward the end of the Spring lamb season so the meat has now been hung for longer and has a really sweet meaty flavour. I like it that way, as it lends itself to long slow cooking, so I bought a half a shoulder. The butcher suggested roasting it for four hours over potatoes and herbs…so this recipe is really his.
With meat and recipe suggestion in hand, I crossed over to the greengrocer where they had lovely new Jersey Royal potatoes and Sussex asparagus. I can’t resist asparagus in season, and besides, there are only a couple of weeks of overlap between the South Downs lamb and asparagus seasons, so it only makes sense to enjoy them together while you can. Sadly, I can’t bring myself to love the greengrocer as much as the butcher. While the butcher gives good value and often throws in a bit extra, the greengrocer charges exorbitant prices for ordinary produce and the staff are sullen. Oh well, I suppose I’m lucky to have them locally even if they’re not very nice.
As regular readers will have gathered, I’m not really a meat and potatoes kind of cook, but I make the occasional exception for fantastic local meat that you can pop in the oven and ignore. My butcher’s recipe reminded me of the recipe for Roman Spring lamb in the Silver Spoon cookbook, so I’ve kind of Italian-ised it. I can’t be expected to roast meat without large amounts of garlic after all…
Roast Spring lamb with rosemary and potatoes
- half a shoulder of lamb
- a head of new season garlic
- several branches of rosemary
- 1/2 kilo of new potatoes
- a glass of white wine
- olive oil
Slice the potatoes thickly lengthwise and layer on the bottom of a lasagna pan. Scatter garlic cloves and rosemary stalks on top and add the wine and a cup or so of water. Rub olive oil over the lamb, sprinkle generously with sea salt and place on top of the potatoes. Cook at a low heat (gas mark 3, or 160 C) for 3 and 1/2 to 4 hours, adding more water if necessary.
While the lamb rests, prepare vegetables: I just grilled the asparagus with more sea salt.
Serves 4.
