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Lupercalia
Febbraio, con
nocci
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by Gustav Ericson, for S. B.
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Now in this hushed and
chill time, the sky is the color of damp nickels for days at a time.
The amaryllises are way late for Christmas, but their companion
narcissi are in full bloom, filling the warm little ochre room with
their clovey scent. The exigencies of the holidays are over, and now
one can more appreciate more a smoldering fire, a leisurely
conversation, something roasted all afternoon. Out here, the birdbath
and pazzo statuary-ram’s
heads and rabbits- remain shrouded in an undiminished six inches of
snow. My inveterate sage still peaks out over its deep white blanket.
The sparrows play around the sage in the afternoon before
repairing to their heavy, safe spruce boughs when dusk settles in. I
wonder about their little romances, and if they will find new mates on
impending Lupercalia. The rosemary seems happy in the cold and
sometimes sunny garage, at least so far, and I give it a little
drink of cool water every day. Just a sip, and it has not yet lost a
needle. The rosemary seems even more robust in winter, kicking up the
omnipresent pappa al pomodoro,
invigorating savory biscotti, and certainly transforming those olive
oil cakes or lamb shanks I make some afternoons. Always there are the
grand gray landscapes here, none of them useless. The source, perhaps,
of the inspiration. It could be other things, though: a remembered
romance, with soufflés and Champagne and a stifling
Valentine restaurant dinner. Or- better- the nibbling, twittering
sparrows- we all have to eat! Let’s
do it right today! Mangiamo Adesso! Or perhaps their
cousins on the coast as they cry and swarm on a dinner
voraciously plucked from the waves. Or maybe it’s the waves over
which they call, those “endless glimmerings and departures of
tides” on that shore or on the Adriatic, where I was last lifetime
and will be headed next. Or perhaps it is the light falling on and
dappling those waves, or failing to penetrate the depths of those
spruce boughs. Perhaps it’s a long afternoon alone with Puccini. Or
freedom from pain. Or a heavy goblet of cold, fizzy moscato next to the fire. Those
are my odd inspirations but they come with fetters, so let’s forego
them here. Find your own and derive from them the repast to nurture
your love or vanquish the chilly gray. Rosemary surviving the winter
and a sale on walnuts might
be less encumbered inspirations, and I offer you here some
recipes- walnutty, cheesey- beloved by me and mine. You might
share them with your beloved this month to honor Saint Valentine, or
Lupercalia, or just for blues abatement.
Taleggio is a favored cheese this winter, when our patrons ask me. This
is an ancient northern Italian cow milk cheese that’s been around since
at least 1200. It is one of Italy’s rare washed-rind varieties. It
comes wrapped in a moldy and unpleasant paper, but that paper holds a
magnificent dusty pink square of soft, undulating pale gold cheese,
redolent of fruit, pasture and hay. It tastes even better than it
smells. Look for a rather bulgy specimen when buying Taleggio- bulgy
but not amorphous. A well-ripened Taleggio almost quivers at room
temperature, and we like that in a cheese. Taleggio is a traditional
topping for polenta, up in Lombardia, where a few slices are
placed on a steaming platter of that substantive yellow mush after it’s
poured out onto a board. That’s not a bad idea for February. I have
tucked Taleggio into chicken breasts along with a sage leaf and a wisp
of proscuitto to make an Italianated and infinitely improved chicken cordon bleu. It’s better in your
leftover risotto arancini than
the more traditional mozzarella, too. If you have some good bread
that’s passed its prime, a bag of spinach, some Taleggio, and some
angst- don’t have a cold salad. Sauté the spinach in olive
oil with some sliced garlic, salt and pepper, just until it’s wilted,
then layer it on your grilled bread, cover with Taleggio, and put it
into a 450° oven until it sizzles. Say adio to your angst. Or, grill some
radicchio, seasoned with salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil,
then remove the slightly wilted vegetables to a baking sheet,
cover them with a fair amount of sliced Taleggio, and put it under
the broiler until it bubbles up. You could do this with artichoke
hearts. Pino Luongo, a wonderful resource for Tuscan food lore, likes
his radicchio this way and we both scatter the finished, bubbling,
cheesey vegetables with walnuts. I like a little good balsamic
nearby. I bet you’ll make this more than once.
Taleggio I recently added a few needles of my stalwart rosemary to
this “Walnut Sauce for Pasta or What Have You” and didn’t relish the
result. I’m all for a complex eddy of flavors, but I think the
nuance of wintry spices with the walnuts is perfect without the
vernal jolt of rosemary. This sauce, which I have made off and on for
two decades, is decidedly urbane and probably also northern
Italian in origin. It might remind you of another favorite Italian
cheese, Speziato al Tartufo, a cow milk cheese from the Veneto
encrusted with a ruddy coat of cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice. The pale
parchment cheese itself is flecked with an elegant amount of black
truffle. Remember that the Venetians have been using spices much longer
than the rest of us westerners, resulting in a quite sophisticated
and haunting use of Asian spices, surprising to palates
associating cinnamon with apple crisp. Speziato al Tartufo is
superb melted on a mushroom risotto just as you bring it to the table.
Or, for an insanely decadent pizza, lavish it on a pizza crust strewn
with sautéed crimini mushrooms and caramelized onions into which
you’ve crumbled a good bit of fresh thyme. Bake this in a 450 degree
over until the cheese bubbles volcanically and house smells utterly
sublime you could then drizzle on a little white truffle oil
before serving. Dio mio! This cheese is beloved by many and
summarily vetoed by some, as perhaps this sauce will be, but I urge you
to try them at least once.
A suggestion: roast walnuts and skin them as you do with hazelnuts. You
know- roast them for about nine or ten minutes in a 325-degree oven,
until they blister, let them cool slightly, wrap them in a non- terry
cloth towel, and rub them vigorously until most of the skin comes away.
You will never get all the rather bitter skin off, as with
hazelnuts, and you will get even less off with the walnuts, but
you will be happy with the roasted butter and less astringent flavors
that result. I use a pound of walnuts, toasted and skinned. Once they
are cool, I put them in a big wooden bowl and chop them coarsely with a
mezzaluna, because I like the texture of certain sauces to be chunky
rather than pureed to a pulp. You have infinitely more control with the
mezzaluna. If you are not of that mind, put the walnuts in a food
processor fitted with the steel blade and process minimally. Then
add a generous half teaspoon of cinnamon, the same of nutmeg, a
teaspoon of your best sea salt, and half teaspoon of good freshly
ground black pepper. Mix with your mezzaluna or process briefly. Remove
the mixture to a non-reactive bowl and beat in a half-cup of cream, a
quarter cup of good French walnut oil and a quarter cup of first-rate
fruity olive oil. A healthy splash of fruity white wine would not be
amiss here. (For me, February is not a time for paltry provender- no
Spartan salads or insipid soups. Have a decent meal and get out into
the cold air for a walk afterwards). If you are using your food
processor, simply combine the liquids in a Pyrex measuring cup with a
spout (get one of those, if you don’t have one, when you go to get a
mezzaluna) and pour it through the feed tube with the motor running. I
beseech you not to over process. And by the way, once you get the hang
of the
mezzaluna, and realize that they are not at all expensive, you will
wonder why you went so long without one. This is more than enough sauce
for pound of pasta. It is great with fresh long pasta like tagliatelle.
I eat it with my favorite orechiette. You might embellish it with
big curls of Parmagiana Regianno, or a shower of Grana, or some torn
flat leaf parsley. I do not, allowing the odd spices and walnuts to
rule. I do like some broccoli rabe- blanched briefly, shocked and then
warmed up in olive oil with a lot of garlic and crushed red pepper-
with this pasta. The interplay of north and south is so nice in
this instance. Put the leftover walnut sauce in a nice jar and seal the
top with walnut oil. Give it to a bud, or use it all week on crostini,
beaten into a vinaigrette, on your forefinger like you do with a new
jar of peanut butter.
If you have some walnuts left, think about a batch of these
intense “Chocolate Walnut Cookies”. Many of you have asked for the
recipe, and I regret that it took this long to get it to you. As with
the previous recipes, there is little technique, special food prep
knowledge or arcane equipment required- only the best ingredients.
These are a simple rolled butter cookie, a tin of which were given to
me many years ago by an esteemed foodie pal Suzanne B. whence they were
tucked into an Asian tin lined with paper. Upon opening the tin, the
air filled with the smell of dark cocoa, toasted walnuts and coffee.
All equatorial on a frigid
Christmas Eve. I acquired the recipe, and though they were scrumptious
in Miss B’s manifestation, I tweaked them over the years and came up
with this version. Simply cream a cup of room temperature,
unsalted butter (the better the butter the better. I’ve been using the
Danish Lurpak unsalted) with a packed half cup of good brown sugar,
then add a teaspoon of your best vanilla, a heaping tablespoon of
espresso powder (we have Medaglia d’Oro) and a half-teaspoon of fine
sea salt and beat until it is fluffy. Separately you should have
whisked together two cups of A.P unbleached flour, and a generous half cup of the best
cocoa you can find, e.g. the Cacao Barry. Add this to the beaten butter
mixture with a broad spatula in two portions, not over mixing, as with
shortbread. Then add a benevolent cup of toasted and coarsely
chopped walnuts and mix. I have not bothered to skin the walnuts for
this recipe, cause I like the slight bitterness. Do toast them,
however. Form the resulting dough into a slab and refrigerate it up to
5 days, or freeze it, well-wrapped, to have on hand for
emergencies. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees, roll the dough into
balls the size of a cherry (as they used to say) and bake on
parchment-lined baking sheets for about twenty minutes, until they
just look dull and almost set, no longer. I depart from tradition
here and roll the still-warm cookies in vanilla sugar or praline
powder before cooling them on a rack.
For a swank and meatless Valentine, you could serve the radicchio or
artichoke as an appetizer and follow it with the pasta and broccoli
rabe. Drink your moscato icy cold. Then have a few cookies with
your gelato of choice, or perhaps that wonderful goat milk and black
mission fig ice cream over in Grocery. Or have an espresso and a
tangelo with the cookies. Throw the tangelo peels into the fire
and pay attention as they hiss and splutter and perfume the room. I bet
you won’t be grousing about February.
As always, we carry all the ingredients for the above recipes, and
many, many more, at il co-op.
Plus we like to tell you what to do with them. This winter, find some
inspiration and comfort in a warm meal together, and on this
Valentine’s Day, remember that you are loved- or you never would have gotten that
cookie recipe.
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