of button mushrooms, sliced
½ wine glass of white wine
60g mature Gorgonzola cheese
2-3 tablespoons mayonnaise (see page 53)
1 garlic clove
handful of flat-leaf parsley
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
Clean the radicchio, removing all the white parts from the base and keeping the small red leaves whole. Tear the larger leaves into halves or quarters.
Heat the olive oil in a pan, add the mushrooms and sauté until golden. Add the wine and stir until that has evaporated. Season, remove from the heat and keep warm.
Break up the Gorgonzola and melt it gently in a bowl placed over a pan of simmering water until it is creamy. Allow to cool slightly and mix into the mayonnaise to make a dressing.
Squash the garlic to a paste with the back of a knife, put the parsley leaves on top and chop it, so that the two combine.
Season the radicchio and toss with the extra-virgin olive oil. Arrange the radicchio in nests on 4 serving plates, so the whole leaves are around the outside. Mix the parsley and garlic with the mushrooms and spoon into the middle. Drizzle with the Gorgonzola dressing and serve.
Insalata di porcini alla griglia Chargrilled cep salad
This is a dish for those times when you go shopping and just happen to see fantastic fresh porcini (see page 232). Whenever I find them, I buy a kilo, use some for a risotto, put some in a veal stew and keep back the most beautiful ones to grill for this salad. In the restaurant, we serve quite a smart porcini salad with reduced veal stock and beurre fondu drizzled around the plate. This is too complicated to do at home, but it is just as good simply to grill the mushrooms, dusted with chopped garlic and parsley, as suggested below, and then rub your plates with a cut lemon before you put the porcini on them.
½ garlic clove
2 handfuls of flat-leaf parsley
300g small porcini (cep) mushrooms (see page 239 for preparation)
a little extra-virgin olive oil
½ lemon
2 handfuls of mixed green salad leaves
5 celery stalks, cut into matchstick strips
50g Parmesan
4 tablespoons Oil and lemon dressing (see page 52)
small bunch of chives, cut into batons
salt and pepper
Preheat the grill or, preferably, a ridged griddle pan. Squash the garlic to a paste with the back of a knife, then put the parsley on top and chop it so that the two mix together well.
Cut the mushrooms lengthways into slices about 5mm thick (cutting through the stem, too) and reserve any trimmings. Season the slices and brush with extra-virgin olive oil, then dust with the parsley and garlic mixture.
Grill the porcini slices, turning them over to cook the other side as soon as they start to brown. Rub the serving plate or plates with the halved lemon and arrange the porcini on top.
Slice any reserved porcini trimmings very finely and mix with the salad leaves and celery strips. Grate about 2 tablespoons of the Parmesan, season the salad and mix with the grated cheese.
Toss the salad with the dressing, then pile it on top of the porcini and scatter with the chives. Shave the rest of the Parmesan and sprinkle it over the top.
‘A fish that deserves respect’
Sometimes it seems to me that people in the UK don’t think of the anchovy as a fish at all, but as something in a category all of its own, that goes on top of pizza or into a salade niçoise. In Italy, though, we have a great respect for anchovies. The ancient Romans ate them fresh and it is thought that, together with sardines and mackerel, they also saturated them in salt and let them ferment in the sun, sometimes adding herbs and wine, to make a sauce called liquamen for seasoning food – rather like Thai fish sauce. In the North, they sometimes add anchovies to osso buco. In Sicilia, they like to cook them al beccafico – boned, sprinkled with a little vinegar, covered in breadcrumbs and herbs and grilled or baked. In Trentino-Alto Adige, they specialise in speck (the hind leg of the pig, cured in salt, pepper, juniper and bay, then smoked over wood and juniper berries), which they serve with anchovies mashed into butter. In the South, anchovies are used in a sauce for pasta.
When I was a child, at Christmas and on special occasions, such as my grandfather’s birthday, we used to have anchovies in salsa piccante (the only time I ever tasted chilli when I was growing up), which came in small gold tins decorated with three little dwarves, like the ones in Snow White, wearing yellow, red and green hats. They were made by a company called Rizzoli in Parma, who still produce them, in a sauce they have been making to a secret recipe for a hundred years. Whenever I go to Italy and see the gold tins in a delicatessen, I still can’t resist them.
Another thing I adore is dissolved or ‘melted’ (sciolte) anchovies. You put some anchovies into a pan with some olive oil, turn on the heat and warm gently to ‘melt’ the anchovies, rather than fry them, or they will lose their flavour. If you buy 500g salted anchovies, rinse off the salt, dry them, then ‘melt’ them like this; you can transfer the paste to a sterilised jar and cover it with a layer of olive oil. It will keep for six months in the fridge, so you can take it out and spoon some over pasta whenever you want. ‘Melted-down’ anchovies are the basis of the famous Piemonte autumn dish, bagna càôda, which literally means ‘warm bath’ (see page 146). Like so many Piemontese recipes, it is a dish that needs lots of people to gather round the table with a bottle of good Barolo and share big plates of vegetables, usually raw but sometimes boiled, which you dip into the bagna càôda. It is made with anchovies, garlic (soaked first in milk), oil and butter, and is kept warm in an earthenware pot over a spirit flame in the middle of the table. Sometimes, when only a little of the sauce is left, people break in some eggs and scramble them. Such a fantastic convivial thing to do.
It is a funny thing that Piemonte, one of the only regions of Italy that doesn’t touch the sea, has a dish based on anchovies as one of its specialities. The reason is historical. About 300 years ago, the Piemontese people harvested salt and made butter in the mountains. These were traded along the ancient salt routes in return for anchovies from Liguria. A traditional thing that many Piemonte bars do in the early evening is to put out little sandwiches made with butter and anchovies, which you can eat with a glass of wine. Even now, there are still associations of anciue (anchovy sellers) in and around the old trading town of Val Maira that hold dinners to celebrate the relationship between salt, anchovies and butter.
In British fish markets, you rarely find the blue-green and silver fresh anchovies. So you usually have to buy them either still on