Leaving home

14 Thursday Jul 2022

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Travel, Uncategorized

Tags

Allotment, Ingredients, Italy, Stories, Venice

Aubergines were the first things I learned to cook properly, by which I mean repeatedly. I cooked for a contessa in Venice in my late teens for a year while deciding what the rest of my life might look like. The contessa’s housekeeper Donatella used to stand over me during my first attempts at melanzane alla parmigiana. For weeks afterwards, I marvelled at my ability to fry the slices until crisp, but not scorched, to layer them with parmesan and mozzarella and to mound with tomato sauce – what the contessa pronounced sose (like hose).

And then Donatella’s absence from the kitchen started to hurt. The aubergines suddenly refused to crisp up – they became mere oily vehicles for the tomatoes and cheese. Ever since it’s been something I can never completely count on. One day crisp and sultry, the next not. It was the dish that I was asked to make often as it stored well in the fridge. The flavours would develop nicely so that by day two or three everything would come together into an aromatic brew of garlic and tomatoes and it was solid enough to cut into rectangles.

It was the dish I made for my mum when she came to visit. I found her in the car park by the train station, the only bit of Venice that looks like any other place: municipal. I had left home by coming to Venice to work, and in those days letters were really all you had, because the alternative was to stand in a booth with a flimsy partition by the train station and sob down the line, which was expensive. I look back at this now as if it was pre-war, it was so basic, to only have letters and the very occasional expensive phone call. But it worked, because by the time she visited we had been apart for six months and I’d gone through the worst of it. I made the melanzane alla parmigiana for her and put it into plastic boxes and carried them to the station.

I had found her a room in a waterside house full of bohemian types and wanted to make sure she had food on her first night. It didn’t occur to me to buy milk or bread or tea. I still remember all the kitchen towel the melanzane used up – the best thing for absorbing all the grease. She didn’t last at the house because it was too noisy with too much party-going, and by now her bohemian days were limited more to reading about them and then getting a good night’s sleep.

I caught up with her in between my shifts. Going home, I first had to pass through the under storey of the palazzo where I lived, which housed washing lines and an upturned boat. The smell was the mixture of earth and Daz or the Italian equivalent. The water from the canal slapped the floors and the stone echoed under foot. I remember climbing the steps to the first floor and feeling the thick walls and knowing the door would never close quietly. My mum visited me once there and I introduced her to the contessa, who thereafter pronounced me ‘from a good family’. What the criteria was I wasn’t sure; my mum’s politeness? Her waxed coat? I remember being proud she had passed muster but also aware we were being judged.

Can you believe in the year I was there I didn’t take a single photo of the food? Not the fish market with its loot of rust-red crabs, and layer upon layer of glassy-eyed gawpers, or the stalls of lolling fruit at the Rialto where I was dispatched daily, my old lady’s shopping trolley bouncing on the flagstones behind me. I can even remember the way the shopkeepers wrapped things: smooth, white paper oblongs that slotted into my shopping bag.

I suppose I thought it was just food and not worth documenting. So I took endless photos of bridges and washing lines. I was too busy reading, shopping, cooking and getting up very early each day to teach English to a lawyer who studied while walking to work, the only time he was free, so we’d scale bridges with his exercise book open and I’d teach him the present simple. Once, when I was explaining a grammar point, he reached across and took my hand. It wasn’t in a predatory way, just impulsive and loving. I ploughed on while he stared at me, his hand holding mine. He was so unlike the Italian men I knew, that I can only speculate he was temporarily unmoored, and I remember only how horrible it was to feel so embarrassed. A fate worse than death for a nineteen year old.

This is the first time I have grown aubergines at the allotment. I thought they would be difficult because they need a quantity of heat and light that I normally can’t provide – my greenhouse is overshadowed by a plum tree. But this scorcher of a heatwave is perfect for them and they are currently elephantine, with wonderful bruised purple flowers.

The recipe in Jamie’s Italy for Melanzane all parmigiana is really good – I have used it more times than I can remember. The recipe in Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook uses mozzarella as I was instructed to (perhaps this is a Northern thing) and there is a whole section devoted to the frying of aubergines. Her two rules are: salt the aubergines first and let them stand for 30 minutes (this was in the days when aubergines were more bitter). The second rule reveals my error vis a vis sogginess: ‘aubergines must fry in an abundant quantity of very hot oil. When properly fried they absorb virtually none of the cooking fat. Never add oil to the pan while the aubergines are frying’. Indeed. She is also a fan of ‘drawing off’ excess liquid during cooking. ‘After 20 minutes (in the oven) pull out the pan, and, pressing with the back of a spoon, check to see if there is an excess amount of liquid. If there is, tip the pan and draw it off with a spoon. Return to the oven for another 15 minutes.’ This addresses the issue of oiliness on all fronts.

Melanzane all parmigiana

Lightly adapted from Jamie’s Italy, Jamie Oliver

3 large firm aubergines
olive oil
1 onion
½ a bulb of spring garlic or 1 clove of regular garlic
2 x 400 g tins of quality plum tomatoes or 1kg fresh ripe tomatoes
Wine or sherry vinegar
1 bunch of fresh basil (30g)
3 large handfuls of Parmesan cheese (freshly grated)
2 handfuls of dried breadcrumbs (optional)
A few sprigs of fresh oregano
150g buffalo mozzarella

Trim and slice the aubergines 1cm thick. Peel and finely chop the onion, and peel and finely slice the garlic.
Place a large pan on a medium heat with 2 or 3 glugs of olive oil, add the onion, garlic and a couple of sprigs of oregano, then cook for 10 minutes, or until the onion is soft and the garlic has a tiny bit of colour.
If you’re using tinned tomatoes, break them up, and if you’re using fresh tomatoes (which will obviously taste sweeter and more delicious, if they’re in season), very quickly prick each one and put them into a big pan of boiling water for 40 seconds. Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and put them into a bowl of cold water for 30 seconds, then remove the skins, carefully squeeze out the pips and cut up the flesh.
Add the tomato flesh or tinned tomatoes to the onion pan, give the mixture a good stir, then put a lid on and simmer slowly for 15 minutes, or until thickened and reduced.
Pre-heat a frying pan. You will need ‘an abundant quantity of very hot oil’ (MH) to fry the aubergines. Do this on both sides until lightly charred – you’ll need to work in batches. Blot them on kitchen towel.
Season the tomato sauce carefully with sea salt, black pepper and a tiny swig of the vinegar, then add the basil. You can leave the sauce chunky or you can purée it.
Spoon a layer of tomato sauce into a 15cm x 25cm baking dish, then add a fine scattering of Parmesan, followed by a single layer of aubergines and then a layer of torn up mozzarella. Repeat these layers until you’ve used all the ingredients up, finishing with a little sauce and another good sprinkling of Parmesan.
Toss what’s left of the finely chopped oregano (leaves not sprigs) with the breadcrumbs and a little olive oil, then sprinkle on top of the Parmesan. I sometimes don’t bother with the breadcrumbs.
Bake at 190°C/375°F/gas 5 for 30 minutes, or until golden, crisp and bubbly – it’s best eaten after a rest at room temperature as you won’t taste anything if it is piping hot. It can also be served cold.

Growing aubergines: you generally sow the seeds in January/February time and treat them like tomatoes. However, you can buy plants from May onwards (so this advice is too late for this year, sorry). They thrive under glass and like masses of heat and a fine, well-drained soil. There are many different varieties to grow. Nigel Slater in Tender is full of good advice about them in the kitchen and the garden, and I recommend reading what he has to say. One of his tips is to salt the aubergines not so much for the bitterness, but as a way of ‘relaxing the cells’ which means there will be less uptake of oil during the frying process. Some of the aubergines he grows are so beautiful, small and creamy rose/ivory in hue, more egg than aubergine, shape wise. Again, it’s easy to forget there’s so much more to the aubergine than the big purple whale from the supermarket. Here are a few from NS’s list to tempt you: Violetta di Firenze (‘White fruit, flushed with violet’), Rosa Bianca, Applegreen, Baby Rosanna, Black Beauty (‘Lustrous, handsome, extraordinary girth’).

Semi-derelict

17 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by Sophie James in Garden, Travel, Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

France, Fruit, Gardens, Nigel Slater, Patience Gray, Pre-Pandemic holidays, Recipes, Stories

She stood on the doorstep with a carton of blackcurrants, the top decorated with the pungent leaves. English but so long in France that she was a bit like Jane Birkin; she had a way of speaking English that sounded translated. She was an illustrator and had bought the house semi-derelict with her French husband and turned this annexe into a one up one down house for paying guests. I found it hard to warm to her, but I recognise it now as jealousy. The garden was ramshackle but loved and beautiful to me for that reason, with ducks and their ducklings skittering about, while various cats lounged on the vegetable beds. He – the husband – was a fanatical gardener and barely spoke. As if it was all too much, or he’d gone feral here, with the woodland at the bottom of the garden and the stream, and the birds he was protecting. Don’t go near that tree, he said, because they’re nesting. He was French and so his insouciance was more acceptable, don’t ask me why. They were both not exactly host material.

Over the years, I have listened to/read the same story told through various lenses, but the words are the same; rambling, derelict, remote, dusty plain, our hideaway, our tumble-down cottage, our house (well, one of our houses), we couldn’t find the front door for the brambles, didn’t even know there was a swimming pool, it wasn’t on the spec, rotting floorboards.

Often they wonder if it is worth it, because of the upkeep. And travel more difficult now. We are so lucky, they always say. And I think, yes you are. To be in France or elsewhere in the seventies or eighties when property was cheap, and you had a few extra bob. Then you held on to it, improved it, gradually the area became more sought after. These accretions are often slow and subtle.

The pioneer spirit looks different now, more calculated, and documented up the wazoo. I wonder if we could ever return to the relative innocence of Patience Gray in Honey from a Weed (‘I was able to light a fire, start the pot with its contents cooking, plunge into the sea at mid-day and by the time I had swum across the bay and back, lunch was ready and the fire a heap of ashes’.) or Elizabeth David brushing the fish with branches of rosemary dipped in olive oil. My own mother bought a three storey house in southern Spain for £2,000, now long gone. All the walls sloped, and swallows nested in the rafters. We had no glass in the windows only shutters. We would get lifts to places in the back of the post mistress’s van or occasionally the back of a tractor. What I remember was how unrelaxing it was. Hard work. We were dusty, tired, often bored, but our skin shone from the olive oil, sunshine and mountain air. Also: the coffee, the tomatoes, the smell of the bakery with its tough brown loaves. The way bits of wall came off on your clothes.

I suppose my mum’s place too was semi-derelict, or as one guest called it – in the days when strangers responded to an ad in Loot and were sent the keys – ‘your hovel’.

The punnet of blackcurrants are swiftly deployed. And I am left with the tale – that they zoned in on this area of unflashy northern France, their demands were few; a bus stop so their daughter could get to school on her own, relative ease of access to a town, a garden to grow vegetables. Then they got to work, quietly and slowly until they built a life.

The blackcurrants are washed and not dealt with in any way, the ‘beard’ still intact. Then they are gently heated on the hob, with the tiniest splash of water along with the sugar. They are cooked when the skins split, and then you eat them like that with ice cream, yoghurt etc. Or once cooked you can push them through a sieve to get a purée. They still retain their tartness, despite sugar, and always arrive in the same way; offered in an old ice cream carton, from a muddy hand, or a repurposed punnet. Some currants will still be attached to the stalks, leaves will be amongst them, the colour reminiscent of beetles. Or ink. Or soot. They are not glossy. I tend to eat them raw as I work my way round the allotment.

Blackcurrant compote (to add to meringue and cream or rice pudding or ice cream). Adapted from Nigel Slater, Tender Volume 2.

300g blackcurrants, 3 tbs caster sugar (or to taste), a shake of water (2 tbs)

Wash blackcurrants, pull from their stalks if necessary, put them in a stainless steel saucepan, with the sugar, water and bring gently to boil. As soon as they start to burst and the juice turns purple, remove from heat and set aside. Leave to cool, then chill.

Me alegro

29 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by Sophie James in Travel, Uncategorized

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Food, Stories

Despite how healthy this picture looks, these peppers never belonged to me. I lived next door to a storeroom and it stored things like beers and tins of things as well as mountains of red peppers and tomatoes and the like. Once, all the bottles of beer in a crate rolled down the hill on their way to the sea. I stopped them by putting my leg out and then running after them, like a parent chasing after her kamikaze child. Only one bottle got broken and the man thanked me and said that he was the owner of the bar, next to my apartment, and if I ever wanted anything I was to come in and ask for him. I remember thinking how nice that was and I was only doing what anyone would have done in the circumstances.

I found the crate of peppers incongruous, sitting there unattended. There was no one in the street but me, although in the photo there is a suggestion of human activity from the open door on the left. But at the time, there was no noise. This is the street where I lived while I was teaching last year. It is in Sitges, just outside Barcelona.

Up until then, Sitges was a place I had only heard of, and only from a man I once worked with in a delicatessen whilst as a jobbing (unemployed and depressed) actor. He was someone who subtly undermined me as I attempted to slice cured meats, who nitpicked about the way I piled sausages. He was not a very nice man and when he said his tan was attributable to a holiday in Sitges, somehow Sitges became as horrible as him. I never wanted to go there. I would go and sit in the toilet and cry and then have to re-introduce myself to whoever I was serving and weigh the pâté. I’ll never forget the awful feeling of my hands shaking over the digital scales. And his red face bearing down on me.

Also, delicatessens are a strange place to work. Things swimming in oil, the obsession with clingfilm, the smell of cold astringent objects, piles of goo. The colour brown. That weird rind on pâté. People who work in delicatessens are rarely warm – have you noticed? Because they, like the food, must remain chilled otherwise they’ll go off. Just a theory.

My very first exchange, the morning after I’d arrived, was with a waitress with black hair and a black mood who pretended not to understand the word tortilla. I thought – he is here, his spirit has contaminated this place. I never went back there even though her cafe was on the corner of my tiny pedestrian street and I passed her every day blackly sweeping up, looking as though she was still mulling over my ridiculous request. She never acknowledged me nor I her. So my first meal was spent looking at a blank space where a plate should have been and Joe drinking very good coffee.

Then I realised I had locked us out of the flat and had to call the estate agent who was hiking in the hills of Catalunya. Of course he was. He sent a sympathetic slightly cryptic message telling me not to worry and all would be well and because we had nothing else to do, we went and ate lunch – a plate of grilled sardines and patatas bravas smothered in a red sauce – made from peppers. Those red peppers are everywhere in Catalunya, a kind of culinary leitmotif.

I never saw that man from the bar again. I never went in there, preferring the open air restaurant on the pontoon over looking the sea, where the waiters fed bread to the fish. Looking over the side there would be masses of dancing fish and no bread, that’s how quick they were. The waiters were all young and friendly and prone to hand-holding; if there wasn’t a table until 3pm, I would get my hand held. That’s one of the reasons I went back, but also the food was good, with a limited menu written in chalk, always finishing with tarta de santiago, sliced as thin as paper with a rosette of cream.

The food though was not the most important thing. It was the colours of the food, the brown paper bags, the heaps of artichokes, the big orange mounds of mango, the tiny streets where my bike would fit, the sudden sweep down to the sea. The sea. I had my own bit, which had a white wind-break, a kind of fence, owned officially by the yacht club but it’s where I once left my watch (still there on my return), where I left my swimming costume hanging, where I sat and imagined the water before going in. It was near two ice cream shops. It was as ice cream always is, unless it’s Italy circa 1988. Never as good as you want it to be.

Down each of those alleyways, would appear the face, from time to time, of a student. Sometimes, we would go through the polite dance of ‘hello,’ sometimes we would feign ignorance, not see each other. Because Sitges is so small, that work seamlessly blends into all aspects of life. You are your work, and so arguments, wandering out of the sea topless, eating, walking, standing – all will be duly noted. Not going out will be too. Because Sitges is a party town, a drinkers place.

The red sauce I think is, must be, romesco? But perhaps not. In all the time I was in Sitges I never asked. Just nodded and ate it. It was lovely.