The Cooking and Cuisine of Umbria

[NYC Mike]

Judith, I'm speechless, your quail look so perfect. Your description of the dish is torture!

-mike

[Pontormo]

Glorious, Judith. You make me want to own a loden coat, don a pair of wide-wale camel corduroys, and with Burberry scarf around my neck, plunge into the woods. Till then, I may have to pair my local beans with sausage instead of those perfectly browned birds.

Klary had a disappointing experience with truffle-paste recently which she reported in the Dinner thread. Were her purchase made at your local festival, I imagine the experience would have been different. I had heard that truffle-infused oils are not worth the money; Henry Lo & Ling seem blissful about truffle salt and the butter D'Artagnan makes.

Edited October 18, 2006 by Pontormo (log)

[Pontormo]

Tonight's dinner was inspired by Kevin as well as Judith. I found della Croce's recipe online by the way, though my substitution of tender, young turnip greens and radish tops did not provide the bitter edge or texture since they both were rather soft.

The second contorno meant that I had to keep the sausage simple since it used up the last plum tomatoes I bought at the market a few weeks ago. Judy Rodgers supplies instructions for cooking fresh shell beans and publishes a recipe she calls Tuscan that is actually quite a bit like the one you'll find at the bottom of this entry on harvest time in Umbria, the noticeable difference between recipes for borlotti stewed briefly in a quick tomato sauce being the lack of the bundle of assertive herbs Rodgers adds.

It makes sense that this kind of cucina povera would be shared by two regions so close to one another. However, it's interesting that a brief search online associates borlotti with Northern Italy and of course, Rome. The bean eaters of Florence inspire a lot of recipes featuring cannellini (exclusively) on Tuscan sites while thanks to Castelluccia, Umbrian web pages list dishes with lentils.

This was the first time I had eaten freshly shelled beans. They seemed creamier than reconstituted dried beans. Incidentally, one of their British names is "quail beans", for reasons similar to the use of "bird's egg" in West Virginia. While evoking Judith's lovely dinner, I'd trade a handful readily for some of that crispy skin.

[hathor]

Pontormo, I was thinking of you at the market this morning. They had borlotti beans, and I remembered you had asked about eating them fresh. I usually take them home, shell them and dry them. I like what you are saying about the fresh ones being creamier.

I bought a big bunch of cardoons-cardi-gobbi. Let's see how creative I get...

Lunch was a quicky porchetta sandwich. Someone, maybe Ellie?, asked about the traditional bread for porchetta sandwiches. Here you go!

[Kevin72]

The lighting in the porchetta picture is perfect. Did you make it or was it bought?

On fresh beans: has anyone ever heard they have toxin in them or need to be parboiled first? I've heard it once, can't remember where or when, but not since.

[Pontormo]

On fresh beans: has anyone ever heard they have toxin in them or need to be parboiled first?  I've heard it once, can't remember where or when, but not since.

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I am pleased to report that I'm still with you, fully alert, motor skills intact.

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Judith, it is quite the thing to see your foreign beans after shelling what turned out to be a little over a pound of my own. Yours are prettier, I must say. Mine had less color though it was nonetheless hard to throw such jewels into a pot to watch the mottled pattern disappear.

Judy Rodgers says that some kinds of beans, such as cranberry/borlotti, etc. turn the cooking liquid an unattractive grey and one way to prevent that is to parboil them first. Elizabeth Schneider has a substantial entry on what are also called Horticultural Beans; she says nothing about toxicity or parboiling as far as I can recall.

[azureus]

On fresh beans: has anyone ever heard they have toxin in them or need to be parboiled first?  I've heard it once, can't remember where or when, but not since.

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Raw, not just fresh, beans contain lectins which can cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. I haven't found any website that says whether fresh beans contain more of the compounds than dried beans. Thorough soaking and cooking takes care of the problem. The site that I linked to refers to "red kidney beans", but I think that they mean all types of common garden beans, in the genus Phaseolus vulgaris.

I've always had the habit of snacking on fresh shelly beans in my garden, and the small amounts I've consumed haven't caused any problems for me.

Sigh. It'll be another nine months before I get fresh beans from my garden again.

April

[ghostrider]

Lunch was a quicky porchetta sandwich. Someone, maybe Ellie?, asked about the traditional bread for porchetta sandwiches. Here you go!

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Omigosh. What a perfect shot. Must have porchetta NOW. Sigh.

I really want to go live in Norcia & consume pork products for a year.

[hathor]

The lighting in the porchetta picture is perfect. Did you make it or was it bought?

On fresh beans: has anyone ever heard they have toxin in them or need to be parboiled first?  I've heard it once, can't remember where or when, but not since.

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Porchetta came from the market. The roast the whole pig, you get a little lean meat, a little fat meat and some crust. I could never fit a pig into my oven...or my fireplace! Funny comment about the lighting....the lighting in the kitchen is ...well, almost nonexistent. It drives me insane!! It just doesn't pay to try and make porchetta at home, this is one thing I'll leave to the professionals.

My sister got really, really sick from eating 'raw' beans from a can. I can't remember if it was cannelloni or red kidney beans. I just cook my beans, raw beans don't hold much attraction for me. But...raw potatoes...well, that's another, crunchy story!

Fooled around with the cardoons last night. Boiled the pieces in salted, acidulated water for about 25 minutes, then put them in an earthenware dish, added grated parm, a little oil, and a small knob of butter and put them in the oven for 15 minutes. They came out of the oven still crunchy, completely edible/chewable but with a discernible, pleasant crunch. Very flavorful, with a strong nutmeg note. Jeff was just using the rest of the fresh cardoons in a mock swordfight...pre-tenderizing? Sort of like beating an octopus on a rock before you cook it?? Boh!

[Pontormo]

Fooled around with the cardoons last night. Boiled the pieces in salted, acidulated water for about 25 minutes, then put them in an earthenware dish, added grated parm, a little oil, and a small knob of butter and put them in the oven for 15 minutes.  They came out of the oven still crunchy, completely edible/chewable but with a discernible, pleasant crunch.

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So, it is true. Ideally, crisp fresh cardoons take forever to tenderize.

In *Lulu's Table*, Olney writes about boiling de-stringed pieces of the stalks for 30-45 minutes until they're tender, before baking them in a gratin dish covered with an anchovy sauce. Lulu makes a blanc w/ a little bit of a flour slurry, coarse salt, lemon juice, butter & olive oil to boil them on low.

When I read through every recipe and reference book I had at home and then boiled the cardoons grown here on the east coast back in early spring, they were done in 8 mins. and overdone in 12. We'll see if the ones growing in fall are better.

I"m surprised by the description of taste. I don't know if Italians do this, though you'd think it's a natural. However, I've heard that on their own, cardoons make a fabulous pureed soup that tastes as if it were made with artichoke hearts. There's a Persian stew of cardoons and beef, so the plant seems to have traveled.

[weinoo]

Jumping in on the act yesterday, while waiting to watch my beloved Mets not quite make it to the world series (congrats to Cardinal fans), I decided to try Julia Della Croce's Minestra di riso e lenticchie.

First, a bit of a bounty after a quick walk over to DiPaolo's.

Here are the ingredients for the soup - lentils, tomato paste, chopped tomatoes, stock, olive oil, proscuitto, arborio rice and the minced garlic.

I had some grape tomatoes lying around as well, so thought I'd roast them and then toss with some mozarella, herbs and olive oil.

And here's the soup ready for slurping!

I really liked this recipe from JDC's book - the rice and lentils benefit greatly from the proscuitto and nice amount of garlic. With some grilled bread and the tomato salad, this made for a terrific, light meal!

[hathor]

great looking soup weinoo!! Wish I had some right now, its cold and rainy.

Pontormo, that's a huge difference in cooking times for the cardoons. Maybe they are a totally different variety. Love the anchovy idea....could be a real flavor symbiosis.

[legourmet]

Those bitter greens are showing up everywhere. When we were in Morra, there were large ortos (vegetable gardens) filled with the most amazing variety of weird greens, some of them look postively alien.  I've been throwing little bits of them in lots of things.

Kevin, yes,  that's a "piadini", a flat bread cooked on a hot stone. They sell them in packages, like tortillas, and then you brown them in a hot pan before using them.

By the way, those game hens look gorgeous!

I made Ellie's roast potatoes and fennel the other night...highly recommend the combination!

Here is last night's dinner:

Pietralunga Potato Soup with Leeks and Walnut garnish (yes, the walnuts that bounced off of my head)

Roast quail stuffed with sausage and chestnuts, served on a bed of truffled "Fagioli Zolfini del Paratomagno"

Poached spiced pears with creamy yoghurt. Generic dessert dish...does not qualify as Umbrian except the pears were local.  Falls into that 'irksome' category of recipes that was discussed upthread. But they are pretty and they make the whole house smell good.

It's the beans and truffles that are the amazing combination. Fagioli Zolfini del Paratomagno are these little, pale colored beans that come from around the Arezzo areao, which is in Tuscany...but we're really close to Arezzo, so I still think of them as local beans. Anyway, they are the most flavorful bean I've ever come across. Normally the best way to eat them is just with some olive oil and a sprinkle of salt. The back of the bag talks about the ease of digestibility and also says that it will not provoke "fenomeni di meteorismo".....do they mean gas???   

But I just bought this little truffle guide/recipe book and they had a recipe for  quail stuffed with sausage and chestnuts with a white truffle sauce. I didn't have any white truffles on hand, but I had white truffle paste, and that paired with the Zolfini beans  seemed like the perfect, luxurious, sensous, decadent, hedonistic counterpoint to the luscious quail. The combination just hits some tastes buds that are located right in the solar plexis. Can you tell it worked for me???  

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Fabulous dishes, chapeau. I have been recently in Castiglione del Lago. If I would have known in late August that you are living close, I had passed by to say hello and took a seat at your table to get those tasty dishes.

We have been in the restaurant l'Aquario at Castiglione and the dishes served (for me eel) have been really good. It's a restaurant recommended by Slow Food.

[weinoo]

great looking soup weinoo!!  Wish I had some right now, its cold and rainy.

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Well, thanks hathor! And you know, it's cold and rainy and grey here today as well. Fits my mood, though, and soup makes it (somewhat) better.

[Shaya]

Weinoo, that soup looks really great, hearty, homey and tasty.

Judith, those roasted quail look amazing. Unfortunately we can only get them frozen here and I am a little leery of this. Does everyone buy them fresh or is this a rare find?

After all my euphoria with Campania, tonight I finally got into the Umbrian spirit.

Spaghetti alla Pasta di Olive - this was great, with all the usual suspects...parsley, anchovies, roasted garlic, baby black olives. Served over homemade spaghetti. My 3-year-old help me make the paste and he gobbled it up tonight with a big "ummmmm".

Trote al Prezzemolo - from one of the websites linked above. It's stuffed with breadcrumbs, parsley, lemon juice and grilled on my grill pan. Unlike Elie's beautiful trout, this one did not call for garlic. It was really tasty. Only because I used fresh breadcrumbs and stuffed the fish so much I ended up browning some of the stuffing on the pan after the fish was done.

Contorno of Pisi e Pancetta with shallots and stock reduction.

[Kevin72]

Mitch, love the shot of the Umbrian product you can get a hold of and your mise.

Shaya, good to have your great pics around again as well. That trout is just perfect!

[Pontormo]

Home-made SPAGHETTI????!, Shaya? Wow.

[hathor]

In *Lulu's Table*, Olney writes about boiling de-stringed pieces of the stalks for 30-45 minutes until they're tender, before baking them in a gratin dish covered with an anchovy sauce.  Lulu makes a blanc w/ a little bit of a flour slurry, coarse salt, lemon juice, butter & olive oil to boil them on low.

Cardoons and anchovies! An inspired combination. I tried this...using some white wine in the 'slurry' mix. Excellent

Served it along with some pork ribs. This recipe was from an Umbrian chef that came to Ital.cook. Dredge the ribs in flour/salt, lightly brown in olive oil. Add whatever fresh herbs you have around and some chopped garlic. In this case, rosemary, thyme, 2 juniper berries, couple scrapes of nutmeg and a shot of wine and a little bit of chicken stock. Threw in some potatoes and put the whole thing in the oven until it was brown and yummy. May not be ribs to you Texans, but they were soft and really flavorful. Sorry about the photo...!

Heinz Legourmet: ohhhh! Too bad! Next time, you'll have to come and visit.

Shaya: just a gorgeous meal as usual! The pisi and pancetta look really tasty.

I haven't made any trout lately, but I think your photo may change my mind.

We went to yet another castagne festival this weekend. This time we biked up to Preggio....and I do mean up! These guys are not as possessed as the Morra chestnut people.

But for a little, bitty town, they must have had 6 or 7 little tavernas. Here is the menu from one of the tavernas.

These autumn festas are really fun, each town has a totally different spirit. Next weekend, we have our big shin-dig.

[Pontormo]

Sorry about the photo? Those ribs look glorious and it's nice to see a sign verifying reports that polenta is served in Umbria.

I turned back to Anna del Conte tonight to make Il Coniglio della Zia Lidoria, substituting chicken for rabbit.

A battuto of garlic and sage leaves flavors the olive oil before the chicken is browned and stewed in a mixture of white wine vinegar and water. At the very end, the pan juices are thickened with potato flour (left over from Lombardy) and a fine mince of capers, anchovy and lemon zest. Nothing like truffles or fresh porcini, but I liked the gremolada-like effect of the final addition since the assertive flavors remained so. This was placed on a bed of mashed turnip instead of the recommended potatoes.

The other vegetable served as a nod to the cardoon gratin photographed by Judith above. This time, Heinz provided superior cardoons even if they are no match for the perfect ones I see in pictures all over the internet with absolutely no discussion of problems in growing them. Unlike the full-scale, woody, virtually hollow stalks that cooked in around 8 minutes that I purchased from him in the spring, without deribbing them, these mostly hollow baby stalks took around half an hour to soften fully, a promising sign. They retained an unpleasantly bitter taste, but it diminished.

I decided that I was a bit tired of bechamel, so my gratin became more French than Italian, perhaps. I tossed the cardoons with grated Parmesan and then added chicken stock and heavy cream, topping the dish with breadcrumbs and more cheese. The bitterness mellowed even more and the stock really picked up the artichoke-like flavor.

[Franci]

I decided that I was a bit tired of bechamel, so my gratin became more French than Italian, perhaps.  I tossed the cardoons with grated Parmesan and then added chicken stock and heavy cream, topping the dish with breadcrumbs and more cheese.  The bitterness mellowed even more and the stock really picked up the artichoke-like flavor.

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And also very milanese way of cooking cardoons.

Did you already mentioned in the thread the parmigiana di gobbi? I honestly didn't have the time to read carefully everything...

Hathor, after that quails I felt the urge to go and buy some

By now you know I love bread! The bread in the picture for the porchetta is called "rosetta". Rosetta in central and south of Italy has a lot of crumb, different than the hallow michetta milanese.

For the piadina, picture posted by Hathor, it is not typical Umbrian but from Emilia Romagna, something similar, from Umbria e Marche, is the crescia.

[Kevin72]

Recent cooking exploits:

Mushroom and sage frittata (caccio melted over the top).

I used chanterelle mushrooms; my second favorite of the exotics after porcini. They, too, have a full, woodsy, autumnal taste and aroma.

Trout with more of the Umbrian "salsa" I made at the beginning of the month for fresh pasta: finely minced garlic, mushrooms, olives and salami. Served with a salad and pan-seared lentils on the side.

Lentil soup! I make a version that Mario Batali did on his earlier shows. He tops the lentil soup at the end with slices of salami, which melt a little from the heat of the soup underneath. But, taking a cue from last month's Campania cooking, I also add salami at the beginning to the base soffrito for the soup to permeate the lentils.

[NYC Mike]

Well I thought my ebay problems were over and they still shipped my Della Croce book to NYC. I've got it now and have a question on it.

On page 75 on the recipe for Umbricelli the method describes rolling 1 inch cubes in your fingers until you have a 1/8 inch thick tube the size of spagetti. BUT! In the picture to the right it shows Ms. Menconi making it more akin to linguini. Can anyone set me straight? I'd like to make them for penci di cascia on the next page.

Thanks!

-Mike

Edited October 25, 2006 by NYC Mike (log)

[NYC Mike]

Great looking meal Kevin, especially that soup, its freezing here this morning. What kind of salami did you use?

-mike

[Kevin72]

One of those individual 8 inch or so sticks you buy whole instead of getting them to slice it for you. I threw out the wrapper, but they're everywhere. Not the kind with the white rind.

As to the della Croce recipe I noticed the picture discrepancy as well. I'd stick to the rolling it between your hands and making them stubby, like pici. You wouldn't think there'd be that much more difference between the stubby and the long, but it adds even more to the prep time and gets tedious fast. Hope you've drafted help!

[Franci]

Well I thought my ebay problems were over and they still shipped my Della Croce book to NYC.    I've got it now and have a question on it.

On page 75 on the recipe for Umbricelli the method describes rolling 1 inch cubes in your fingers until you have a 1/8 inch thick tube the size of spagetti.  BUT!  In the picture to the right it shows Ms. Menconi making it more akin to linguini.  Can anyone set me straight?  I'd like to make them for penci di cascia on the next page.

Thanks!

-Mike

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I don't think is really important. I searched in my files of years of collecting recipes on Italian forums....

Cristina from Sangemini writing on cucina italiana gives her recipe for "picchiarelli" (that is the name used in her area) and she explains that the spaghetto is of different length and thickness is different parts of Umbria. Picchiarelli are pretty thick: 3-4 mm, ciriole (from Terni) are much thinner.

Dianella from Spoleto gave a recipe of stringozzi where the dough is worked with egg whites...and she cuts it as for tagliatelle.