Sprung At Last

For whatever reason, some things are doomed to failure, and no matter how hard one tries, all the effort expended to prevent that outcome ends up being a waste of time, or money, or energy, or in the case of the Mini, a waste of all three.

This is not unlike a manuscript that was recently sent to me by my good friend Toby over at Plate Fodder – A Taste For Italian: Celebrating Italy’s Cuisine, Music and Language. The title is the first clue that all is not right here; I’ve managed to get past the irritating lack of an Oxford Comma, but not the fact that it sounds like the author has a hankering to eat the country’s people, rather than its food.

A bit of back story: A Taste For Italian is a unpublished manuscript that was found in an antique store (like a lot of things related to this book, we’re using terms loosely) by the lovely Julie over at Cookbook Fetish. The manuscript is described by its authors as “preliminary,” and that’s a good word. Julie sent the manuscript over to Toby, who described it as “uninspired,” also a good word. Toby then sent the manuscript over to me, and rather than try to sum it up in one word, I chose my Mini as a metaphor: A lot of time and effort went in, but in the end, it came to naught. It’s the car that everyone trades in.

The manuscript, such as it is, isn’t really a cookbook, or a travelogue, or a cultural history, or an appreciation of things Italian. Unfortunately, it tries to be all of these things, at once, and the result is a stream-of-consciousness hodge-podge of opera snippets and history (Aida was first performed in Cairo in 1871, and one song has “virtually become the National Anthem of Egypt”), Berlitz-style helpful phrases (“Is the pizza ready? I’m dying of hunger!”), and restaurant listings (in case you happen to be in Bologna in 1997).

And recipes.

Julie and Toby each cooked a recipe or two from the manuscript, but I didn’t even get that far, though it wasn’t for lack of effort. I got stuck on a recipe for The Child’s favorite soup, minestrone – it seemed like a fairly safe bet because, at the end of the day, how do you screw up soup?

This is how:

• Don’t list the ingredients in the order in which they will be used, or in any particular order whatsoever.
• Be nonspecific about your ingredients: If you don’t care whether the kidney beans are canned or dried, your reader surely won’t wonder which to use.
• In the recipe steps, don’t use all the ingredients you have listed. (I should probably have listed this last step first, as it’s the most important, but maybe it’s at the end for emphasis?)

If you construct your recipe this way, your reader won’t be able to guess which type of beans to be using or at what point said beans should be added to the pot. They will, however, go back over the out-of-order list repeatedly in an attempt to figure out what else was omitted (the answer is the first ingredient, potatoes). They’ll have to check things off because the list order doesn’t correspond to the steps or any other sequence; in doing so, they will discover that a couple of ingredients are added twice (garlic and onion). Then they will get tired of trying to sort it all out, and will open a can of Progresso for The Child.

I still had the challenge of making something inspired by the manuscript, so I went with focaccia, inspired less by the manuscript and more by Toby’s take on focaccia, but also my recent success with the Saltie cookbook. Saltie is a Brooklyn sandwich shop, which uses focaccia in most of its offerings. I made the recipe twice, and had no trouble following it, and better yet, The Child loved this simple bread with lots of salt. The recipe would easily make 6-8 sandwiches, maybe more, but she just cut large hunks of it and ate them plain.

The downside of a recipe that makes this much is that some is likely to go bad, since it’s only good for about 24 hours. On the other hand, the cookbook suggests that day-old focaccia is wonderful added to soup, and if I can find a recipe for minestrone that uses all its ingredients, I might just make some.

I did find the focaccia made absolutely superb sandwiches, and I tried one of the recipes from the book, the “Ship’s Biscuit”. This blissfully simple sandwich relies on the freshness of one ingredient – use only fresh ricotta cheese, not that packaged supermarket stuff – and the technique used with the other ingredient – the eggs, which should be “softly scrambled.” It took a while for me to master the technique, which is basically this:  melt some butter in a frying pan, then crack two eggs into the warm (not hot) pan. When the whites begins to set, start moving them around the pan with a small rubber spatula but don’t break the yolks until the whites are completely cooked and fluffed up. Then, take the pan off the heat, break the yolks, stirring them in with the whites while letting them cook over the residual heat. You may have to play with this a couple of times to get it right, but when you do, you’ll know – the eggs will be fluffy, yet with a nice softness of yolk.

To make the sandwich, take a piece of the focaccia, slice open for a sandwich, spread some fresh ricotta on the bottom half, and the soft-scrambled eggs on top. Then scarf it down and be amazed by the creamy, eggy texture against the salty, oily focaccia.

I’m thankful to Julie and Toby for letting me share the fun with A Taste For Italian. If you’d like the information on how to join in, or just what the heck is going on, it’s here.

I am eagerly awaiting my instructions on where the manuscript will head next!