Is There a Nutmeg in the House? by Elizabeth David, Jill Norman Page B
Authors: Elizabeth David, Jill Norman
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to fill and puff with wind, or from its participle meaning windy, puffed, full of wind. 2 To judge from what Stefani says, he was approaching this fruit with caution, but not with the deep suspicion it had so often engendered in the past.
‘The aventani are certain fruits grown in gardens and in which monks such as Capucins, Osservanti and the like are specialists. When in perfection they turn a purple colour and are smooth as ivory; they are about the size of an apple, oval in shape. Take these, remove their skins with very exact care, and having split them, take away their seeds, then divide them in small pieces, plunge them in cold water, which you must change two or three times, in order to remove their natural bitterness: take them from the water, dry them, put them in a pignatta or other vessel of a suitable size, with oil, salt and pepper, and set them on a charcoal fire, stirring frequently. When they are cooked, take sweet almonds, three ounces (90 g) for every pound (500 g) of eggplant, toast them in the oven, taking care not to scorch them, and pulverise them in a mortar, add a little nutmeg, and a little sugar according to your judgement, all to be tempered with the juice of bitter oranges, put this into the vessel containing the eggplants, which are to be turned into a dish and served hot.
If you wish to cook this dish with butter, do it as above, but instead of the almond sauce dress it with piacentino (Parmesan), with cinnamon over.’
I have many times cooked aubergines on the lines described by Stefani, but bypassing the cold water baths he recommends – I find that aubergines nowadays don’t need any pre-cooking treatment to remove bitterness – and the removal of seeds (I have come across this same daunting direction in a Spanish MS recipe of about the same date as Stefani’s), a refinement I have not even contemplated.
For the sauce, the three ounces (90 g) of almonds to a pound (500 g) of aubergines is rather too high an allowance, I find, particularly as Stefani appears to have been using the twelve ounces (350 g) pound, and one and a half ounces (45 g) to thejuice of a couple of Seville oranges seems about right. A word of warning here. The bitter orange juice and the scrap of sugar in combination with the almonds makes a sauce so vastly superior to the same made with sweet orange juice, without the sugar but with the addition of lemon juice, that I am tempted to say don’t bother to try the dish until you can lay hands on Seville oranges, but perhaps after all it is worthwhile persevering until you find some satisfactory way round the problem. A sprinkling of ground red sumac, that favourite Persian seasoning, might provide a simple lemon, sweet orange and almond mixture with just the required quality of aromatic acidity; or sweet-sour pomegranate juice could be the answer. It is a pity to have to keep so good a dish as Stefani’s Vivanda d’aventani for just those few weeks of the year when Seville oranges are obtainable in England.
I think, by the way, that the dish is better cold than hot. And I do find that a very small amount of garlic, chopped with parsley, and added during the cooking, is an improvement, almost a necessity.
VIVANDA DI SILARI
(a dish of celery)
Take the celery well cleaned of its leaves and green stalks so that what remains is half a palm’s length of the heart of the celery close to the foot; throw it into cold water and wash it; have ready a pot of vegetable broth on the fire, when it is at the height of boiling throw in the celery, let it boil until half cooked; then take it from the broth, put it in a dry vessel, squeezing lemon juice over it and adding crushed pepper; in the meantime prepare a frying pan with butter. And because celery, like many other things is calculated by the piece not by measure or weight, it is obvious that there are small and large ones, so that in some places the average ones may be larger than the large of elsewhere; and in other
‘The aventani are certain fruits grown in gardens and in which monks such as Capucins, Osservanti and the like are specialists. When in perfection they turn a purple colour and are smooth as ivory; they are about the size of an apple, oval in shape. Take these, remove their skins with very exact care, and having split them, take away their seeds, then divide them in small pieces, plunge them in cold water, which you must change two or three times, in order to remove their natural bitterness: take them from the water, dry them, put them in a pignatta or other vessel of a suitable size, with oil, salt and pepper, and set them on a charcoal fire, stirring frequently. When they are cooked, take sweet almonds, three ounces (90 g) for every pound (500 g) of eggplant, toast them in the oven, taking care not to scorch them, and pulverise them in a mortar, add a little nutmeg, and a little sugar according to your judgement, all to be tempered with the juice of bitter oranges, put this into the vessel containing the eggplants, which are to be turned into a dish and served hot.
If you wish to cook this dish with butter, do it as above, but instead of the almond sauce dress it with piacentino (Parmesan), with cinnamon over.’
I have many times cooked aubergines on the lines described by Stefani, but bypassing the cold water baths he recommends – I find that aubergines nowadays don’t need any pre-cooking treatment to remove bitterness – and the removal of seeds (I have come across this same daunting direction in a Spanish MS recipe of about the same date as Stefani’s), a refinement I have not even contemplated.
For the sauce, the three ounces (90 g) of almonds to a pound (500 g) of aubergines is rather too high an allowance, I find, particularly as Stefani appears to have been using the twelve ounces (350 g) pound, and one and a half ounces (45 g) to thejuice of a couple of Seville oranges seems about right. A word of warning here. The bitter orange juice and the scrap of sugar in combination with the almonds makes a sauce so vastly superior to the same made with sweet orange juice, without the sugar but with the addition of lemon juice, that I am tempted to say don’t bother to try the dish until you can lay hands on Seville oranges, but perhaps after all it is worthwhile persevering until you find some satisfactory way round the problem. A sprinkling of ground red sumac, that favourite Persian seasoning, might provide a simple lemon, sweet orange and almond mixture with just the required quality of aromatic acidity; or sweet-sour pomegranate juice could be the answer. It is a pity to have to keep so good a dish as Stefani’s Vivanda d’aventani for just those few weeks of the year when Seville oranges are obtainable in England.
I think, by the way, that the dish is better cold than hot. And I do find that a very small amount of garlic, chopped with parsley, and added during the cooking, is an improvement, almost a necessity.
VIVANDA DI SILARI
(a dish of celery)
Take the celery well cleaned of its leaves and green stalks so that what remains is half a palm’s length of the heart of the celery close to the foot; throw it into cold water and wash it; have ready a pot of vegetable broth on the fire, when it is at the height of boiling throw in the celery, let it boil until half cooked; then take it from the broth, put it in a dry vessel, squeezing lemon juice over it and adding crushed pepper; in the meantime prepare a frying pan with butter. And because celery, like many other things is calculated by the piece not by measure or weight, it is obvious that there are small and large ones, so that in some places the average ones may be larger than the large of elsewhere; and in other
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