Editor’s letter
THERE IS NO COMFORT FOOD
like Italian food. If food has genres, which of course it does, the Italians must take the credit for this one. And it’s not just the food either, it’s the way the food is prepared: with generosity, skill, respect for tradition, and very often with lots of carbs and cheese.
One of the first proper recipes I learned to cook was osso buco Milanese, from the blue River Café cookbook. That page still bears the smears of my early years as a budding food nerd. I was fresh out of university and followed the recipe like academic instructions, finely chopping onions, celery and carrot – not knowing then that I was making soffrito. I didn’t cut corners. I chopped garlic and parsley and zested lemons for the gremolata, which is critical for balancing this dish. It’s also just one of those great Italian words – grem-oh-la-taaaa!
For years it was my signature dinner-party dish. I’m ashamed to say that I did use veal shank initially –
I would never have questioned the great Ruth Rogers and
Rose Gray, but now I would use free-range beef shin, obvs. I may even branch out, this month, and make Abi’s thrifty SA rendition starring oxtail and beef chuck.
While it sounds impressive, osso buco is really a very easy braise and improves with standing. Make it the day before to reheat so you have time to enjoy the peaceful ritual of standing at the stove stirring your saffron-streaked risotto and watching as each ladleful of brodo, chicken broth, disappears into the creamy grains.
It is one of the great disappointments of my life that the Salad Dodger does not like risotto. For me, it is the height of comfort food; not just in the eating, but in the making, too.
Years ago, my friend Cazzie moved to London after I’d already been living there for a year. By then I was a committed Jamie Oliver acolyte, had eaten (unforgettably) at the actual River Café and had mastered risotto. Cazzie was still jobless and adjusting to relative poverty. She came over for dinner looking shellshocked and hungry. I had made pumpkin risotto with goat’s cheese. She cleared her plate, then looked over at the pot and said, with appropriately Dickensian pathos,
“Do you think I could have some more?” My heart swelled. “It’s just … I haven’t eaten anything so good in a long time.”
And that, dear readers, is the reason I love to cook. Being able to feed and comfort a homesick, broke, anxious friend with a bowl of rice on a freezing night in a strange city, is one of my proudest memories of the time I spent in the UK.
I was a lot less proud of my attempt to make pumpkin gnocchi for a dinner party. One of the guests arrived hours early – a crime second only to offering to “help” in the kitchen. Then she offered to help in the kitchen.
It has taken almost 20 years to get past the rubbery humiliation of that meal and even contemplate making Hannah’s sweet potato gnocchi (p 100). I’m not even sure I’m there yet. Fortunately, this issue has more than 60 alternatives. No less than 14 new pasta recipes for starters – several of which can, ingeniously, if not authentically, be made in one pot.
Just make sure you get your sauce-pasta combo right please (see p 117). It’s all I ask. You cannot make carbonara with macaroni, any more than you can make mac ’n cheese with linguine. (And yes, I know they are basically the same thing.)
One thing the Salad Dodger had to relinquish when we took our vows was his habit of eating Bolognese with spaghetti. If I can’t comfort myself with risotto,
I will eat my ragù with tagliatelle, grazie.
For, in the words of the great Stanley Tucci in perhaps the finest movie tribute to Italian food, Big Night, “Sometimes the spaghetti likes to be alone.”
“It has taken almost 20 years to get past the rubberised humilation of my first gnocchi”