Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (66 page)

A beef rib steak a finger thick, weighing 500 grams (about 1 pound
)

200 grams (about 7 ounces) of lean milk-fed veal

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of untrimmed prosciutto

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of salted tongue

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of grated Parmesan cheese

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of butter

2 chicken livers

1 egg

a fistful of fresh crustless bread

Make a little battuto with an onion the size of a walnut, a little celery, carrot, and parsley; place on the fire with the butter, and when it begins to brown, toss in the chicken livers and veal cut into small pieces, season with a little salt and pepper, and cook with a little broth until the meat is done. Strain the meat, and chop it finely with a mezzaluna. Dissolve the crustless bread in the sauce that is
left in the pan, making a firm paste, and adding a little broth if necessary. Now mix together the chopped meat and the bread paste, adding the egg, Parmesan, prosciutto, as well as the tongue, cut into small cubes. When this filling is ready, dip the steak in water for just a moment so that you can better stretch it out. Pound it with the blunt edge of a knife, and flatten it out with the blade. Then place the filling in the middle and roll the steak up, tying it tightly as you would a salami, first the long way and then all the way across. Place on the spit lengthwise and roast with olive oil and salt. This delicate roasted meat serves six to seven people.

You are all familiar with simple veal cutlets “alia milanesc,” but if you like them more flavorful, make them this way. After removing the bone from the rib and discarding the scraps, flatten the cutlets with the blade of a large knife until they are quite thin. Then make a battuto with prosciutto (more of the fatty part), a little parsley, grated Parmesan cheese, truffle shavings (if you have any), and a little salt and pepper. Spread this mixture on one side of the flattened cutlets, dip them in beaten egg, coat with bread crumbs and saute in butter. Serve with lemon wedges. For five cutlets, if they are not very large, 50 grams (about 1-2/3 ounces) of prosciutto and two heaping tablespoons of Parmesan will suffice.

This is a family-style stuffing, not a fancy one. For a medium size chicken, here are the approximate amounts of ingredients:

2 sausages

the liver, combs, and wattles from the same chicken

8 or 10 well-roasted chestnuts

a small handful of truffles, or if you do not have them, several small pieces of dried mushrooms

a dash of nutmeg

1 egg

If you are cooking a turkey instead of a chicken, double the amounts.

Begin by cooking the sausages and giblets in butter, moistening with a little broth if necessary. On account of the sausages, season with only a little salt and pepper. Remove the sausages and giblets, and toss in the liquid some fresh crustless bread, enough to make, with a little broth, two tablespoons of a thick paste. Skin the sausages, finely chop the giblets and reconstituted mushrooms with a mezzaluna, and then put these ingredients in a mortar along with the roasted chestnuts, egg, and bread paste and grind well. The truffles, however, should be sliced thin and left raw. This is the mixture you will use to stuff the chicken, which will be easier to carve cold than hot; it will also taste better cold.

The Florentines say that cooking is a fanciful art, which is true since all dishes can be modified in various ways depending upon the fancy of the particular cook. But in modifying dishes one should never lose sight of the need for simplicity, delicacy, and a pleasing taste; thus everything depends on the good taste of the cook. I have attempted to adhere to these principles in making this expensive dish; I leave it to others to indicate a better way. I would stuff a gutted capon without the head, neck, and legs, killed the day before and weighing about 800 grams (about 1-4/5 pounds), in the following way:

250 grams (about 8-4/5 ounces) of truffles (it does not matter much whether they are black or white, as long as they are fragrant
)

80 grams (about 2-2/3 ounces) of butter

5 tablespoons Marsala

Carefully peel the truffles, which should be about the size of walnuts,
and put the raw peelings inside the capon; you can also insert a few slices of raw truffle under the skin. Place the butter on the fire, and when it has melted toss in the truffles with the Marsala, season with salt and pepper, and cook over a high flame for two minutes only, stirring constantly. Remove the truffles from the pan and let them cool until the butter congeals; then toss them whole into the capon, and sew it up at both ends, both at the bottom and at the top where the neck was removed.

Keep in a cool place and cook it after 24 hours; that way it will have ripened for a total of three days.

If you are preparing a pheasant or a turkey, make the necessary adjustments to the proportions. During the winter, it is good to keep turkeys and pheasants stuffed for three or four days before cooking them. In fact, for the pheasant, you should wait until the first signs of ripeness appear, for that is when the meat takes on that special fragrance that distinguishes it. When you are ready to cook it, wrap in a sheet of paper and follow the instructions for cooking guinea hen in recipe 546.

It is called this because it is supposed to be seasoned with strong cayenne pepper and served with a very spicy sauce, so that whoever eats it feels his mouth on fire and is tempted to send both the chicken and whoever cooked it to the devil. I shall give a simpler, more civilized way to prepare it.

Take a cockerel or young chicken, remove the head, neck and feet, and, after cutting it open all the way down the front, flatten it out as much as you can. Wash and dry it well with a kitchen towel, then place it on the grill. When it begins to brown, turn it over, brush with melted butter or olive oil and season with salt and pepper. When the other side begins to brown, turn the chicken over again and repeat the procedure. Continue to baste and season as necessary until done.

Cayenne pepper is sold as a red powder, which comes from England in little glass bottles.

This is a family dish, not one for a distinguished company. Stuff a chicken with thin slices of untrimmed prosciutto a little more than a finger in width; add three whole cloves of garlic, two small tufts of wild fennel, and a few peppercorns. Season on the outside with salt and pepper and cook in a pot in the oven, with butter only. During the sausage season, you can substitute sausages for the prosciutto, splitting them lengthwise before inserting them into the bird.

Place on the fire with olive oil, butter, a finely chopped slice of untrimmed prosciutto, a few small pieces of garlic, and a small bunch of rosemary. When the chicken has browned, add seeded chopped tomatoes, or tomato paste diluted in water. When it is done, take out the chicken and cook potatoes in the liquid remaining in the pot. Then put the chicken back into the pot to warm it up before serving.

Nobody knows the reason this dish is called this way, but it is a simple, healthy, delicately flavored dish, and that is why I describe it here. Take a young cockerel, clean it and remove the neck and the tips of the wings, and cut off the feet two inches below the knee joint. Then cut the bird into six pieces: two with the wings and breast, two with the legs including the thigh, and two from the back (but remove the front part). Bone the thighs and remove the wishbone from the breast; flatten the two pieces from the back.

Beat an egg with as much water as half an eggshell will hold; flour the pieces of chicken, season with pepper and a generous amount of salt, and put them in the beaten egg mixture, leaving
them there until you are ready to cook them. Then take the pieces one by one, coat with bread crumbs, and cook them in a copper skillet with 100 grams (about 3-1/2 ounces) of butter. When the butter starts to sizzle, place the chicken pieces in, skin side down, for a second or so; then turn them, put a cover on the skillet, and cook with a high flame on top and a moderate flame below for about ten minutes. Serve with lemon wedges; you will find it is just as good hot as it is cold.

To speak a language that everybody understands, the Holy Scriptures say that Joshua stopped the sun and not the earth. Well, we do the same when we talk about chickens, because the hip should be called the thigh, the thigh should be called the leg, and the leg should be called the tarsus.
⁸⁹
In fact, the hip has only one bone that corresponds to the femur in humans, the thigh has two, which correspond to the tibia and the fibula, and the chicken’s foot represents the first bone of the human foot, that is, the tarsus. Thus the wings, because of the structure of their bones, correspond to the arms of a human, which are of a single piece from the shoulder to the elbow (humerus) and two pieces (radius and ulnus) in the forearm; the tips of the wings are like the first signs of rudimentary hands.

Apparently—and you can find out for yourselves whether or not this is true—chickens that have just been killed are more tender before
rigor mortis
has set in.

This is not an extraordinary dish, but it might make a nice surprise in a family meal.

Take the body of a young cockerel, that is, gutted and without the feet, neck and head. Grease it all over with cold butter, sprinkle with salt, also sprinkling a pinch of salt inside. Then, with the wings folded, truss it with two wide, thin slices of lean, partly trimmed prosciutto and cover with the dough described in recipe 277, rolled out until it is about as thick as a coin. Brush the dough with egg yolk and bake the chicken, thus “dressed,” in a moderately hot oven. Serve it as is, so that it can be carved at the table.

I like it better cold than hot.

This fowl, originally from Numidia and therefore erroneously called Indian hen, was a symbol of brotherly love in ancient times. When Meleager, king of Calydon, died, his sisters mourned him so deeply that Diana transformed them into guinea hens. The
Numida meleagris
, which is the domestic guinea hen, is still half wild, unfriendly and restless; it resembles the partridge both in its habits and in the flavor of its delicate flesh. Poor creatures, they are so pretty! They are usually killed by cutting their throats, although some people prefer to drown them, keeping them under water by force—a cruel practice, like so many others invented by the gluttony of man. The meat of this bird needs to ripen for quite some time; during the winter, it will keep ungutted for at least five or six days.

The best way to cook guinea hens is to roast them on a spit. Place a ball of butter rolled in salt inside the bird, stud the breast with lardoons, and wrap in a sheet of paper greased with cold butter and sprinkled with salt. Remove the paper when the bird is two-thirds cooked; then brown it over the flame until done, basting with oil and salting it again.

A young turkey can be cooked in the same way.

Salt the inside and wrap the entire breast with wide, thin strips of lardoon held in place with twine. Baste with oil and salt when it has almost finished cooking.

The mallard or wild duck, being naturally lean, gives off little juice, so it is better to baste it with butter.

The goose had already been domesticated at the time of Homer, and the Romans (388 years before Christ) kept geese, which were sacred to Juno, on the Capitoline Hill.