Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (38 page)

Unpublished, 1970s

Variations of Pizza

A few weeks ago I read, in a catering trade magazine, an account of a pizza house recently opened in the university city of Oxford. Ingredients used for the fillings, it was reported, were ham and onions, ham and pineapple, ground beef, prawns, sardines and anchovies, hot salami and olives, mushrooms, onions and egg, and to conclude the list ‘a superior Special which has everything’.

Oh dear. A pizza with everything is just what I don’t want. Some people, of course, and I’m afraid this is a very English disease – perhaps in Denmark you don’t suffer from it – tend to think that the more ingredients you can cram into any dish and the more oddly assorted they are the more interesting the result will be. Others regard the cheap and popular specialities of other countries simply as a means of using up left-overs. They equate cheapness with lack of balance. This results in such dishes as the Italian risotto, the pizza, and I regret to say the Scandinavian smorgasbord, being the ones people think about on the day they’ve just cleared the refrigerator and brought to light a saucerful of green peas, three mushrooms, a grilled sausage, and half a tin of sardines – not to mention,
pace
the Oxford operator reported above, a few pineapple chunks and a slice or two of salami.

It’s a pity. Those who treat the pizza as a dustbin miss the joy of fresh hot dough, well-risen and spongy, with an onion and tomato mixture, aromatic and pungent, seeping into the air pockets to form one delicious whole. This is really the whole point of the pizza at its best: dough and filling should become one and indivisible, and when a miscellaneous collection of knobbly, unyielding things are piled on top of a piece of dough no fusion can take place. In the heat of the oven the bits and pieces become tough and rubbery and indigestible. It’s not surprising that the
pizza very often has a bad name as a stodgy and coarse dish for the undiscriminating. Once, though, that you have learned how to make it with a light dough and a simple basic sauce or filling you begin to see why it is such an excellent invention, and why it has achieved world-wide popularity. You quickly discover also what a world of difference there is in both cost and quality between the pizza you make yourself and the one you buy from the deep-freeze counter or eat in a pizza house.

A LIGURIAN PIZZA OR SARDENARA

For a 22–24-cm (8½–9½-in) pizza, the ingredients for the dough are 150 g (5 oz) of plain unbleached bread flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, 7 g (¼ oz) of yeast, 2–3 tablespoons of olive oil, 4–5 tablespoons of milk, 1 whole egg.

Warm the flour and salt. Mix the yeast to a cream with 2 tablespoons of the tepid milk. Break the egg into the centre of the flour. Pour in the creamed yeast and 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Mix to a light soft dough. If too dry add the rest of the milk and another tablespoon of oil. Form into a ball. Cover with a sheet of polythene and leave in a warm place to rise. Allow 2 hours.

For the filling: 500 g (1 lb) of ripe tomatoes or half and half fresh and Italian tinned tomatoes, 2 small onions, 2 cloves of garlic, seasonings of salt, sugar, freshly milled pepper, and dried oregano (the Italian version of dried marjoram), olive oil, a small tin (50 g/approx. 2 oz) of anchovy fillets in oil. Optionally, 8–10 small black olives. There is no cheese on this pizza.

Slice the peeled onions very thinly. Cook them very gently in 4 or 5 tablespoons of olive oil in a covered pan until they are pale yellow and quite soft. They must not frizzle or turn brown. Add the skinned and chopped tomatoes. Increase the heat. Add seasonings and the crushed cloves of garlic. Cook uncovered until most of the water from the tomatoes has evaporated and you have a fairly thick sauce.

When the dough is ready, that is when it has just about trebled in volume and is light and puffy, break it down, shape it into a ball, and pat it out into a 22-cm (8½-in) disc on a perfectly flat, oiled fireproof platter, or on a baking sheet.

Spread the warm sauce lightly on the dough, leaving a little uncovered round the outer edge. Make a lattice pattern with the
anchovies, and if you are using the olives, stone them, cut them in halves, and add them to make a decorative pattern. Scatter a little more oregano and a little more olive oil over the filling and leave to rise for 15 to 20 minutes before putting it into the centre of the oven to bake. Temperature should be fairly hot, 220°C/ 425°F/gas mark 7, and the pizza will take from 20–25 minutes to cook.

There will be enough for 2 to 4, depending on appetite and what else you have for the meal.

Notes

1. 1. If you like the pizza can be cooked in a 24-cm (9½-in) removable-base tart tin.
   
2. 2. Unless you can get the right kind of olives, very small and black, it is best to omit them. The large, brownish, rather acrid ones are useless for a pizza. In Provence, the country people use olives so small that they don’t even bother to stone them.
   
3. 3. There is no cheese in a Ligurian pizza, nor in a Provençal one, and personally I find these versions much the best. Those who prefer the Neapolitan style, with mozzarella, will find that it is advisable to add the cheese (about 125 g/4 oz cut into slices) only half way through the cooking. In this way, it doesn’t get quite so tough and rubbery.
   

A PIZZA IN THE ROMAN WAY

In the pizzeria where I used often to eat when I spent a winter in Rome twenty-five years ago, by far the best pizza was spread only with onions stewed in olive oil and seasoned with oregano. The Romans themselves claim this as the only true pizza, and dismiss the tomato and mozzarella version of Naples as a fanciful upstart.

To make the Roman onion pizza all you need, then, is dough as for Ligurian pizza (
page 233
), about 750 g (1½ lb) of onion cut into fine rings, stewed slowly, slowly, in fruity olive oil until quite soft and yellow. Season with salt and a good sprinkling of oregano. Spread on the prepared and well-risen dough. Add a little extra oil and bake as above.

A PROVENÇAL PISSALADIÈRE

This used to be spread with a brined fish product called
pissala
, peculiar to the Mediterranean coast between Nice and Marseille. It is now a thing of the past, and the pissaladière is made mainly with stewed onions and anchovies. There is also a version in which a tomato sauce figures. This one is excellent.

It is made as follows: spread the dough (made as for Ligurian pizza,
page 233
), with a mixture of 6 tablespoons of the onion and tomato sauce (also made as for the Ligurian version), the contents of a 60-g (2-oz) tin of anchovy fillets and 2 cloves of garlic pounded up together, almost to a paste. Bake as before. This anchovy filling is my own favourite.

A PIZZA IN THE ARMENIAN MANNER

The Armenians claim that they invented the pizza, and that theirs is of far older origin than the Italian and Provençal versions. Very possibly they are right. After all, leavened dough and the domed bread ovens still used for pizza-baking in Italy are both believed to have come to southern Europe from Asia Minor, and to this day the typical, traditional bread of the Middle Eastern world is a flat loaf which forms a pocket in which the basis of a splendid portable meal – olives, white cheese, mint, coriander leaves and raw tomatoes – can be enclosed. Sometimes meat, charcoal-grilled on skewers, is slid off the skewers into the pocket of bread.

It isn’t so far from there to the disc of dough which is the basis of the pizza, the Armenian variation being made with minced meat. I use lamb or pork, and spread it on top of the dough, in the Italian fashion – and a portable meal it still is.

Mix double quantities of dough (recipe as for Ligurian pizza,
page 233
), with 250 g (8 oz) of flour, 15 g (½ oz) of yeast, 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 8–10 tablespoons of milk, 2 teaspoons of salt and 1 large egg.

For the filling: 200 g (7 oz) of raw or cooked minced lamb or pork, 1 small onion, 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, a small tin of peeled tomatoes, salt, olive oil, and seasonings of ground cinnamon, cumin seeds, cloves, pepper and dried mint. The ground seeds of a plant called sumac are also a typical aromatic of the Levantine pizza filling; it is one that is hard to come by in Europe, but even
without it the dish is still a winner. Many variations can be made on the spicing and seasoning.

For cooking this pizza you will need a 28–30-cm (11–12-in) flat earthenware platter or baking sheet.

To cook the filling: melt the chopped onion in olive oil. Add the meat and let it brown gently; put in the peeled and crushed garlic cloves, a level teaspoon each of cinnamon and ground cumin, a half-teaspoonful of ground cloves, and the same of freshly ground black peppercorns. Add the tomatoes from the tin, cover the pan, simmer gently until the juice from the tomatoes has evaporated and the whole mixture is fairly thick. Taste it for seasoning. It should be well spiced, and may need a little more pepper and perhaps extra cumin. A little sugar may be needed, and at this stage a teaspoonful of dried mint is also added.

When the dough is well-risen and light, pat it out on the oiled platter, spread it with the filling, leave it to rise again, and bake it as for the Ligurian pizza.

Notes

This Armenian variation of the pizza is one for which a left-over ingredient, in this case cold meat from a roast joint, can be used without detriment to the finished dish. In fact, it provides one of the best ways I know of using up cold lamb. (It is important, though, that the mixture be fairly moist, or it will dry up during baking.) But I wouldn’t try adding pineapple and ham, or mushrooms and prawns. You have to know where to stop.

A GENOESE PIZZA

A
pizza genovese
is really more bread than pizza. The embellishments are incorporated into the dough rather than spread over it. The traditional version is made with cracklings, the delicious little pieces of frizzled pork fat left after the rendering down of lard when the pig is killed. It is eaten as an accompaniment to a soup or a meat stew rather than as a dish on its own, and a good variation can be made with little pieces of bacon and the fennel seeds so beloved in Italian cooking.

Simply make the basic pizza dough (
page 233
), and when it is risen and light, incorporate 125 g (4 oz) of bacon, cooked and cut into very small pieces. Add a tablespoon of fennel seeds (or aniseeds), work the dough as for bread, form it into a nice plump
round about 15 cm (6 in) in diameter, sprinkle it with oil, and bake it as described for the Ligurian pizza. Cut it into wedges and serve it hot.

Søndags B-T
, Denmark, 1976

Banketting Stuffe

The flowers we have this month are single anemones,

stock gilliflowers, single wall-flowers, primroses,

snowdrops, black hellebore, winter aconite, polyanthus;

and in the hot-beds the narcissus and the hyacinth.

The Complete English Gardener
, Samuel Cooke, Gardener at Overton, in Wiltshire. London: Printed for J. Cooke, at Shake-spear’s-Head, in Pater-noster-Row.
c
.1780.

That little list of December flowers in the garden at Overton in the eighteenth century reminds me of the delightful directions for garnishing a trifle by Esther Copley in her
Housekeepers Guide
of 1834. The recipe is a long one, calling for all the ingredients usual at the period – Naples or sponge biscuits, ratafia drops or miniature macaroons, white wine, brandy, split almonds, jam, a pint of rich thick custard, a pint and a half of whipped cream, a scattering of non-pareils (we now call them hundreds and thousands). Having built up the edifice ‘stick here and there a light delicate flower. Be careful to choose only such as are innocent: violets, heart’s-ease, polyanthus, primrose, cowslip, geranium, myrtle, virburnum, jessamine, stock gilliflower, and small roses. These will afford variety, and some of them be in season at most times of the year.’

I wonder if the ladies of Overton used some of the innocent flowers, the aconite, the primroses, the polyanthus, grown by Samuel Cooke the gardener to decorate the creams and trifles and custards which surely figured among their desserts at the festive season. How ravishing those eighteenth-century tables must have looked when the crystallised fruit, the oranges and raisins, the spun sugar confections, the trays of syllabubs, the pyramids of jellies, the dishes of little almond cakes shaped into knots and rings and bows, the marchpanes spiked with candied fruit, the
curd tarts and all the sweetmeats were spread. No doubt many such delicacies were made in their own stillrooms by the ladies of the household. Others were bought from professional confectioners. Long experience and a specialist’s skill were needed – as indeed they still are – to produce the candied and crystallised flowers and fruit, the lemon and orange and citron peel, the sugared almonds, and the gilded marchpane sweetmeats in perfection. Even a great establishment like Woburn, seat of the Earls of Bedford, did not run to a specialist in the art of sugar confectionery. In
Life in a Noble Household
1641–1700,
¹
Gladys Scott-Thompson recounts how anyone visiting Paris was commissioned to bring or send back sweetmeats and even
confiture
, which was more likely to have been a paste of quinces or other fruit than what we know as jam. In 1671 fifty shillings’ worth of
confiture
was sent over to the Earl from a Parisian confectioner called Monsieur de Villar, who also supplied candied oranges, lemons, apricots and cherries. For the festive season of 1673/74 the Earl
²
spent nearly £5.00 on sweetmeats from a M. Etienne Emery, known to the Woburn household simply as ‘Monsieur’. Monsieur’s bill for about 24 lb of candied fruit, chocolate-covered almonds, sugar cakes and marchpanes for that Christmas and New Year gives us some idea of the prices of those luxuries during the second half of the seventeenth century.