Arista

This is one of the most classical dishes (roasts) in Tuscan cooking and I must admit that it is one of my favourite. It is basically a pork roast taking the pork sirloin cut. Better would be to have it with the bones, far from Tuscany however this is a meat cut not easy to find. The name dates back to the Renaissance period, when Florence was a melting pot. The legend says that the Medici family organized an ecumenical council with the Roman and Greek churches (sort of G8 of that time). As usually happens in Italy, no problem how harsh the discussion might have been during the day, once at sharing a meal everyone agrees on it. So the Greek cardinal, tried the pork roast and after the first taste simply said “aristos”, the best, and from then onwards the dish got the name of Arista.

I agree with the Greek cardinal, arista is for sure one of the best dishes of Tuscan cooking. It is not very common in restaurants, but it is one of the most popular Sunday lunches in Florence.

So here are the ingredients for 4 people

Pork sirloin (whole) 800g
Rosemary
1 Teaspoon of Fennel seeds
2 cloves garlic
Salt, Pepper
Extra virgin olive oil

For the best results I would suggest that you prepare the meat a few hours or the night before cooking. In this way it will be tasteful.
Finely chop the garlic and the rosemary with the fennel seeds, add the pepper (1/2 teaspoon should be enough) and cover the arista with this mixture.

DO NOT:
Add salt at this point, it will recall all the liquids from the meat resulting in a chunky shoe sole
Punch the meat, it has to be as integral as possible
Add the mixture to the sides.

Depending on the size of the meat the cooking will take around 40-90 min. And it is better eaten if left for 15 min to rest after the cooking. So consider your timing accordingly. Before the cooking add plenty of salt to the arista (again on the top and bottom, not to the sides), and cover with olive oil, Place in the oven (using a suitable tray of course) at maximum heat for 15 min. Then cool the oven at around 200° and continue to cook. You can check the cooking by punching the meat and once you feel it is soft inside it is ready. Also during this checks you can collect some of the juices that form on the bottom and you pour over the meat. For a 800 g piece 60 min are usually required.
Collect the juices in a bowl and cut the meat into ½ cm slices. Serve with the juices on the side.

As a side dish you can prepare some roast potatoes. Cut the potatoes in cubes around 2 cm long. Place in a metal tray with plenty of salt, rosemary (you can prepare also some extra herbs mixture that you used for the meat) and olive oil and cook with the meat.

Frittelle di San Giuseppe

19th of March is the day of St. Joseph. Being the main paternal character of the Christian tradition, this day is considered father’s day in Italy. And in the best of Italian tradition we do not do cards, or give presents such as chocolate golf balls and so on. We eat! San Giuseppe is the day of “Frittelle” . Again all the main bakeries will sell them during this period of time, but being far away from Florence I will have to prepare them myself. It takes some time but the result is worth the effort. I do not know how to translate Frittelle into English. If you prepare them and find a suitable English name, please send it to me.

Also a key point about Frittelle is that they are one of the few dishes in Florentine tradition with rice. Rice is traditional a northern Italy dish, and risotto is something that you better eat in Milan or in Piedmont. In the south of Italy rice is used in preparations such as stuffed tomatoes and peppers and arancini. However rice is almost unexistant in Tuscan cooking. Frittelle are an exception…. And a very good one.



1 liter of Milk

250g Rice

2 Eggs

Sugar

2 tablespoons Ron

50 g Raisins

100g Flour

1 untreated lemon

1 table spoon of sodium carbonate

1 vanilla bean

50 g of butter

Cook the rice in the milk with the butter and the vanilla bean until all the milk is absorbed (if it dryes out before the rice is cooked, add some water). Remove the vanilla bean and leave the rice to cool down (Practical tip, prepare the night before).
Separate the eggs and add the yolk to the rice. Beat the egg whites until stiff.
Add the rehydrated raisin, the ron,the flour, the grated lemon zest and at the very last moment the egg whites, being careful when mixing in order to keep the air bubbles in the mixture.
Prepare a large pan with plenty of peanuts oil to fry the frittelle. Heat the oil.
Add spoons of the mixture in the oil and fry turning occasionally.
Once brown remove from the pan, dry the excess oil and cover with sugar (crystal sugar). Frittelle are best enjoyed cold!

Occasionally the Italian maid will fill one frittella with a piece of cotton wool before frying. This is a sort of joke in order to laugh at whoever gets it. Once in my family all the frittelle were gone and the cotton had not appeared!!!! Someone had something hard to digest!

pinzimonio

To prepare this dish you need as many small bowls (ideally 10 cm in diameter and 10 cm tall) as your guests and a large basket of fresh vegetables.

This can include:

Fennels - Wash in plenty of water and remove the hard outer leaves. Cut in quarters.

Spring onions - wash in plenty of water and remove the hard outer layers.

Celery - Use only the heart and wash in plenty of water

Artichokes - Only the Tuscan variety, skinny, purple in color. Simply wash in plenty of water and then I will explain how to eat them!

Horse radishes – Washed and peeled.

Other vegetables you can use but are not traditional : indive , carrots.

Each person is assigned a small bowl with some olive oil (extra virgin, etc... as usual), salt and pepper and you leave the vegetables in the middle of the table.

The meal consists on picking the vegetables, dipping in the sauce and eating the tip. After doing so you dip again and eat, etc.

An international kitchen cookbook would call this crudite, but in Tuscany we call it pinzimonio. This is really a strange word, and I guess that only a few people know its meaning outside Tuscany.I made a brief research on its etimology and the word comes from "pizzo", tip.

Probably due to the fact that you only eat the tip...

So let's come to the artichokes, this odd vegetable that resembles a flower. You remove the outer leaves, the ones that are all of dark colour. Then you will see that the leaves will start to have a whitish (pale green) bottom. That part is soft and edible. Dip it in the sauce and eat.

The pale green part will become bigger and bigger as you go inside the artichoke. At a certain point you will see that the leaves are all pale green and soft. You reached the heart of the artichoke.

At this point cut the top bit (1-2 cm) of the artichoke to remove the spines, reduce the stem to 3-4 cm length and peel of the outer layer of the stem. Cut in quarters, remove the hairy bit in the middle (if it is a good artichoke no hairs will be inside) and eat it.

Don't be afraid, it is more complicated to say than to do. Try and enjoy your first carciofo in pinzimonio.
Don’t try to prepare the artichoke in advance as it will get dark very soon.

You can eat some Tuscan bread with the vegetables.

The key of success of this dish is the quality of the oil and the quality of the vegetables. It is usually eaten as a second course. Spring onions can be a challenging experience…

crespelle alla fiorentina

Alla fiorentina is often used outside of Italy to indicate a dish which contains some sort of cheesy spinaches on top. An example of that is the most unflorentine of all dishes: pizza alla fiorentina. No one would ever dream of eating such pizza in Florence…

I wonder where this could come from… and I started thinking of the most “alla fiorentina” dish that you can find in a real Tuscan menu. The only dish I could think of is Crespelle alla fiorentina. This is a first course made of crepes filled with ricotta and spinaches and topped with besciamella sauce. The master of this dish in my family is the grandma of my husband. Now she is approaching her 90s and does not cook elaborate dishes anymore. However I was lucky enough to meet her a few years ago, and I must admit that she used to make memorable crespelle.

So if you want to prepare a proper “Crespelle alla fiorentina you need)



For 4 persons:



For the crepes:

4 eggs

6 tablespoons of flour (white, 00)

100 g of butter

A pinch of salt

Milk



For the filling



5000g of fresh spinaches

300g of ricotta cheese (better if you can get your hands of sheep milk one)

Grated Parmigiano reggiano (no Parmesan!)

Grated nutmeg

Salt and Pepper



For the sauce



100 g of flour

100 g of butter

500 ml of milk



A can of chopped tomatoes



The best way to proceed is to prepare the filling then the crepes and then the sauce.



Filling preparation

So for the filling boil the spinaches and rinse the excess water. Finely chop them and slightly fry with a clove of garlic and some butter to dry them. Remove the garlic, add the ricotta and the parmesan, grate some nutmeg on top (not too much) and adjust salt and pepper to your taste.



Crepes preparation

Have and antiadherent pan ready around 25 cm in diameter. Beat the eggs with the flour and add some milk until you have reached a creamy although fluid mixture. In case you have lumps of flour I suggest that you use a blender to remove them. Gently warm the butter in the pan until melted and then add the butter to the dough. Add some salt and pepper to your taste. Do not clean the pan! Make sure that the bottom of the pan is covered with butter and heat the pan. Transfer one ladle of the dough to the pan and move the liquid so that it forms a thin layer on the pan. Cook on both sides (I usually use a dish to turn it around) until ready. Proceed in this way for all the crepes adding butter in case it runs out. You should have at the end around 12 crepes.



Put one spoon of the ricotta and spinaches filling on one crepe and roll it. Place the crepes in a buttered baking pan, put some chopped tomatoes on top of each (1 spoon should be enough) and prepare the sauce.



In a cooking pan melt the butter and add the flour. Slightly fry the flour and then add the milk in small batches until you get a creamy mixture. Are you getting a lumpy milky mixture. Use the minipimer and you will get fantastic results! Add the parmesan and adjust the salt. Cover the crepes with the sauce and add some grated parmigiano reggiano on top. Bake in the oven at 200 deg. For around 20 min and serve hot!

Lesso

Literally means Boiled and in Tuscany is a word that identifies boiled beef. I would not define this a simple dish.... it is a whole world. It is a preparation that allows a cooking maid to have a first course (soup) a main dish, and also clearly reusable leftovers. I will talk of all these possibilites in this post, but first let me provide some background information on this dish.It is a very poor dish, it employes the bad quality meat, the one that needs long boiling in order to get minimally tender to be eaten. But don't get me wrong here, this does not mean that it is not delicious. I just mean that in the past, the working class could not affords the nice beef cuts that you can braise and roast and get tasty Sunday lunches. The only beef that you could afford was only edible when boiled, and that's why this is a “poor” dish. However, today's hectic life, makes this dish a real speciality as only few people have the patience and time necessary for its preparation. To give you an idea on the importance of “Lesso” for a maid in the past, I have to go back to my grandma. In fact for her any sum of money is measured by the amount of “Lesso” meat that you can buy with it. I still remember when my teenage uncle came back home having spent 50.000 Lire (around 25€) for a pair of stone washed 501 Levi's. Apart from the fact that she could not understand how you wanted to buy a pair of trousers that looked old and worn out, but what could not get out of her mind for days after this happened, is that she could have bought 10 Kgs of “Lesso” for the same sum!
Having said that, let's go to the golden rule for boiled beef preparation: you want a nice soup? Place the meat before the water boils. You want a tasty meat dish? Put the meat in the boiling water. Probably because I am Italian, but I like to go round this rule by preparing Lesso with different meat cuts. I usually buy a small piece of low quality cut (usually from the leg, the rule is that it must come with some bone) to prepare the broth and put it in the cold water. And then I add a nicer cut to the boing water. I know that the cuts of meat differ from country (and in Italy from city to city) so I would suggest that you speak to your butcher for best advice. However a good … for a nice “Lesso” is that you must have some bone, some fat, and a decent quantity of lean meat to eat. For a cut of around 1 kg of meat I would use around 2 liters of water, 2 carrots, 1 large onions, one bunch of parsley (I usually add the stems in the broth and use the leaves for other preparations), two sticks of celery. Clean the vegetable and place in the cold water together with the meat and bring to boil. At this moment adjust the salt and put down the heat so that it slightly bubbles. Leave boiling for at least 2 hours. Be carefull to adjust the salt before the broth is starting to take consistency, as it is very tricky to do afterwards.
Soup:
What we call minestra is a broth soup where some pasta is cooked in the broth. The pasta is usually of small format and of egg dough. You can also cook tiny egg noodles in the soup or tortellini. Be careful that the tortellini have to be small (around 10 euro cents coin) and have a meaty filling (ham or meat). Once you have prepared your Lesso filter the broth with a colander and consider 3 xxx of broth per person. Bring to boil and add the pasta (around 30-40 grams per person or 50 g of tortellini). Serve with grated parmesan once the pasta is cooked. Do not add herbs, cream or any other thing to this dish.
For a healthier alternative, leave the broth to cool down before filtering. This will enable the fat to solidify on the top, so that it is easily removed once filtered. You can also freeze the broth for future use.
Meat:
You will love me for this... I am finally providing some recipes for sauces. Yes, we use sauces, but only on Lesso.
The queen of Lesso sauces in Tuscany is salsa verde, which literally means green sauce. Salsa verde is based on parsley, and you need a generous handful of parsley leaves. You remember what I said before? Put the stems and leave the leaves. Lesso is a “poor” dish which optimizes the usage of all ingredients.
Let's try to do this in a structured way:
1 handful of parsley leaves, washed
1 boiled egg
2 spoons of mixed vegetables in vinegar
In case you have... 1 slice of left over tuscan bread. Do not use other types of bread as it will not work.
2 fillets of anchovies in olive oil.

In case you use the bread soak it in water and then squeeze out the water. Finely cut (you might want to use a food processor for this) the egg, the vegetables and the anchovies and add to the bread. Adjust the salt and pepper and cover with oil. It can last for one week in your fridge. Serve with Lesso meat. It is delicious.

Vitello tonnato:

In case you have a nice cut of lesso, that can be sliced in nice round bits, prepare the vitello tonnato, or beef with tuna fish. This is a cold dish, perfect in summer. Cut the beef in thin slides and adjust them in a serving dish.

For the sauce:

1 can (150g) of tuna in oil
2 fillets of anchovies
1 spoonful of capers in salt
100 g of ready mayonnaise (the plain one, not that that contains mustards or other additives)

Wash the capers to remove the sald and finely chop them with the anchovies and the tuna. Add this mixture to the mayonnaise and cover the meat with this sauce. It is great!

The leftovers

There are always leftovers of meat from a Lesso prepartion. Put them in a food processor with a clove garlic and some parsley. Add the same amount of smashed boiled potatoes and an egg and work this mixture (dough) until uniform. Form some balls around 2 cm in diameter and flatten them. Cover them in breadcrumbs and fry. You have just prepared polpette (I think this word has the same root as pulp, which resembles the fact that they come from a pulp of different things), however the translation into meat balls does not satisfy me. These are just polpette. Best served once cold. You can prepare polpette also with minced meat, however it does not have the same fascination as when prepared with leftovers.

Following the same procedure as above, you can prepare a polpettone, the Italian version for meat loaf. However once the meat is processed with the garlic and the parsley, you add bradcrumbs and eggs. Work until uniform and then form a loaf. You can wrap it in aluminium foil (remember to spread it with olive oil to avoid it sticking to the polpettone!) and boil, or you can braise in a tomato sauce prepared by slightly cooking a can of chopped tomatoes with some garlic. In this case make sure that it does not stick to the pan during the cooking, that can require one hour.
In both cases cut into thick slices and serve!

So as you can see I have presented you not only a recipe, but a whole world.