from soup to nuts

Casting around for something to read tonight while I ate my home brand spaghetti with bottled red sauce, I settled on The Nuovissimo Big Cook Book (1982 edition) from my housemate’s collection. Its 840 pages include recipes for: rice with frogs; milk soup; stuffed tripe; mushroom conserve; whiskey risotto; pheasant with truffles; and a dessert called dead man’s bones—but my favourite chapter is the first in the book, entitled The art of receiving. Some excerpts follow.

Six rules for dinner parties:
- Never serve two courses that both contain cooked cheese
- Absolutely never serve two courses that are both stews or broths.
- Don’t serve two courses in the same meal that are both fried.
- Don’t serve pasta and rice in the same meal, no matter how diversely prepared.
- Don’t serve two courses with an egg base.
- Don’t serve the same vegetable prepared in different ways, no matter how far apart.

On dessert:
In a meal of a certain tone the dessert should never be missing; that is not to say that only ‘fancy’ meals should finish with a dessert. Dessert, if well managed, is even more desirable if made by the housewife herself. It is good etiquette that the hostess, as for the other courses but especially in the case of dessert, does not brag that ‘I made it with my own hands,’ nor discourse at weary length upon the recipe.

From a section entitled At table with the Ancients, an authentic menu from a meal eaten by Petrarch (who was from Arezzo, by the way) in 1365, in the home of Bianca di Savoia in Milan (the bits still in Italian are the words I can’t be bothered to look up):
Baked meat, fish and sucking pig; fritters of pike and hare; veal and trout terrine; quails and partridges on the spit; ducks, herons and marsh birds; ox meat and capon fat; beef and eel pie; bovine gelatine and fish; kid on the spit; hare and kid; venison and oxmeat in iron pots; capons and chickens; peacocks with savoy cabbage and beans; salted tongues; roast peacocks, swans and ducks; junket and cheeses; seasonal fruits; candied fruits and raisins.

From the Culinary Disasters and handy tips section:
- A soup or stew has ended up too salty? Peel a potato, drop it in and stir it around. After ten minutes the excess salt will be absorbed.
- The boiled beef has turned out too tough to eat? Add three spoons of grappa to the cooking water for every kilo of meat.
- Parasites infesting your dried legumes? Add two spoons of salt to the container.
- To ascertain that a cauliflower is fresh, be sure that it is not covered in a face powder-like dust.
- To avoid crying while cutting onions, simply stand near a pot of boiling water.
- To make an excellent vinegar at home, it is enough to preserve in a bottle, day after day, the lees of your table wine—providing, of course, the wine is of good quality.
- A highly efficacious de-greaser for dirty dishes—better than any commercial product—is the water in which potatoes have previously been boiled.

The owner of this book is turning out to be a mite high-strung. She tells me in great detail of her digestive disorders, yells at me for using too much hot water after a four-minute shower, and only likes me to have guests one night a week, when she is out of the house. She’s also moved on from descanting on her own character (she’s the sort of person who is always saying ‘I’m the sort of person who…’) to making rather presumptuous comments about mine. ‘I’ve been observing you closely. I’ve noted that you put up walls. And you’re quick to get annoyed. Whereas I’m very easy-going. I mean, we’re both strong characters. I’m probably stronger than you… [a pause ensues that may or may not involve a minor staring competition] …or not, you know, it’s not important. The point is…’ The point is, though her fits of pique are quite amusing and I’m learning lots of Italian psychobabble, I may decide to pack up and move again. I’m scheming to smuggle that book out the door with me. I’m the sort of person who’ll compromise my morals pretty seriously for the perfect mascarpone cream.

Page 465:

Let 300g of mascarpone cheese stand for a while at room temperature. Lightly beat two egg yolks. Put the mascarpone in a bowl with 4 tablespoons of sugar and the egg yolks and stir with a wooden spoon. Add a small glass of brandy to the mixture a bit at a time, continue stirring until you have a dense and consistent cream. This may take a while. Put it back in the fridge for a couple of hours before serving with a dusting of cocoa and a few biscotti.