These weeks of enforced leisure have inspired me to go ahead and do some cooking projects I've long put off. I did the first of them this past Saturday, a dish called Bucatini Alla Flamande.
It's a molded pasta dish — you line a pudding basin or a rounded double boiler with semi-cooked bucatini, line the inside with a forcemeat paste, then fill with cooked meat and bechamel sauce, cover with another layer of bucatini, and cook the whole thing over a pot of boiling water for about 45 minutes. When it's done you invert the basin onto a platter and if everything has gone properly, you get a sort of pasta beehive or igloo full of meat.
Bucatini, incidentally, is a long pasta like spaghetti, but it's a hollow tube.
I got the recipe from one of my dependable pasta cookbooks: The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed. It leads of the section on "Special Occasion Dishes" and would definitely be a showstopper if it comes out right.
Making it was quite long and involved. I started the process about four hours before we could eat anything. Admittedly, one of those hours was devoted to making stock, and in the future I'll do that part a few days in advance. After that I made the sauce, essentially a puree of cooked celery-carrot-and-onion with some stock to thin it. So far, so good.
Then I made the "meat paste" — the layer that's supposed to go inside the pasta envelope and seal the cracks like spackle. The recipe was charmingly vague about what meat you should use, so I went with cooked chicken. In future I may try something a bit gummier, like maybe stewing beef. The book was also vague about how much bechamel to incorporate into the paste. I later found another vague recipe on line which did at least give an amount, and I had far underestimated it. So my paste was more like the sauce. In fact, given that it also contained pureed celery-carrot-and-onion, I realized that the meat paste was really supposed to be meat and bechamel with some of the sauce for flavor. In future I'll do it that way, which should knock another half-hour off the cooking time.
Getting the bucatini to coil around the inside of the double boiler bowl was very tricky and involved some swearing, but I finally managed to get it done, and then smeared meat paste (I just love saying "meat paste") all over the inside.
The filling was a mix of chicken, tongue, and ham. The ham dominated the flavor, but it was good so I have no complaints. The tongue added richness (and the leftover tongue became tacos de lengua the next day. I layered in the chopped meat and the remains of the bechamel, then topped with the last of the meat paste and made a flat layer of bucatini for the lid.
Forty-five minutes later it was time to serve. We got it inverted onto a platter in one piece, but had trouble getting the bucatini to leave the bowl (despite a lavish layer of butter). Diane suggested lining the bowl with parchment or foil next time, and I may do that.
And then we ate it all up. No leftovers. It was good, no question. But the ratio of 4 hours preparation to 15 minutes consumption is a little high. If I can get the prep time down to maybe 2 hours I'll try making it again.
What's interesting about the dish is what it doesn't contain: tomatoes. Also almost nothing in the way of herbs or spices, nor any cheese. There's garlic, salt, and pepper. That's all. The main flavors are ham and carrot. It's quite good, but very far from the typical red-gravy southern Italian culinary stereotype. I am inclined to think it may be a very old recipe, from before 1500, although the absence of spices argues against that. Every other Renaissance-era dish I've tried has a ton of saffron, clove, or some such in it.
I confess to a little dissatisfaction with the cookbook. Most of the recipes in The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces are clearly written and appear to have been tested, but I think this one got in through a back door. The author claims to have gotten it from a Neapolitan aristocrat, and I believe her because it reads as if she simply transcribed a handwritten recipe jotted down by someone reconstructing it from memory.
Anyway, now that I have the basic concept down, I may experiment a little. I have the idea that this would make an excellent seafood dish, using some gummy fish like cod for the spackle, and filling it with crabmeat and shrimp, or maybe a chopped lobster tail. The vegetable puree sauce is very much like my father's recipe for Crawfish Alla Nantua, so I think it would do well with crustaceans.
Now that Passover is approaching, Diane has taken over the kitchen, and after the big Seder meal we'll be dining off leftovers for a while. My next big cooking experiment probably won't be for two or three weeks. Watch this space.
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