By Leigh O’Connor.
Making time to eat as the Italians do is to share in their inexhaustible gift for making art out of life.
Spend a year in Letitia Clark’s kitchen in her latest cookbook, ‘Wild Figs and Fennel’, on the most beautiful island in the Mediterranean Sea – Sardinia.
Delve into the jagged core of Sardinian cooking and taste the flavours of each season as this Chef and author takes you on a culinary journey that you can recreate in your own home kitchen.
Sardinian food is a distilled version of Italian food and each recipe in this new book celebrates this, emphasising the importance of cooking seasonally and locally – eating well is a way of life here.
Try your hand at soft, pillowy pumpkin gnocchi, fried with sage butter or Letitia’s perfect Autumn dish of braised chicken with grapes and fennel:
Letitia says: "Gnocchi are underappreciated, delicious and extremely useful things to have up a cook’s sleeve. People are put off from making them, perhaps, by the inevitable fear of collapse, the terrifying moment as you plop them into a pan of rolling boiling water, peering timorously over the lip, watching it cloud and swirl and then breathing a sigh of relief as the plucky little dumpling rises to the surface.
"Sometimes this bobbing doesn’t happen at all and the gnocco simply dissolves into a sad, watery cloud, never bobbing to the surface. This recipe doesn’t do that.”
Pure pumpkin is best, both for flavour and colour. The variety of pumpkin is very important, too – it can’t be watery.
A good gnocchi should be toothsome and chewy but not gummy and still have a bouncing lightness to it. The secret lies in light handling, not too much flour and eating them fresh.
As for the chicken recipe, Letitia calls this the perfect Autumn dish - the meat is tender, juicy and falling off the bone and the ‘gravy’ this produces has extraordinary depth - winey, sweet and deeply satisfying.
Currently splitting her time between London and rural Sardinia, Letitia’s latest book reminds us that good food is not just about authenticity - nor is it about complication, technique or trends – it is about sharing, people and most importantly, enjoyment!
