Last Sunday, being roughly between both my parents' birthdays we went to lunch at Bocca di Lupo (I'd be lying if I claimed to not have anything to do with that suggestion.) If anyone's failed to notice my adoration for this restaurant and chef Jacob Kenedy's food, he's seriously rivaling Theo Randall for being the object of dizzying, wide-eyed Fan Boy-ism. And as I mentioned before, this was largely accidental as Amazon suggested I'd be interested in his book The Geometry of Pasta as I'd already bought Theo Randall's book. Of course I was interested. The book itself is fantastic. It forgoes glossy Food Porn style pictures of the dishes that beg you to cook them, instead featuring wonderfully abstract illustrations of all manner of pasta shapes and varieties, half of which you've never heard of. The recipes include a load which I think are the kind of dishes I think a lot of people don't expect from Italian cuisine, that aren't the sort of Summery, brightly coloured, quickly cooked dishes that are seemingly synonymous. What was that about Pot Tossery being cynical about The General Public's Attitudes to Food?
So anyway, I stuffed myself to the nines with five courses. Not quite Mr Creosote proportions, but if we hadn't skipped tea/coffee due to their coffee machine being broken I'm not sure if I would have been able to find room for whatever might have been offered in place of a waffer thin mint. They were instead ferrying coffees from over the road at their deli counterpart Gelupo, which we perused as a matter of principle. Now so far all my attempts at making pasta have been using Canadian strong flour as a substitute of Italian Tipo 00 flour. Not that it would have been difficult to get the latter, given the number of fantastic Italian delis in Soho. But anyway, with it looking right at me, I thought it high time I gave it a go. So that's Part One of Life Impacting on What I Cooked out of the way. That and I'm still breaking in my new Imperia pasta machine. I'd make pasta so much more often if it didn't always leave so many egg whites to use up. Not that so many eggs are used in every pasta dough recipe, but it's going to take a lot to drag me away from Theo Randall's. It is now well and truly a comfort zone.
So, Part Two. And to be fair, this is fairly tenuous anyway. But yesterday marked the opening of a new butchers here. Apparently there used to be five butchers in this town, but for a long time now there's been none, and just the offers of shitty mini supermarkets which assume people only ever want to use about three different cuts of meat. Much in the same way that they assume everyone wants asparagus in December and parsnips in June. There was for a brief time the meat counter in the now closed down Farmer's City Market. The fact that the children's gym on the floor above it is still open just infuriated me even more. What a fantastic portrayal of the middle classes getting their priorities round the wrong way. But anyway, the butchers is run by the people who ran the meat counter at the Farmer's City Market. I said this was tenuous, and it literally is as going to a butchers on their first day of trade and deciding what to cook based on what they had. Told you.
So what did I cook? Based on Part One, I consulted The Geometry of Pasta and came up with Pappardelle con Lepre in Salmì, or Pappardelle with jugged hare. I made do with rabbit instead, and also slightly changed it to incorporate some of my bacon. The recipe calls for marinating the meat, along with virtually all the other ingredients in 'copious quantities of red wine' for two to three days. I had to make do with merely a couple of hours. Oh well, (spoiler alert) it was still bloody delicious.
Go massive ingredients list. (This supposedly serves eight, I roughly halved it to feed three.)
800g dried, or just over 1kg freshly rolled pappardelle
1 hare (about 2kg)
2 sticks celery, finely chopped
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
4 bay leaves
1 sprig sage
2 sprigs rosemary
3 sprigs thyme
16 juniper berries, crushed to release flavour
8 cloves
8cm cinnamon stick
¼ nutmeg, grated
1 teaspoon crushed black pepper
2.5 litres red wine
400g butter, or 350g butter and 25g dark chocolate
4 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
grated Parmesan, to serve
Cut the hare into joints that will fit your pot (hacking it roughly into four sections will do; you can leave the liver and kidneys in), and marinate for two to three days with the vegetables, herbs, spices and wine in the refrigerator. Transfer to a suitable cooking pot, add a pinch of salt and cook over a medium heat for 2½-3 hours at a gentle boil or ambitious simmer, until the liquid has reduced to about a cup and the meat is falling off the bone.
Leave to cool until it can be handled safely - wear rubber gloves if you're impatient. Drain and pick the meat from the carcass, breaking up any large lumps of flesh with your fingers. Discard the bones, cinnamon stick and herb stalks. Mix the meat and vegetables back into the cooking juices: you should have just over 1.5 litres of sauce.
When you're ready to eat, put the pasta on, and reheat the sauce over a high heat. Add the butter and parsley (and chocolate if you want a richer flavour, though I normally make this sauce without), and stir to keep everything nice and emulsified. At this point you can adjust the consistency, boiling the sauce down if it's too watery, or adding a little of the pasta water if it seems too thick, as well as tasting for salt and pepper. Drain the pasta just moments before it is cooked to your liking, as it will continue to cook for the last minute as you stir it into the sauce, still over the heat. Serve immediately with grated Parmesan and a glass of Barbera or a mighty red, more expensive than the one used in such quantity to make the dish.
Simple as that. I fried a couple of thick slices of bacon, chopped, in a little oil as it releases a lot of fat, before adding everything else to the pan, and served it with my own hand-cut pappardelle. Which is just a pretentious way of saying I don't have an attachment for my pasta machine for pappardelle, so had to cut it with a knife, hence the uneven, non-straight pasta. The pasta itself was probably the best I've made yet, although pappardelle being my favourite pasta had a little to do with that. The dough was more moist than usual, in fact as Kenedy says "it should be sticky enough to stick to itself, but not to anything else". That said, it was no harder to work with than a slightly drier dough, I just had to be careful of it not sticking together too much when it bunched up having come out of one of the thinner settings on the machine. The whole dish, aside from being quite rich thanks in no small part to the Fuck Ton sized knob of butter, was really deep in flavour with the cinnamon and nutmeg particularly coming through in both flavour and aroma. I can only imagine how much this would be increased had I marinated it for the full three days having previously seen the effect of marinating pig's cheeks in red wine for a day for what was my second attempt at making ravioli.
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