The asparagus season has begun in earnest. We’re practically living on the stuff. Possibilities abound. There’s asparagus soup, asparagus salad, asparagus with Hollandaise, asparagus risotto, asparagus frittata. We remained safely tucked in our asparagus comfort zone until one day, not so long ago, we got really bored. The moment had come to try asparagus dumplings. Don’t ask me why but the whole concept of having an asparagus in a dumpling sounded pretty weird too me. However, since the Silver Spoon (an undisputed authority on all matters related to Italian food) recommends it I decided to give it a try.
The recipe asks you for pureeing a lot of asparagus (and I mean a lot!), mixing the puree with stale bread and eggs to obtain a mixture to make dumplings from.
Somehow this felt wrong to me. Asparagus is expensive and it takes all that effort to make it grow into long beautiful spears. How can it possibly make sense to puree it and make it fall victim to such basic ingredients? It certainly didn’t help that the whole thing did not look very promising. Pale little balls were sitting on my kitchen counter, looking at me as if asking ‘So, is this what you wanted us to be? How can you be so cruel?’ My heart sank even further when I set to deep fry the odd-looking creatures. But that was before I dug my teeth into them and, oh my, what can I say. I was in asparagus paradise.
That precious vegetable I had felt so sorry for shone through the dumplings (which, by the way, looked quite appetizing after their bout of deep frying). I ate more of the little creatures than I can remember. So what’s the moral here? Always trust the Silver Spoon.
Asparagus dumplings ‘Bella Elena’
adapted from The Silver Spoon
1kg asparagus, spears trimmed
50g bread, crusts removed
200ml milk
40g Parmesan cheese, freshly grated
4 eggs
120g dried breadcrumbs
4 tablespoons plain flour
vegetable oil, for deep-frying
salt and pepper
Cook the asparagus in salted, boiling water for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, tear the bread into pieces, place in a bowl, pour in the milk and leave to soak. Drain the asparagus, cut off the tips and set aside. Place the stems in a food processor and process to a purée, then scrape into a bowl. Squeeze out the bread and stir it into the purée with the Parmesan. Separate one of the eggs and stir the yolk, together with two whole eggs, into the purée. Season with salt and pepper and stir in the asparagus tips. If the mixture is too runny, add some of the breadcrumbs or more Parmesan. Shape the mixture into balls. Spread out the flour in a shallow dish, beat the remaining egg in another shallow dish and spread out the breadcrumbs in a third. Dip the asparagus balls first in the flour, then in the beaten egg and, finally, in the breadcrumbs. Heat the oil in a pan, add the asparagus balls, in batches if necessary, and fry until golden brown all over. Remove with a fish slice and drain on kitchen paper. Serve immediately.
Are you following Italian politics these days? No one can deny that it is highly entertaining but opinions differ as to whether that’s a good or a bad thing. The world has been watching incredulously the putting back in charge of 87-year-old President Napolitano. It has witnessed the desperate search for a new Prime Minister, a search that would not have been complete without the ever-grinning Berlusconi drawing one string or other. And then, ta-da, nine weeks after national elections and month after month of political paralysis, crisis-ridden Italy has got a new government! That government is a lot younger and more female than previous ones. Just when the Italian people were about to get used to their first non-white minister ever, an unemployed Italian man shot three people in front of the Prime Minister’s office. His later claim that he had actually wanted to shoot politicians only added to the general sense of drama. Whatever you are asking for it’s all there; economic crisis, social unrest, political turmoil, le emozioni and chaos.
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Why this hype about balconies, I used to wonder. Whenever I was house hunting the real estate agent wouldn’t stop talking about them. ‘An additional plus of this place is that it comes with a balcony’, they used to say or, ‘Unfortunately there is no balcony but there are two bathrooms’, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t use my balconies much. Either they were too wet, too small, too windy or facing a major throughroad, sometimes all four of them. This all changed when I moved to Italy. For me the whole concept of balconies assumed a entirely new meaning. In Italy balconies came with views and sunlight and much-needed fresh air, mostly with all three of them. And don’t even get me started on the sheer beauty of an Italian balcony. If I had anything of consequence to say in this country I would elevate balconies to the rank of an officially recognized art form.
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Go and talk to an Italian person, any Italian person really. Ask him where he’s from. The person might briefly mention the place where she actually lives, works and sends her kids to school. Sooner or later though he will direct your attention to a more, much more important detail. The Italian person will start singing the praise of her place of birth. It doesn’t matter if that place is the Tuscan hilltop village the whole world seems to be daydreaming of while being stuck in traffic, an unhappy marriage or ‘please hold the line’. The place can equally be some suburbian settlement along the industrial belt of Lombardy or a crumbling palazzo. It doesn’t matter because to one person or other it means home. Wherever the place may be, it is the Italian’s true home, even if for the past forty years she’s been living 600 kilometers away.
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Easter time in Italy. Huge chocolate eggs are to be seen everywhere, clogging supermarket aisles and making the pasticcerie even more colorful than usual.
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I am meeting Giorgio and Elena to discuss next week’s work agenda. Giorgio has a cold and he doesn’t take his coat off even though the bar we sit in is heated to what must be boiling point. Elena is shivering though but that is because she insists on wearing a short dress on a cold and rainy day. ‘Yesterday was such a beautiful spring day’, she says, ‘before I went to bed I promised myself I would wear that dress today, no matter what’. Bad luck, Elena.
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Have you ever done la passegiata? That most Italian of Italian moments? La passegiata is an ur-Italian institution. It’s the early evening stroll in town, any town, when everyone seems to be outside.
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‘We don’t want radicchio in our salad’, the children are wailing, ‘the leaves are bitter!’ There is a pause, a suspense that adds to the drama and makes me wait for what they always, always say in a situation like this. ‘Just because we live in Italy doesn’t mean we must eat everything that Italian people eat’. Not so this time. They just don’t say it. It puzzles me enormously. But I can guess why. Italy has stopped being the strange, foreign country it used to be. It’s become home. When we first arrived, my children used to refer to Italian people as ‘they’ and ‘them’. Now it is ‘we’ and ‘us’, ‘they’ being reserved for the country the children originally come from. Have they passed the point of no return? I pretty much think so. In the grander picture it doesn’t matter a bit that they can’t bring themselves to eat radicchio. The other day I hid a couple of leaves in a salad of mango and fennel, things they love, and you know what they said? ‘Radicchio is not that bad. People outside Italy should try it too’.
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Italy has been having a proper winter so far. Tons of snow, even in Rome. Winter fog as far as you can see (which is, not far at all). People think it is about time to put away not only with Berlusconi and his club, but also the scarves and mittens. Sadly, spring does not seem to be ready for Italy yet. 1° Celsius isn’t anything unusual in notoriously cold Milan, but 3° in Naples and 6° in Sicily are making people down there shiver with cold.
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Yes, Italy is cooking and eating as usual but there is something rather important going on. General election this coming weekend! ’Who can save Italy?’ the Economist wants to know. Indeed, who can? The Italian people haven’t really figured it out yet and it remains to be seen if the election will make matters clearer. Due to a highly fragmented political landscape and a hugely complex electoral system it is unlikely that there will be a stable parliamentary majority capable of reforming the country’s economy. Silvio Berlusconi has returned from the apparently dead and is again canvassing votes. Rather predictably he is employing the tried and tested rhetoric to advance his own interests at the expense of the Italian people, railing against the European Union and the diktat della Merkel, promising cuts in taxes and refunds of those already paid. What is surprising though is that there are still people out there who believe him.
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