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Food: Tiella Gaetana
Jun 4th
From time to time I get e-mails from Americans (and I mean Argentineans as well as US Americans) asking for some particular Italian recipe their grandmother used to make. I am happy to help whenever I can, I love those trips down memory lane, but occasionally I feel terribly sorry for not being able to lend my hand in their recipe search. Sometimes it is because, while I know the dish well, I have no idea of how the recipe looks like. Yet more often, I simply have no idea what dish they are talking about: the name might be familiar, but the description of the dish is not. The problem is that Italy simply does not have a national cuisine, but rather a collection of local ones that at times can change dramatically just going over the next hill. So, even for a born and raised Italian like me,m Italy remains an immense cooking school, with a promise of something new around the next road bend.
Shortly before leaving for my Italian break, I had one of these ah-ah!/I am learning something new moments. I was reading William Black’s “Al Dente”, a very well written and enjoyable book about Italian food and history, and stumbled upon his description of Tiella Gaetana, the stuffed “bread” typical of Gaeta . Now, I spent many of my childhood summer holidays in the area near Gaeta, so I had heard the name before, but I must admit I had no idea what the dish was. Black describes food in such a delicious way – something he definitely has a knack for – that I knew I had to get a bite of tiella as soon as I could. I also wanted to learn more about it.
I did not manage to find much about the history of this dish, but to me tiella symbolises the perfect union of love for food, local ingredients and a practical take to eating. According to some sources tiella was the fare of the local mariners: simple to eat yet delicious. Tiella is essentially two disks of bread dough, brushed with plenty of oil, stuffed with a moderate amount of simple ingredients, sealed and baked.
You can find similar items throughout many countries whose eating culture is centred on wheat, but tiella Gaetana has a couple of peculiarities that make it unique. First of all, the border sealing the two disks of dough is always wavy like the sea. The dough itself is made without oil, yet the bottom and top of the “bread” should be brushed abundantly with extra virgin olive oil. Finally the stuffing, which has a few rules of its own. The most classic of tiellas is made with octopus, some gaeta olives, tomatoes, parsley and plenty of olive oil, but there are plenty of variations: escarole and olives, escaroles and bacclà (salted cod), anchovies, tiny calamaretti and zucchini and cheese (sheep) are just a few. The purist say that once you cut the tiella into quarters and bite into it, there should be so much oil in the filling that it runs down your forearms. I don’t find that particularly appetising, to be completely honest. Traditional recipes can be good, but sometimes there is a reason why evolution is better. On the other hand, I completely agree with the keepers of the Gaetan tradition when they claim that tiella should only be paired with wine, never water. A nice cool wine from Lazio or Campania goes down a treat with it.
For my taste of tiella, I followed Black’s tip and went to Chinappi a tiny and somewhat hidden bakery that specialises in Tiella. It was a difficult choice, but the first go had to be tiella with octopus, which was simply delicious. The oily dough was a delectable container for the filling of sweet tomatoes, firm (but not hard octopus, rich of sea aromas, and the occasional slightly bitter punch of the olive. A good amount of oil in the filling too, but luckily not so much that it was dripping to my elbows. Now I am dying to try all the other fillings!
Chinappi
Via Fratelli Bandiera 4
Gaeta
Italy
Article source: ilforno.typepad.com
ShareCooking Recipes: Telline (wedge shells) and spaghetti
May 25th
Whenever I handle the ingredients I am planning to use for my next meal, I cannot help think that there is a part of us that is still back in the Stone Age. Fact is, as much as I love quality ingredients, there is nothing that compares to the joy of using ingredients that you have grown, caught or prepared from scratch yourself.
I definitely have quite a bit of that old hunter-gatherer ancestor in me. My balcony is hardly a place where you can sit out and enjoy the summer sun: too many herbs and potted plants (quite a few used for cooking) there screening you from those precious rays. Likewise, when I walk into a wood I try as hard as I can to just enjoy the landscape, yet inevitably I find myself looking for mushrooms, berries and wild herbs. At the seaside, I look for molluscs, which, on the shores of Lazio, means telline.
Telline (Donax trunculus), also called arselle in Italian and wedge shells in English, are small triangular clams that live in the sand banks close to the shore. Commercially, these are fished by boats carrying nets that drag through kilometres of the superficial layer of the sand banks, something that, to my eyes, is pretty damaging from the ecological point of view. Yet the real way to collect – and earn – a well deserved dish of telline is fishing them yourself.
The simplest way, in areas like the southern coast of Lazio where telline are abundant, is to just dig your hands into the first few centimetres of the shallow sand banks close to the shore and use your fingers to sieve the clams from the sand. Though not terribly effective, it nonetheless works quite well, especially when doing this with kids, who usually love the idea of digging in the sand. The most common method is instead that of using a net linked to a frame with metal “teeth” at the bottom. This net is then strapped to the back of the person fishing the telline and pulled via the strap and a pole fixed to the frame, like this picture shows. As you can imagine fishing telline is a quite tiresome activity, albeit great for training your leg and back muscles, yet the taste of telline more than makes up for that
Telline can be used for a variety of dishes ranging from simple appetisers to soups down to pasta and risotto. For me the best way to eat them is either simply sauteed or with spaghetti, but strictly without tomatoes. This is the best way to enjoy their taste, a mix of mellow sweet flesh and iodine aroma. Alone it is great, combined with a simple pasta even more delicious. As usual with clams, there are a couple of things to act before cooking. First of all discard any open clams that do not shut when you touch them. Second, given telline’s natural habitat, they need to be purged to eliminate any sand they might have ingested: to do this simply cover the telline with a litre of salted cool water (about 10-15 grams of salt will do) and let them rest for 12-24 hours somewhere dark. Ater that time, simply lift them from the water leaving any sand behind.
The recipe below is for spaghetti with telline, yet if you leave the pasta out and stop once the telline are open, you have sautee di telline, a tasty appetiser on its own. Also, I have made the parsley optional in the recipe because there are a few people in my family who don’t like this herb, yet traditionally parsley is a must on pasta with any sort of clams or mussles. Clearly, you can use this recipe with any sort of small clams that are typical of the area where you live. The freshest your clams the better, and what’s fresher than local?
Spaghetti con le telline
serves four as a pasta course
Ingredients:
about 800-1000 g (1 3/4-2 lb) telline (wedge shells), purged as described above,
400-500 g (about 1 lb) spaghetti,
2-3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil,
a garlic clove,
a dry cayenne pepper (or less, if you prefer),
half a glass of white wine (optional),
a tablespoon of chopped parsley (optional),
water and salt for cooking the pasta.
Recipe:
Start heating the pasta water as usual.
When the pasta water is close to the boil, start heating the oil over a medium flame in a pan wide enough to hold all the telline in one layer.
Once the oil is hot but not smoking, add the garlic and cayenne pepper.
As soon as the garlic turns golden brown, turn the heat up to the maximum and add the telline. Shake the pan to distribute the telline as good as possible. Add the wine here, if using.
The telline should all open in the first two three minutes, any that keeps shut should be discarded together with the garlic and cayenne pepper. You should also notice some clam juice at the bottom of the pan, which you’ll use to dress the pasta together with the clams themselves. If you properly purged the telline, there should be no sand there, but if there still is some, simply pass trough a fine clean cloth.
The pasta water will probably be boiling by now, so add the spaghetti, pushing them down so they fit into the pot if you don’t have a special high spaghetti pot, stir and check from time to time cooking till slightly short of al dente.
You can add the telline to the pasta in their shells, something many do in Italy, yet, in regards to your guests, it is better to remove the clam meat from most of the shells, keeping only a few “as is” to decorate the dishes. The best way to do this is using a pin or your fingers. (I would recommend to get someone else to help you so that you speed up things while the pasta cooks.) Once shelled, return the clams to their juice.
As soon as the pasta is cooked, drain it and add it to the pan you have use for the telline, together with the telline flesh and juices. toss for a minute over a medium flame to blend flavours.
Divide among four (warm) dishes and garnish with the remaining telline in their shells and, if you like, parsley.
Articles source: ilforno.typepad.com
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