Holiday Salad
Diary entries from Rome, cooking notes, and eating notes
Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This week’s newsletter is a diary entry about some meals in Rome, cooking leftover lentils, cooking scarola in padella, and eating notes.
US readers! You can now pre-order my book Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen. It is being released on June 6 this year!
Holiday Salad
Funny to receive a message a few days ago from a friend to say ‘I have just popped into your home cos M told me he had put two mutton pies thru the letterbox! Now in the freezer.’
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Yesterday we walked to the top of the hill in the park ‘Villa Pamphili’ – a large, hilly, wooded park that rivals Hampstead Heath. There is a grassy plain stretched over the crest of the hill and when I was there in April, people sat in the sunshine eating picnics of takeaway roast chicken and potatoes from a Tavola Calda or tupperwares with homemade salads, bread and cheese. At the top of the hill there is a café that knows you are grateful to have reached the top – and that they are the only café there. It is slightly silly and expensive and is filled with people with dogs and/or children, as well as people like us who have reached the top of the hill, know it is the only café, and are a little desperate and want a drink and the bathroom. It serves an odd mixture of dishes: the menu reads like it was written by an out of date algorithm. Dishes have titles like ‘Vicious Brunch’ and ‘Guacamole Mania’ and they serve tempura, curry, hamburgers, bowls of salad, and ‘centrifugal antioxidant’ juices. I tried to order chips but (again) got fresh crisps by accident and shared Sam’s bowl of what I call ‘holiday’ salad, which is typically very large and as well as lettuce, has an eclectic array of ingredients, often with a centrepiece like a wheel of goat’s cheese. This one had little zones of morsels sitting on top of the lettuce in a large deep square bowl – chickpeas, capers, sun-dried tomatoes, tuna, cubed potatoes, and a kind of sweet honey mustard dressing. I liked it a lot and I had a centrifugal juice and used the bathroom.
The most exciting moment in the café was a sudden furore when a dog tied to a metal stool on an outside table bolted out of the gate from the restaurant into the surrounding park with the stool still attached, chased by staff and owners. The dog eventually returned, and received a lot of petting from the staff, who gathered round and talked to it, the star of the afternoon.
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I have been longing for soup and having read the passage in Five Quarters last week about the place where Rachel tried soup with beans and pasta, decide to go there. We arrive late in the lunch shift after failing to eat in the neighbourhood across the river. Inside, the restaurant is covered with dark wooden veneer panels, is darkly lit, with stacks of wine bottles and amaro on shelves. It is very, very full. Rooms in all directions, full of people eating. Customers wearing the restaurant’s large bright white branded bibs look like babies, but otherwise everything appears old fashioned.
Something feels generally awry – the lunch service has tipped a little into madness.
There is a very old man, I would say in his late 80s or early 90s, sitting on his own on a table near the door, looking around the room every few moments. Our waiter, wearing a mask which he pulls down to speak, runs around bent almost double, the posture necessary to make himself heard – though he does not wait long enough to hear the answers to most of his questions. First, he runs past and said ‘two minutes’, holding up two fingers. Five minutes later he says, ‘1 minute’, holding up one finger. Five minutes later he takes an order for wine, then later, begins to take the food order – however this is thwarted by the fact he runs away after I have named one dish, cutting me off, running away, repeating back the one dish as if it were a summary of the whole order. This practice is anxiety-inducing, as it is unclear how much lunch I will be able to order, or eventually receive. It takes four visits for him gather the whole order. Each time he rushes by, staying only long enough for me to name one dish. In between his third and fourth visits, another waiter comes to say they have no pasta e ceci, so we ask for pasta e fagioli instead.
red wine and fizzy water,
pasta e ceci,
pasta cacio e pepe,
— there’s no pasta e ceci
pasta fagioli then
cicoria
We explain, a little manically after the difficulty ordering, that we will share the pasta and the bean dishes, and then at that moment and subsequently throughout the meal the waiter addresses Sam to say that his wife always wants so share, wherever they go, she wants to share, and rolls his eyes. Not satisfied with Sam’s lack of reaction, he repeats his statement about his wife’s preference.
The beans and pasta are, however, very good: well seasoned, earthy and comforting.
To my right are two couples eating together. Or to be precise the men were eating together and the women were eating together. The women sit very upright, seem nervous, and talk little and quietly, eat pasta and do not order dessert. Their husbands both have desserts and wear bibs and talk a lot and loudly and have five or six bottles of digestifs on the table around them after dessert. They eat large pieces of meat for their main courses.
The old man by the door spends a long time trying to get someone’s attention to pay. Eventually a man who appears like the owner or maitre’d gives him attention, they feel familiar with each other, affectionate even. The owner figure plays a game, lightly slapping the bottom of the old man’s fist, which he is holding out, and up pops a 50 Euro note, which the owner figure then takes as payment.
Cooking Diary
Leftover Lentils
After the meal with lentils and sausage last week, the remaining lentils went into the fridge. The recipe said they would serve eight – and quite precisely they gave me eight portions, four meals for me and Sam. We had them twice for lunch, reheated in a small saucepan and topped with a fried egg (as Rachel Roddy suggests in her recipe in Five Quarters), some with croutons of leftover pizza bianca fried in olive oil, and with the addition of robiola cheese, which is like a better version of Philadelphia, or some parmesan, and bread.
We also had another dinner with lentils, also with an egg, and then the addition of cicoria ri-ripassata! This was to use up some cicoria ripassata – the dandelion-like leafy bitter green that is served everywhere in Rome boiled in salted water then squeezed out and fried a little with garlic, dried chilli and olive oil. I fried a piece of guanciale (cured pork cheek) cut into strips until the fat rendered out and the pork was crispy, took out some of the fat to fry the eggs, and then mixed the rest of the fat with the cicoria in the hot pan with the guanciale and some red wine vinegar. This is one of my favourite ways to eat bitter greens – boiled then mixed with red wine vinegar and bacon – the recipe from Patience Gray’s remarkable book, Honey from a Weed.
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Scarola in Padella
Last night I cooked ‘scarola in padella’ – escarole in a pan, to another recipe by Rachel Roddy (when in Rome…) Scarola or escarole is a bitter leaf that looks like a big lettuce and has many bitter relations, like chicory and frisée. You can grow it in the UK (seeds via Franchi.) The bitterness is an excellent contrast to the accompaniments in this recipe – olives, chilli, garlic, pinenuts and sultanas (I couldn’t get currants). I did not have the large frying pan specified in the recipe (in padella means ‘in the pan), but a tall pasta pot. For me some of the fun of cooking on holiday is figuring out how to make things in the combination of pans found in the holiday apartment. The tall pot worked well as lots of steam rose up through it, wilting the scarola, as is required for this recipe to succeed. I could have given the garlic and pinenuts a little more colour in the olive oil before adding the scarola to the pan, but I still liked it a lot. A pleasing tender texture to the fleshy stems of the scarola, and the fun of bitter and sweetness and saltiness in the flavourings. I served the scarola with some small cubed roasted potatoes and a pork chop that I’d marinaded in juniper bought from a spice stall in the newly built mercato cardano in Marconi district – and garlic. However, I rarely marinade pork chops and feeling tired, wasn’t thinking properly about what I was doing – so I began frying the chop without having removed the chopped garlic of the marinade, which began to burn almost instantly. I turned off the heat, scraped off the garlic and juniper so the pork could make contact with the heat, cleaned the pan too, and began again. The scarola in padella, pork and potatoes were very good in combination, and we drank a bottle of Pacina with it, a red wine of mostly Sangiovese grapes, which I love.
Eating notes
Maritozzo at Linari pasticceria: a cream filled sweetened milk bun.
Sour cherry and rice ice cream with whipped cream on top from Giolitti. The best rice ice cream I have had yet – and I have had a lot. Often the rice is too hard. This had a superb rich creamy flavour, smooth texture and tender rice. The sour cherry was the perfect sharp fruity foil.
Artichoke alla romana, a breaded piece of chicken and some pizza bianca with a beer, on my own when S was away for the day from the bakery under the flat.
Lunch at the British School at Rome canteen with artist Laura White who makes work using pasta dough as a sculptural medium and is on a residency there. I ate a roll, a bowl of well seasoned soup with vegetables and beans to which I added a little parmesan and olive oil, a mixture of roasted potatoes and artichokes which was also flavoursome, steamed edamame beans and green salad, followed by ripe melon and a coffee. We gossip and plan a collaborative talk in the summer and I visit Laura’s studio after lunch, and see her work, which I love.
A nice surprise reading this delicious piece of writing - to find me at the bottom….!!
Lxx