Blessed springtime

Blessed springtime
Magazine: April 2008

Ready to use salad washed, cut and packaged is one of the most successful products of recent times. Convenient but also lazy. It is yet another less direct contact with nature. Pick a head of salad in the orchard, choose the leaves from the bunch, break off the roots from the leaves and rinse them under running water... a few simple gestures are enough to prepare food that seems to encapsulate all the delightful freshness of the new season. Salad yes, but not just any old leaf! To celebrate spring, gather together a salad of different herbs, shoots, stalks and leaves like the famous ‘misticanza’, always more tricky to fi nd on marketgarden stalls, even where the tradition has its roots… for example, in Rome and in the whole of Lazio, likewise in Umbria, in the Marches and in Tuscany. The real ‘misticanza’ should be based on wild herbs, those that thrive on the edges of fi elds, paths, meadows and woods even in ditches or in amongst cultivated crops. Here, at the edges of the planted fi elds, semi spontaneous leaves grow. According to tradition, priests that went from house to house begging for charity proffered the greens picked along the route. In the country families it was always the women who gathered the leaves in the fi rst light of dawn to take them fresh to the market. To the ‘wild bunch’ they added garden produce with a gentler, more delicate and sweeter fl avour to treat the palate to a delightful contrast.

Vegetable Cocktail
The components of the misticanza, for those who know where to look, are still around. You need an eagle eye and the ability to categorise them. So a stroll in the countryside can provide humble prey, which mixed with the ‘cultivated bunch’, create a precious vegetable cocktail. Dark green dandelion and light watercress, ruby coloured chicory, small blades of sorrel and the rounded lettuce rosettes, branched blades of purslane, wisps of whiskery wild fennel and the serrated rocket leaves are a joy to the eyes. A wide-ranging freshness of shapes and colours, of consistence and thickness that becomes a symphony of bitter and sweet tastes. In greengrocers’ shops or in certain supermarkets you can often fi nd mixes of cultivated leaves that have an aromatic base of rocket, curly lettuce, endive, lollo rosso, red chicory, sometimes with spears of curly endive, Friar’s beard and sprouted broad beans. But obviously to create a personalised mix is a lot more gratifying. And the dressing? The simplest is extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper and wine vinegar. Sometimes it is good to contrast, following a more Nordic habit, with sautéed bacon cubes or lard melted in a few drops of vinegar. Yoghurt and sour cream are interesting alternatives. Easy additions are fl akes of tuna, chunks of boiled egg, tasty olives. Plus other orchard ‘friends’: radishes, cherry tomatoes, fennel, courgettes... as for all great cocktails there is just one golden rule: the harmony of the fl avours.