Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [222]
5. Choose a baking dish that will contain all the bundles without overlapping. Lightly smear the bottom of the dish with butter and put in the asparagus bundles. Over each place 2 crisscrossed slices of fontina or slivers of Parmesan taken from the cheese you had earlier set aside. Dot every one of the sheaves lightly with butter and place the dish on the uppermost rack of the preheated oven. Bake for about 20 minutes, long enough for the cheese to melt and form a lightly mottled crust.
6. After taking it out of the oven, allow to settle for a few minutes before serving. When serving each bundle, baste it with some of the juices in the baking dish, and provide good, crusty bread for sopping them up.
FAVA BEANS
Until the discoverers of America came back home with beans, as well as with gold and silver, the only bean known to Europe up to then was the fava, or broad bean. Curiously, although it has been grown and consumed for close to 5,000 years, its popularity in Italy has never traveled above the south and center. Tuscans grow them by the acre and eat them by the bushel, even without cooking them, dipping them raw in coarse salt and chasing them down with pecorino, ewe’s milk cheese. But in northern Italy, most people have never had them, and would have no idea what to do with them.
When and how to buy Their season lasts from April to June, but the best beans are the earliest and youngest. When shelled, they should be the size of lima beans or only slightly larger. Bigger fava are tougher, drier, and more starchy. Look for pods that do not bulge too thickly with overgrown beans.
How to cook When cooking fresh fava beans, the best advice is, do as the Romans do. The classic Roman preparation, which in the spring you can sample in every trattoria in the city, has few peers among great bean dishes. I have never gone through a single spring without cooking it at least half a dozen times, and no food I can put on the table is ever more warmly received. In Rome, the dish is known as fave al guanciale, because the beans are cooked with pork jowl, guanciale. In the version given here, pancetta—which is far easier to find—replaces pork jowl with total success.
Fava Beans, Roman Style
For 4 servings
Pancetta in a single slice ½ inch thick
3 pounds unshelled young fresh fava beans
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons onion chopped fine
Black pepper, ground fresh from the mill
Salt
1. Unroll the pancetta and cut it into strips ¼ inch wide.
2. Shell the beans, discarding the pods. Wash the fava in cold water.
3. Put the oil and onion in a saute pan, and turn on the heat to medium. Cook and stir the onion until it becomes translucent, then add the pancetta strips. Cook for about 2 to 3 minutes, then add the beans and pepper, and stir to coat them well. Add ⅓ cup of water, adjust heat to cook at the slowest of simmers, and put a lid on the pan. If the beans are very young and fresh, they will cook in about 8 minutes, but if they are not in their prime, they may take 15 minutes or even longer. Test them with a fork from time to time. If the liquid becomes insufficient for cooking, replenish it with 3 or 4 tablespoons water. When tender, add salt, stir thoroughly, and cook another minute or two. If there should be any water left in the pan, uncover, raise the heat to high, and boil it away quickly. Serve at once, accompanied by thick slices of crusty bread.
GREEN BEANS
Spring and summer are generous with their gifts of vegetables, but none is more precious, or more characteristic of the Italian table, than young green beans at their freshest. When on a June day in Italy, you have let yourself fall in with the rhythm of an Italian meal and have had pasta, followed perhaps by scaloppine