Journal

Simple Italian Recipe: Escarole alla monachina

When I eat out in restaurants it is usually the vegetables that I am looking for - searching for things that would be easy to adapt for home.  Healthy, simple, frugal.

Sometimes this is difficult - there seems to be an unwritten rule that 'eating out' requires either fancy ingredients or heavy comfort food, meat arrives at a table with a sprig of something green and a pile of chips, fish with a puddle of oil and fennel fronds.

Not in Naples - here, assuming that you aren't in a pizza place, the vegetable sides can be ordered on their own. Back in history, before the C17th reliance on macaroni, Neopolitans were known as mangiafoglia - leaf eaters - and that has stuck around a bit.

One of my favourite dishes - so much that I don't have a single photo of the uneaten dish - is Escarole all Monachina (often just Scarole on menus).  The name translates as "Chicory of the nuns" and it was probably originally a nutritious meal cooked by the nuns for the poor.

In Naples Markets you can buy bags of chicory leaves to make this - but dismembering a curly endive works just as well.  The chicory is blanched to make it less bitter - and then flavoured with a garlic and anchovy impregnated oil before adding pine nuts, capers, olives and raisins.

I would say that all of these ingredients seem to be at least twice the size of the ones available in British shops - so I would pour boiling water over the raisins and leave to plump up for ten minutes before using.  Then again,I suspect that all these expensive additions are more recent adaptations and that the nuns were serving the escarole unadorned.

INGREDIENTS

• Head of Curly Chicory (it also works with chard)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 clove garlic chopped
• 3-5 salted anchovies (optional)
• 30g pine nuts
• 20g capers
• 50g black olives, stoned and sliced
• 30g raisins soaked in warm water to plump, then drained
• Salt

METHOD

Take off any damaged leaves from the chicory and cut off the root and discard,  then chop the leaves into three or four pieces and wash very well.  Some chicory have soil in the creases of the leaves (if grown outside).

Bring a pot of water to the boil, add salt and then the leaves.  Bring back to the boil and simmer for one minute, drain and refresh in cold water.  This removes the bitterness from the leaves.  Leave to drain very well - squeezing to remove the last of the water.

In a frying pan gently heat the olive oil and add the chopped garlic and anchovies if using.  Cook the garlic without browning it, stirring round, removing from the heat if it looks like colouring.

Add in the drained chicory and cook for 2-3 minutes, stirring so that the leaves begin to absorb the garlicky/fishy oil.

Add in the raisins, pine nuts, capers and olives and cook for another couple of minutes.

Season to taste - leave this to the end as lots of the ingredients are very salty.

This can be obviously eaten as it is but it is also added to pasta or into a chunky Italian bread roll sandwich.

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