Inspiration from Italy

Exploring the towns in the Italian riviera

After 18 months within the UK, in September we were lucky enough to go down to Nice to visit my parents in law.  While were there, Toby and I escaped across the Italian border to the very Western corner of Liguria, the Italian Riviera.  We primarily went for the market shopping.  Ventimiglia, a little town near the border, has the most brilliant market, stalls overflowing with cheese, fresh pasta, sundried tomatoes and above all, vegetables.  The real allure of an Italian market is that of the weird and wonderful veg I’ve never tried before.  Serpentine tromboncini (long elongated courgettes) and weird and wonderful tomatoes, jewel like beans and marbled aubergines.  Above all, this year I really fell for the Italian bitter winter greens, admittedly not the showiest of vegetables but exotic and exciting in their own right.

Rossa di Treviso

Best known in the UK are the wonderful burgundy leaved radicchio such as ‘Rosso di Chioggia’ and ‘Rosso di Treviso’, both of which can be found in more upmarket greengrocers.  But within the chicory family there are other varieties with very different characteristics.  In the market at Ventimiglia, the most abundant chicory sold looks a lot like a giant dandelion with wonderful big, serrated leaves.  This is Cicoria catalogna, very close to the wild form of Chicorium intybus and is indeed closely related to the dandelion which can be cooked up in a similar way.

These green leaves have a strong, bitter taste and are either soaked in ice cold salt water before rinsing and adding to salads or are boiled for a few minutes to reduce the bitterness before being sauteed with some olive oil and a bit of lemon juice.  A similar variety, often referred to as ‘Asparagus chicory’ or ‘cicoria puntarelle’ contains fat buds which look much like asparagus and lie hidden within the outer crown of leaves.  These buds are sweet enough to be chopped up in a salad or cooked very lightly.

Dandelion like leaves of Cicoria Catalogna

Dandelions not only look similar but taste similar too.  I’m too late to sow chicory this year, but as a quick alternative you can gather up dandelions from around the garden.  The very bitter leaves can be cooked and eaten like cicoria catalogna, or they can be forced much like an endive (again from the same family) to produce tender pale shoots.

All chicory can be sown from late spring or early summer (lengthening days trigger bolting so you need to let days lengthen a bit first), and they are at the top of my list for growing next year.  I’m interested to see how it goes.

Spring rapini or cime di rapa

The other ‘bitter’ green that covered every stall in Italy this autumn was what the Italians call Cime di rapa.  These look much like bunches of very weedy sprouting broccoli but are in fact a form of turnip or mustard.  As with chicory, their bitterness is reduced by boiling them for a little while and they make a brilliant traditional pasta sauce chopped up and again sauteed with oil and lemon zest.  Unlike chicory the plants grow fast and there isn’t much mystery to growing them.  They are so quick to grow that the varieties are often named after the number of days to a first harvest, Quarantina, Sessantina and Novantina (40, 60 and 90) as well as some slower growers in the early hundreds.  I’ve had problems with them bolting in the past, so they do best direct sown and are perfect in the cooler months of the year, either in early spring or late summer.  They throw up tonnes of small flowering shoots which you chop down and eat leaves and all.

Oddly these vegetables don’t seem to have made it across to Britain and information on preparing, let alone growing them is surprisingly scarce. Beyond Patience Gray (who describes how various chicories, radiccio and cime di rapa are cooked), the only cookbook I can find that references them is Antonio Carluccio’s brilliant book Vegetables which has a good first chapter on Italian greens and a few recipes. Beyond that I’ve spent many hours trawling the web and trying to decipher the back of Franchi seed packets to better understand the variety of bitter greens available and how to grow and cook them.

I love the idea of growing things that are a bit harder to find in the shops here so I can’t wait to sow them.  Luckily Seeds of Italy has a huge range both of chicories and of cime di rapa, and the packets are so generous, I’ll be sowing a few as baby salad leaves along the way.  I can’t wait till spring!