Photo by Nigella
This week’s CookbookCorner takes a slightly different turn, as I draw your attention to two wonderful courgette/zucchini recipes from a couple of cookbooks I love. I raved and raved about Ben Lippett’s How I Cook when it came out last year, and one of the recipes I’ve cooked repeatedly from it (along with the divine Peppered Clam Frites that I shared with you at the time) is his Semolina Flatbreads with Scapece. ‘Alla scapece’ is what Italians call quite a few dishes, either vegetables or fish, that are fried and then dressed with vinegar, garlic and, most commonly, mint; this technique may be more familiar to you as ‘escabeche’. Here it refers to thinly sliced crisp-fried courgettes, which are just glorious with fresh ricotta, as Lippett suggests, even without the flatbread. I’ve been just dying to share the recipe with you and I’m very grateful to him and his publishers for granting permission.
I am also inordinately grateful to Danielle Alvarez with Libby Travers and their publishers, even if for some inexplicable reason the indispensable Recipes for a Lifetime of Beautiful Cooking did not feature on CookbookCorner, for giving me their unbeatable recipe for Spaghetti alla Nerano to run on the site. This is the dish that many people learned about through the good offices of Stanley Tucci, but it is the novelist Charlotte Wood who first drew my attention to Alvarez and Travers’ version, and I’ve been hooked ever since. The courgettes are sliced very thinly and fried till crisp, as they are in Lippett’s recipe, but then they’re tossed through spaghetti with garlic, parmesan, basil and lots of butter! It is one of the most heavenly pasta dishes imaginable.
Since we’re hitting zucchini season (a more euphonious phrase than courgette season, for all that we call them courgettes in the UK) it felt important to me to bring these recipes to you now, and I’m excited for you to have them in your life. Just a few of things I want to add. The first is that I use small courgettes which are usually sold as ‘baby courgettes’ as I find them better suited to both dishes. And although you don’t have to use a mandolin to slice them, it does make life very much easier. I always wear my cut-resistant gloves whenever I slice anything on a mandolin, and urge you to do likewise. What also makes life easier is that you can fry the thin coins of courgette in advance. In fact, I think they taste even better when they’ve had a night in the fridge. I just put them in a tub with a lid. They actually last a long time like that, so you can fry when you have time. And Lippett’s Scapece is lovely with mozzarella or burrata, too.
Finally, before I go, let me give you links to other courgette recipes on the site (though there are more in my books, too!) As far as my own recipes go, there’s Courgette Fritters; Bean and Courgette Salad; a simpler, and rather different, Pasta with Courgettes; Courgette and Chick Pea Filo Pie; and, should you have any yellow courgettes to hand, Happiness Soup! And from other already existing CookbookCorner recipes, let me point you towards Skye McAlpine’s Tagliolini with Prawns, Courgettes and Saffron; Linda Dangoor’s Courgette Gratin; Russell Norman’s Zucchini Shoestring Fries; Ben Tish’s Charcoal-Grilled Tuna with Coriander Seeds, Lemon and Courgettes; Fadi Kattan’s Mafghoussa; and a sweet suggestion from Letitia Clark in the beautiful form of her Courgette Ginger Cake with Lemon, Yogurt and Mascarpone Icing.
