Grandma Food
Molinata, plus a bonus recipe for broad bean hummus
I’d love to say we invented Molinata, but we didn’t. This spinach and broad bean dip was introduced in to Ida in 2015 by a Puglian chef I have called “Santino.” In order to explain how it ended up on our menu, I’m going to quote a passage from my recent memoir, Ida at My Table, where I talk about the curiously symbiotic rapport that exists between restaurant owners and the professionals who work in their kitchens.
The analogy I use over and over again for the relationship between a neophyte restaurateur and the person whose cooking a business lives or dies by is that of a new mother and a maternity nurse. Instinct might not kick in if you are feeling overwhelmed by looking after a newborn, just as being a great cook doesn’t automatically translate into knowing how stay afloat during a brutal six hour service.
I was lucky enough to have a support system around me when my three children were born so never felt the need to engage the services of a professional. I wasn’t put on this earth knowing how to look after babies, but I figured that love and patience and learning from mine and other mothers would tide me along, and luckily they did. No matter how much parenting styles may differ between generations and cultures, between families and individuals, academics and government departments, we are all products of six million years of child rearing; somewhere, amongst all that competing information and inherited know-how, you will forge your own less-than-perfect path as a parent.
Not so when you become a restaurateur. You might think you know about food and flavours and how to gather people around a table, but you don’t. Not really. And, unless you have come up through the world of hospitality, there is no wellspring of knowledge to draw from. You are on your own. As a result, your chefs become your teachers, overriding all your airy-fairy notions about creating daily specials from boxes of fruit from the market, while at the same time you are still their bosses, nagging them about time-keeping and holding their cooking to account.
Most Italian chefs chafe at the idea of the “canon” of Italian gastronomy, as laid out by Pellegrino Artusi in his 1891 “La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiare bene” which is still in print. Just as novelists of today struggle to break free from the long shadow cast by the largely white, male writers of the past, they want to be allowed to play around with the wealth of ingredients and scientific innovations such as molecular gastronomy which globalisation - and the Masterchef franchise - has afforded them.
Setting aside the thorny question of culinary cultural appropriation, when we opened Ida in 2007 we had to decide how far we would be prepared to stray from our original vision when settling on our menu. In our minds, Ida was going to be like dining at the house of Avi’s mother and aunts, which meant that any kind of fusion was out. But would it be fair to clip the wings of eager young chefs by expecting them to only cook the dishes which three women born in 1920s rural Italy would have recognized? As one, grumblingly, put it, “I didn’t come all the way to London to make grandma food.”
The following passage describes one of our first chefs, “Santino” being worked upon by his family in southern Italy in a multi-pronged request for funds. He was already in a bad mood when his nonna rang, as a customer had criticised his tomato sugo for being too bland.
“As he spoke to his grandmother, Santino’s voice would grow tender and the knife would drop from his fingers and on to the chopping board. The resigned slump of his shoulders always brought to mind the scene in Fellini’s Amarcord when Uncle Teo being is coaxed down from the tree by the rotund little nurse from the asylum. Staring out of the kitchen window on to Kilburn Lane, Santino would frown and nod, occasionally muttering, Si, Nonna….no, Nonna….d’accordo, Nonna.” Then, when the call was over, sighing ruefully, he would pick up the knife and resume chopping.
Nothing further would be said about the matter, until, at the end of lunch service, Santino would sheepishly ask me or Avi for an acconto of £500, out of next month’s (or, more likely, the month after’s) salary, so that before training at the gym, he could run to Wizard Video on Harrow Road and send a Moneygram to Italy.
To his credit, once Santino got over his funk about the customer calling his sugo bland, he rang home and got the recipe for a dish that was so good, that ten years later, it has never been off the menu at Ida. Molinata is basically a snack which his Nonna used to make him and his siblings after school. His parents didn’t have much money when they were growing up, so Santino was never allowed the merendine - cellophane-wrapped bars of cream-filled wafers or sponge with retro names like “Fiesta”, “Ciao Crem” or Brioss” - which his better-off schoolmates were given. Instead, Nonna would simply fold spinach or chard through pureed broad beans, and serve it to her grandchildren with a hunk of village bread.
Molinata was, and is, a platonic ideal of a dish, utterly nourishing, economical to prepare, savoury yet subtle, and vegan to boot. It hits the spot when you are hungry, and also satisfies that longing for something green and vivid when your body feels depleted. And, curiously, it tastes like soul food, whichever part of the world you are from, in the same way that old-fashioned laundry soap is the universal smell of nostalgia.
Interestingly it’s not actually called Molinata; I know that, because I Googled it (multiple times) to see how it was made, as Santino flat-out refused to give us the recipe. In fact as soon as he started to get wind of how popular it was becoming at Ida, he would only prepare it when nobody from the family was in the kitchen. And when I resorted to peeking inside his ring-binder (which I’m not proud of) I discovered that he had craftily written down the recipe in his home-town dialect, which was so incomprehensible that it might as well have been another language.”
Six years later, Santino bequeathed us the Molinata recipe as a leaving present. He had come to recognise the value of his nonna’s patrimony, and, in a final act of generosity, had gifted that patrimony to us.
Molinata
(serves four, as a starter, with bread)
Ingredients
800g of fresh or frozen skinless broad beans. (Middle Eastern supermarkets are good places to source the latter.)
2 medium onions
2/3 cloves peeled garlic
150 ml Extra virgin olive oil
One bag fresh spinach leaves
Half a bottle of decent white wine
Fresh chilli, deseeded, (optional)
One flat teaspoon of coarse black pepper
Method
Peel and roughly chop the onions into 2-3cm chunks, and the garlic and chilli into slivers.
Pour the oil into an approximately 30cm saucepan, and sauté the onions and garlic at a low heat until golden. (If using, add chilli at this point)
Then, add the broad beans, salt and the black pepper.
Cook on low/medium heat for about 10 minutes stirring occasionally and making sure they do not stick to the pan.
Pour in the wine, stir well and turn up the heat until it evaporates.
Add around half a kettle of boiling water, so that you have a good centimetre of liquid above the broad beans.
Simmer for around 45 minutes - do not cover!
Once the Molinata has cooled, use a stick blender to pureé into a kind of gritty hummus. (This can be stored, covered, in the fridge for around 3-4 days, and also frozen.)
To serve, warm the Molinata with a little extra virgin olive oil (and boiling water to loosen it up if necessary), and when it is piping hot, fold through the spinach leaves until they wilt. It’s best to do this each time from scratch, as the spinach shortens Molinata’s fridge life and it also goes weird in the freezer.
Season with olive oil, and serve with bread
Midnight Broad Bean Hummus
Last week, I made hummus from a packet of frozen broad beans I happened to have in the freezer at home. Avi was returning late from a trip to Italy, and I figured it would work as a light midnight supper with a piece of bread. The results were excellent, so I am sharing the recipe here. The trick is to make sure that the broad beans - fresh, or frozen - are peeled. Also, as all the ingredients are raw, use the best garlic you can get your hands on, ideally the “wet” or “green” garlic which is currently in season.
Ingredients
400g of frozen, peeled broad beans
One clove peeled garlic
90ml tahini
90 ml extra virgin olive oil
Juice of one lemon
Salt to taste
Method
Steam the broad beans for around 5 minutes to soften
Blitz all the ingredients in a food processor or Nutribullet
Serve with bread or crudités
