MINESTRA DI LENTICCHIE E ZAFFERANO DI SANTO STEFANO DI SESSANIO
II Gran Sasso is the highest peak of the Apennines, surging up from the sea, a beast longer than twenty miles, a great-winged harpy, petrified, iced in flight and leaving only a slender shelf of coastal plain in its wake. And hitched halfway up its magnificence sits the medieval fastness of Santo Stefano di Sessanio. One meets few of its two hundred folk on a Wednesday evening's sunset walk through its catacombs and labyrinths, peering into the unbarred doors of abandoned houses that spirit up invention and half-light musings. Inside the bar-there is always a bar-a Medici crest embellishing its door, the briscola squad is hard at play. Curious at what could bring us forty-five hundred feet up into the January cold that afternoon, we told them we were looking for lentils. Sometimes I can still hear their laughing. But they found us some lentils, the last of that year's harvest, they told us, and they convinced us to stay the evening, the night, in a little locanda, an inn, closed for the season but of which one of them was the owner. Of course we stayed and of course we cooked and ate the beautiful black lentils that looked so like a great bowlful of glossy jet beads and of course we drank beautiful wine. And afterward we slept close by the fire. Though it is hardly traditional to adorn this humble soup with cream, when our host offered it with the willowy dollops melting into its warmth, it tasted like a dish as old as the mountains' secrets. And I would never again eat it any other way. The ennobling of the soup with saffron is common in many dishes of the region but only for these last half a hundred years. Fields of crocus have flourished, though, for centuries in the peculiar micro-climate of the high plains of Navelli and Civitaretenga, since a curious village monk, when sojourning in Spain, folded a fistful of their dried seeds in his handkerchief and tucked them in a prayer book. The monk sowed the seeds first in the monastery gardens, and when the flowers bloomed and he harvested their pistils according to the rites he learned in Spain, he and his brothers planted whole fields of the sweet flowers, desiring to use the saffron as a pharmaceutical and as a colorant for ceremonial vestments. Still, the old monk's is the only saffron cultivated in Italy.
Yield serves 6
Number Of Ingredients 13
Steps:
- Rinse the lentils and soak them in cold water for 1/2 hour. If you are using a variety of lentils other than those recommended, leave them to soften in the cold water overnight.
- Lightly toast the saffron threads, then dissolve them in 2 tablespoons of warmed Cognac.
- In a large soup pot over a medium flame, warm 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and heat the pancetta. Scent the fats with the garlic, softening it but taking care not to color it. Add the bay leaf, the lentils, six cups of cold water, the saffron, the tomatoes, and the sea salt. Over a moderate flame, bring to a simmer and cook the lentils for 1/2 hour or until they are soft but not collapsing. Remove from the heat, add the red wine vinegar and stir it well into the soup.
- Permit the soup to rest, uncovered, while you warm a little olive oil in a sauté pan and sauté the bread well on all sides. In a small bowl with a wire whisk, beat the cream with the cloves and the remaining 1 tablespoon of Cognac just until it begins to thicken.
- Ladle the soup into warm bowls, add a few bits of the sautéed bread, and float a spoonful or two of the perfumed cream over each. Drink good red wine and continue to drink it after the soup with thick shards from a fine, aged pecorino.
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