Polpo by Russell Norman: a review
Where I discovered that pork sausage can be eaten with candied fruits.
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This article was first published in a French version here. I didn’t use the book’s version in English, so the names of the dishes and the page numbers might defer from the original book.
The quick review for the readers in a hurry
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A great book with very few defaults
❤️ The things I loved: one of the most beautiful cookbooks I’ve ever seen, simple recipes with very few ingredients but that turned out absolutely delicious, helped me discover Italian regional ingredients.
🍮 The recipes I made: all of them tasted great according to me, but people who are not fond of rich food may find them too heavy.
😋 My favorite recipe: Grilled fennel skewers with plain anchovies.
💪 Level of accessibility: Apart from recipes that ask to do homemade dough - like bruschetta and such, recipes are mostly easy.
✌️ The long review for people who have time to kill
First, a long introduction starting with my classmate’s risotto
The reason I'm reviewing this book is partly thanks to one of my classmates at the charcuterie school. One day, he had homemade salmon risotto at lunch. This was certainly unexceptional for him, as he used to cook very elaborate dishes at home - he was the kind of guy who would do a duck pithiviers when he’s bored..! But the spoonful he had me tasted made me dream of risotto for a whole week.
My classmate's meal was just the little push I needed to fall for Polpo, an Italian cookbook I had had on my wishlist for ages. If your bookstore has a copy, you can't miss it. It’s one of the rare cookbooks that have a bare spine with the binding threads showing and the title printed in black. See this paper splendor below:
Would I buy this book just because it’s pretty to look at? Yes.
Beyond the creative book spine, the work of the Praline agency on this book is just amazing. If like me, aesthetic criteria is important to you in a cookbook, it’ll be difficult resisting the desire to add it to your collection - sorry in advance for your wallet 😅
One of my favorite design websites, It's Nice That, sums up well the book’s aesthetic qualities:
"The combination of deconstructed, spineless format (practical for real-life kitchen use), old Venetian typefaces and beautiful photography come together to create not only an intoxicating hymn to Russell's stripped-back foodie philosophy but a gorgeous and unfussy object in its own right."
So what do we have ? Pretty fonts. A smooth and matte paper that is an ultimate pleasure to touch for a book lover. And even the way the photos are arranged is clever: they are not full page or centered, but rather on the sides or straddling two pages, which makes the book look strangely elegant.
All of these details contribute to a very pleasant reading experience. Polpo is undeniably one of the most beautiful cookbooks I've held in my hands. The fact that it was published in 2012 is admirable: ten years later, it could give a lesson in creativity to many cookbooks published recently.
By the way, the book’s photos, which are gorgeous, are by Jenny Zarins, whose lovely work on cooking can be seen on her website.
Less is more: few ingredients for amazing and bold tastes
After the design, the first thing that stood out for me as I flipped through the book was the extremely small number of ingredients that each recipe called for. I realized when I read the introduction at the beginning that this was intentional:
"We have a rule, that any dish is ready to enter the menu when as many ingredients as possible have been removed from it."
This was one of my greatest pleasures while I was cooking the recipes of this book: to simply combine a few ingredients that go perfectly well together. And guess what? The less there were ingredients in the plate, the better the dish tasted.
As someone who usually thinks in terms of multiple seasonings, with lists of spices and herbs as long as one’s arm, preparing a plain cicchetti with grilled fennel and anchovies was a revelation. Composed “only” of slices of fennel drizzled with olive oil and roasted in the oven, dill, plain anchovies and sea salt, that recipe was fabulous, and turned out to be my favorite of the four recipes I cooked from the book. It had such a powerful and addictive flavor, and that dish was just made in a few steps, so quickly! It reminded me how you don't need sometimes to have much on a plate to get a great meal.
A book not of Italian food, but specifically Venetian cuisine
By the way, if you are a connoisseur of Italian culture, mentioning cicchetti will have tipped you off to the regional theme of the book: Venetian cuisine. Cicchetti are small dishes served in typical Venetian bars, the bàcari. They are traditionally eaten standing at the counter, with a glass of wine, either at the end of the morning for lunch, or as a snack in the afternoon. It’s a bit like tapas, but in a Venetian way (see Wikipedia).
The book draws its inspiration from the repertoire of Venetian specialties and the menus of various bàcari in Venice. As someone who knows nothing about this regional cuisine, it was the perfect opportunity to discover not only some of its specialties, but also typical products and ingredients from the region or more generally from Italy.
This is another thing I liked about my experience with this book: it allowed me to discover various Italian products. Admittedly, I had to take a 40-minute subway ride to get to two specialized Italian grocery stores. But it was worth it! I really enjoyed cooking for the first some cotechino, an Italian sausage, radicchio, which is sort of like chicory, but prettier and tastier, and carnaroli rice. Risotto is actually quite a common dish cooked at home in France, so there’s nothing fancy about cooking short-grain rice, but to cook for the first time "the king of rice" as the carnaroli variety is apparently called was a real treat.
Almost all the recipes are appealing.
Last but not least, each dish title was appealing and mouth-watering. That’s a sign that I really like a cookbook: when I want to cook the vast majority of its recipes and not only a few of them! I guess I liked the fact that most titles would simply state a good combination of 2-3 ingredients. For instance, warm squid salad with black cabbage and chickpeas; a beet salad with rocket pesto and walnuts...
In fact, if you like these humble yet wonderful ingredients such as anchovies, cabbage, fennel, white beans and lentils, you'll love Polpo.
Let's take fennel and fennel seeds as an example: in addition to the fennel-anchovy dish I mentioned above, the book offers spicy pork meatballs with fennel, a fennel, radish and mint ricotta salad, a soft crab and fennel fritter salad, and a fennel, green bean, frisée and filbert salad. Not a bad listing for a vegetable one doesn’t often see in cookbooks!
In Polpo, we’re far from the clichés of Italian cuisine. Of course, there are familiar dishes, like tiramisu, risotto or meatballs. But the books also contains so many intriguing and not-really-seen-before dishes, which really distinguishes it from other Italian cookbooks.
In short, Polpo delighted me with its recipes that were as delicious as they were easy to make. In one word, it's one of the easiest AND tastiest books I've tried.
And that's its most important quality. If I exaggerate a little, I find that easy recipes usually have a boring taste, and good dishes can sometimes ask too much work. Polpo on the contrary shows the right balance between accessibility and tastiness. For sure, some recipes can be long like when I cooked the risi e bisi, or they ask for a little cooking experience when it comes to homemade dough like for pizzetta or bruschettas. But most of the book’s recipes are straightforward, easy to follow, and the little effort I did was paid with a great result.
Nevertheless, some of the recipes may not be to everyone's taste. I made two rather rich recipes that I deeply enjoyed, but that my companion allergic to fat couldn't stand.
Other dishes display very traditional flavors that I guess not so many people would like, especially at a time where less and less people cook and eat unusual meat parts. For example, a beef tongue in breadcrumbs with balsamic vinegar or a pork hog terrine with parsley won't appeal to everyone. But the book is actually well balanced between rich recipes for winter and lighter ones for summer, a little demanding tastes and more crowd-pleasing ones. If I had tested this book during the summer, you would have gotten a much different review for the “recipes I tried” chapter. I would definitely have made more refreshing, vegetable-centric recipes, like plain Piedmont peppers and anchovies, or tomato panzanella.
Venetian recipes by a British guy
Note that the subtitle of the book is "A Venetian cookbook (of sorts)". It hints at the fact that the book pays more homage to Venetian cuisine than it represents it. Indeed, it was written neither by an Italian, nor by a chef, but by a passionate British restaurateur (!).
The recipes are therefore rather interpretations or stripped down versions of Venetian and Italian dishes. And what do the people who visit the London restaurant have to say about it? According to its founder, half hate it, half love it!
The recipes I tried
Cotechino, lentils and mustard - p 158
This dish, normally served at Christmas and New Year's Eve, is quite a discovery! It combines cotechino (a sausage made out of minced meat, pork rind and pork fat) with lentils and Cremona mustard, which, contrary to its name, is not a mustard like what we would think. It’s in fact a condiment based on whole candied fruits, preserved in a syrup with mustard essential oil. Needless to say that when I assembled the dish, I was a bit puzzled, wondering what the heck this big candied apricot was going to do with those sausage slices. But thank goodness I trusted the recipe, because the sausage, lentils, and fruit went wonderfully together! The fat of the sausage is offset by the sweet and sour fruit, and the lentils add a nice dose of comfort to the dish.
My mother and I loved it, but true story, my partner literally threw up a few hours after having it! But you know what? He was exhausted, he hadn't slept for 3 days, he had heavy meals at restaurants the previous days, so I don’t think it was the cotechino’s fault. I guess that ingesting two slices of fatty meat was the last straw for his body which was just asking for a good night's sleep and a detox juice 😅
Still, it gives you an hint of how fatty the sausage is and that it won't necessarily be of everybody’s tastes. Besides, when I saw the picture of the book, which presented the dish with what seemed a few miserable slices of sausage, I wondered why so stingy, why not put one whole sausage ?But actually they were right, a few slices only of this sausage could fill up a person 😅
Pork belly, radicchio and hazelnut - p 157
This is another dish from the International Club of Fat Meat Lovers 😅 Also a very nice combination, between the tenderness of the pork belly, the slightly bitter radicchio, the crunch of the hazelnuts and the acidity of the red vinegar. These are literally the only ingredients, along with an onion and the usual olive oil. It was as simple as it was delicious, with very frank flavors.
My only complaint would be that the brisket didn't come out very crispy - I thought afterwards that I should have looked up Chinese-style crispy pork belly recipes to compare cooking times and oven temperatures. Anyway, aside from the cooking problem, the overall taste of the dish was very nice.
Grilled fennel skewers with plain anchovies - p 53
My favorite of the four recipes I made, as I said above, and one that I think will become a classic at home. It's insanely simple, and at the same time so wonderfully good. I didn't bother making the skewers, I just put the elements together as an appetizer, and what more can I say except that the fennel-dill-anchovy combination is just perfect perfect perfect!
Risi e bisi - p 228
Obviously I had to do a risotto recipe, since that's what made me want to buy the book! Also a very good dish that happens to be vegetarian, combining the freshness of peas and mint with the sweetness of a risotto. It was a bit long to cook, but the book’s instructions are very clear so that you can’t mess up the cooking part. I don’t think that cooking the rice in the shells of the peas cooking water made a difference, but at least it made me use them instead of throwing them away. Note that my risotto is much less liquid than the recipe calls for, but simply to suit our personal tastes.
Cauliflower gratin à la Fontina - p 244
A classic cauliflower gratin: cauliflower blanched in water and béchamel sauce, except that we add a super dose of cheese, with a nice and tasty mix of parmesan, mozzarella and Fontina, which is one of the best cheeses I've ever tasted. This is a winter dish that is as comforting as you could wish for, to be accompanied by a good meat in sauce and a bit of salad to feel less guilty when swallowing this enormous amount of cheese 😄
More about the author
Interestingly, the book bears the name of the restaurant from which the recipes are inspired, but the name of its author, Russell Norman, only appears discreetly in the back of the book. This may be an indication of the huge success of this restaurant, which opened in 2009, launching at the time the fashion for small plates to share in London and restaurants with antique decor and Edison light bulbs. In short, the restaurant was sufficiently famous to generate interest in a book by its name alone, like a more recent book dedicated to French restaurant Septime for example.
So I didn't know the restaurant nor the author, but the latter, a celebrity across the Channel - he was the center of a show on BBC2, seems to be quite a character. The kind of guy who opens 5 successful restaurants in three years, who is able to say "I do like being me, yes. It's fun" and poses as James Bond for a national newspaper. In short, these are the kind of people who get attention and are admired as much as they annoy us a little bit.
If you want to know more about Russell Norman, I suggest you read two very interesting articles on The Drinks Business and The Guardian I linked to before (where he tells how Venetians are 50/50 to love or hate his restaurant).
A final word
I hope you liked this review! I’ll see you next week for the beginning of a long series about Ottolenghi’s two first cookbooks… It’ll be in 4 parts, so be prepared 😄
In the meantime, have fun in the kitchen and don’t hesitate to follow me on Instagram!
Des bises,
Marjorie
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