A rummage among dusty charity-shop bookshelves unearths a gem of a recipe for spicy-sour courgette suffused with the fresh taste of mint.
For the past 10 years, some of my best cookbook purchases have been from Oxfam on London’s Marylebone High Street and the Mercatino dell’Usato in Monteverde in Rome. I visit both as often as possible, always feeling the same high on book-buying endorphins as I make a beeline for the cookery shelves.
Oxfam is relatively small: you have only to walk a few steps, passing mostly women’s coats and Fairtrade chocolate, to get from the front door to the cookbook section. It’s harder at the Mercatino, which is a warehouse; a tetris of antiques and junk, 80-piece crockery sets, novelty ashtrays, designer furniture and old electric guitars. My cookbook endorphin, though, is stronger than the one for Apulian plates and mannequins, even though I am sure a mannequin would come in useful. Will the shelves be exactly the same as the last time, or will there be new arrivals? Has that first edition of A Feast of Floyd been bought? Has someone recently donated a recently passed relative’s entire cookery book collection?
After a period in which the shelves in both places stayed more or less the same, a fresh batch of books arrived in both places – at least two dozen in each, the nature of which suggested someone had either downsized or died. While new books smell crisp and inky, secondhand books smell like old wardrobes and vanilla, and come with a history: the immediately obvious one, a name inscribed inside the cover, scribbles in the margin or a fringe of Post-it notes; but also the clues that make you feel like a detective – the folds and creases, a smudge of sauce or oily print. Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cooking (one of a five-book haul from Oxfam) belonged to Siobhan in 1993: there are Post-its marking bagna cauda, tartelettes aux pommes and mon gateau au chocolat which, according to the margin notes, is “v good”, “needs 35 mins” and to “see Gary Rhodes page 233”. The mark in a €1 copy of La Cucina Napoletana by Jeanne Caròla Francesconi is both less and more obvious – it simply fell open on page 196, at a recipe for zucchine a “scapece”.
Alla scapece, like saor in Venice and carpione in the north of Italy, is a technique of cooking fish or vegetables by first frying and then covering them in a marinade of vinegar, aromatics and herbs. The origin of the word is Spanish – escabeche – a reminder of the Spanish influence in Italian cooking, and dishes cooked alla scapece are often typical of port towns in which this influence first arrived with hungry merchant sailors.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
