My attempt to make Salsa di Noci ended in failure. Here's what happened: the walnuts and parsley mashed up well enough to make a paste, and did indeed turn a bright green colour ("stokethefires" please take note.) I stirred in two tablespoons of breadcrumbs, but then poured in far too much oil. (Mrs David says 'half a coffee cup', meaning, with hindsight, half a coffee can). Like a fool, I used about half a mug's worth. The resulting sauce was far too oily. I tried whizzing it up in the Magimix, and then added a squeeze of lemon juice and some more salt. I finished it off with a few tablespoons of single cream, as instructed.
If you ignored the oil slick, it tasted all right. It looked all right too, but it seemed a bit odd to serve it cold. Italian Food doesn't happen to mention this. I thought I could get away with warming it up, but then of course, the inevitable happened, it curdled and ended up looking like a beige coloured vomit. So it's back to the old drawing board with this one.
Talking of vomit, I bought an amusing little book the other day. It's Vincent Price's Cooking Price Wise, published by Corgi paperbacks back in 1971. It seems that Vinnie hosted some sort of a gourmet cookery show for Thames Television, and this was the book of the television series.
Cookery books from the 1970's are hilarious. For monsieur, how about a bacon moussé, or perhaps, tournedos Victor Hugo, served on a delicate bed of glorious technicolor? For cocktail parties, Vincent suggests you make his Crocodile Cucumber- that's a cucumber on cocktail sticks (to look like legs), and garnished with tinned pineapple and peppers, spiked all over like some sort of a hedgehog. You make the eyes from cheddar cheese.
There's also his bizarre Melon Monsters. This is a hollowed out melon, filled with mayonnaise, grated cheese, sherry, paprika, bacon, chives, prawns and raw celery. You then spike the thing with stuffed olives on cocktail sticks to look like eyes. A corn kernel substitutes as a nose. They're supposed to look like aliens.
Wasn't the world a simpler place?
