I love this. I know the recipe looks a little long and scary, but it’s such a beautiful thing to do if you have lots of friends coming around in the summer, so I just had to include it. It is a huge celebratory feast of fish and vegetables from Genoa, the capital of Liguria, which is a region that is such a tight fit in between the sea and the mountains, and this is an incredible marriage of the bounty of both. I have never found the idea of surf and turf acceptable in the form of steak with lobster – for me these are two things that should not be put together – whereas the combination of seafood and hearty vegetables works so well, especially as each ingredient stays recognisable in its texture and taste within the structure of the dish, which layers its way up from quite rich and saucy at the base, to the delicate ingredients on top.
Like so many dishes that ended up as elaborate baroque centrepieces on rich men’s tables, cappon magro has its roots in the meals that fishermen ate at sea, made with galettes – hard biscuits – which would be soaked in sea water to soften them and then layered up with some of the fish they caught and boiled up, along with root vegetables which would either have been stored on board or preserved in vinegar – the genesis of the vinegary salsa verde (green sauce) that binds the layers together. I have given a recipe for the galettes (once made you can store them in an airtight container for a few weeks), but you could use water biscuits instead.
Cappon magro was one of the dishes that the great Italian chef Nino Bergese was most proud to put his name to. He was one hell of a guy, who cooked for royalty and film stars and was the first chef to earn two Michelin stars at his restaurant, La Santa, in Genoa, but he never forgot the traditional dishes of his region. The way I do the dish is a little different, because I like to add hake. Sometimes we make it at Locanda, where the challenge is to incorporate all the ingredients into individual plates, but personally I like to make one big dish of it, as it looks so splendid. This is the kind of thing I would do when I am relaxed on holiday with family and friends and can buy a box of mixed fish and shellfish and really fresh vegetables in the market. The nature of it is that you can adjust the ingredients according to what you can find, so if you have to leave out the artichoke or beetroot, depending on the season, it really doesn’t matter; if you can’t find hake, another white fish will be fine, and you can leave out the bottarga, too, if you prefer.
Serves 10
potatoes 4 medium
Jerusalem artichokes 3
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
carrots 4 large, peeled
celery 4 stalks
green beans 200g
red beetroot 2 large
lemon 1, halved
black peppercorns a few
lobster tails 3, and/or 20 large prawns in their shells
langoustines 12
mussels 15, cleaned and prepared as here
clams 1kg, cleaned and prepared as here
hake fillets 800g
Giorgio’s dressing 6 tablespoons (see here)
white wine vinegar 150ml
extra virgin olive oil 50ml
oysters 6, shells washed and opened
pickled artichokes 4 (see here)
hard-boiled eggs 3, quartered
pea shoots 500g (optional)
bottarga 1 slice of
For the galettes:
00 flour 300g
semolina flour 200g
polenta flour 50g
fine table salt 15g
fresh yeast 15g
extra virgin olive oil 100ml
For the green sauce:
salted anchovies 3
olive oil
fennel 70g, chopped
capers in vinegar 1 tablespoon
hard-boiled egg 1
breadcrumbs, made from stale bread 1 tablespoon
white wine vinegar 60ml
black olives 20g, stones removed
garlic 1 small clove
extra virgin olive oil 80ml
cold water 20ml
Cappon magro
1 Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas 4.
2 To make the galettes, mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl until you have a firm ball of dough. Leave to rest for 20 minutes, covered with a clean tea towel, then roll out thinly (2–3mm) and prick with a fork. With a 4cm diameter cutter, cut out discs (you should get around 25–30). Lift on to a baking tray, or trays, and put into the preheated oven to bake for about 10 minutes, until light golden. Remove and keep to one side.
3 Cook the potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes, whole, in a large pan of boiling salted water until tender.
4 Meanwhile, cook the whole carrots, celery and beans, in a separate pan of boiling salted water, lifting out each vegetable as soon as it is tender, and draining under cold running water. Finally put the beetroot into the same pan of boiling salted water (don’t add it until all the other vegetables are out, as it will stain them red) and cook until soft, then drain and set aside with the rest of the cooked vegetables.
5 Bring a fresh pan of salted water to the boil with the halved lemon and peppercorns, and put in the lobster tails, if using, and cook for 4 minutes. Alternatively, if using prawns, cook with the langoustines, for just one minute then remove. Then put in the mussels and cook until they open (remove any that don’t). Lift out, then put in the clams and cook until they open (again, remove any that don’t). Lift out, then finally put in the hake and cook until tender. Lift out and keep to one side.
6 Now you need to make the green sauce. Rinse the salt from the anchovies and dry them. Run your thumb gently along the backbone of each anchovy – this will allow you to easily pull it out and separate the fish into fillets. Heat a little olive oil in a pan, add the fennel and cook briefly until just soft. Lift out and allow to cool, then put into a blender with the rest of the ingredients and 550ml warm water and blend into a green sauce.
7 Cut all the reserved cooked vegetables into slices and put them into separate bowls, then season each one with a tablespoon of Giorgio’s dressing and some salt and pepper.
8 Take the skin from the hake and flake the fish. Put into a separate bowl with half the white wine vinegar and the olive oil.
9 Take the shells from the lobster tails or prawns (if using prawns, leave the heads on). Take half the mussels and clams out of their shells (reserving the rest for garnish).
10 Put the rest of the white wine vinegar into a large shallow bowl with 125ml water and put the galettes into the bowl to soak for a few minutes.
11 To assemble the salad the idea is to layer up the hake, galettes and sauce with a different vegetable each time, starting and finishing with the sauce. So you will need seven layers of the sauce, and five layers each of the flaked hake and galettes.
12 First, spread a fifth of the green sauce over the base of a large serving dish, then spread a fifth of the hake over the top, followed by all of the carrots in an even layer, then a fifth of the whole soaked galettes, spread out evenly. Next, spread over another fifth of the sauce, followed by another fifth of the hake, all the celery and another fifth of the galettes. Repeat, this time with the potatoes, then again with the