Today on our blog we will introduce a new food and wine section. Between historical notes and some practical advice, we offer you some of our typical recipes, starting with the Tuscan culinary tradition.
Thus we can only trace the footsteps of a famous woman who has profoundly marked the evolution of medieval cuisine over time, leading it with inspiration towards modernity which today we recognize in our local dishes and in the more refined French “novelle cuisine”. In fact Caterina de ‘Medici, daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, betrothed and future queen, departed from the cradle of the Florentine Renaissance, bringing with her to the court of France not only cooks, pastry chefs and ice cream makers, but also introducing the concept of “mise en place “with the use of precious tablecloths, ceramic plates, bright Murano glass goblets and still unknown forks. Starting from his wedding banquet with Enrico de Valois, and remembering the exquisite menus she showed off delighting the real palates, as well as introducing new sauces, onion soup, duck with orange and sorbet, among which recipes that have been handed down and “exported” across the Alps, certainly including the one of the excellent stuffed crespelle, better known as crêpes.
Unlike later versions with a sweet fillings stuffed with powdered sugar, honey and various jams, in Tuscany they were served as a salted first course. To prepare them in three separate procedures and all in all quite simple. To start with, round crêpes are prepared in a pan by making a dough with eggs, flour and milk, and then in a separate bowl the filling is prepared by mixing the boiled spinach, ricotta and pecorino cheese. These are the ingredients for the stuffing of the crêpes, which have to be rolled and placed one next to the other in a pan.
Then, they are covered with the famous béchamel invented by Queen Catherine and originally called glue sauce because it can hold and stick together. Finally, with the addition of tomato sauce and grated pecorino cheese on top, they are placed in a pan to the moment in which you notice the surface starting to brown. At this point you can remove the pan from the oven and serve them to enjoy the taste of this tasty delicacy. If then, traveling in Tuscany you feel like learning how to prepare them and would like to experiment a fun cooking class, we know the right places for you; just if it were hard for you to prepare them, but you won’t struggle eating them, you just have to taste them in one of the many delicious restaurants we have in the area!
Ingredients:
Dough
- 3 eggs
- 3 tablespoons of flour
- 250ml of whole milk
- 1 pinch of salt
Stuffing
- 400 g spinach already cooked
- 1 tbsp oil
- 1 clove of garlic
- 250 g ricotta cheese
- 1 egg
- 100 g grated pecorino
- 50 g diced pecorino
- grated nutmeg
- 1 pinch of salt
Béchamel
- 50gr. of butter
- 60 g flour
- 500 ml milk
- grated nutmeg
- 1 pinch of salt
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