Lamb and pancetta spiedini — a Rowley Leigh recipe

On a trip to Puglia a few years ago, my friend Matthew Fort felt obliged to inform us of the lack of authenticity of almost every dish we were given. Why were they offering us rice when rice was only served in the north, normally in the Po valley between Venice and Milan? Pizza should only be eaten in Naples, didn’t we realise? Did we not know there is no such thing as Italian food, with just a disparate collection of regional cuisines, barely related to each other?

In Marianna Giusti’s piece in these pages a few weeks ago, Alberto Grandi claimed that our perception of a long-standing tradition is bogus. Among other things, he asserts that panettone and tiramisu are modern commercial inventions, authentic parmesan cheese is best made in Wisconsin and spaghetti carbonara was invented during the war at a US army dinner.

Fort and Giusti both note that Italy didn’t exist as a unified nation before 1861; Fort’s proposal is that regionality still prevails over any idea of a national cuisine. So it does, but no more so than in China or France, and yet we accept there is such a thing as Chinese or French food. The other problem is that Italians keep breaking the rules: they have pizzerias in Liguria, put tomatoes in their osso buco (conflating Milan and Naples) and serve mozzarella in Turin.

Grandi’s point of view, as I understand it, is that Italian food itself is a fiction in a slightly different sense; the Italians have created a “tradition” whose rules and solecisms compensate for a lack of tradition. I am not convinced. It seems to me that Italian food has as strong an identity as any of the great cuisines. But Grandi is right when he says that a “tradition is nothing but an innovation that was once successful”. The fact that the Italians have adopted the inauthentic and taken it to heart is testament to the dynamism of their cuisine.

Spiedini are no regional speciality. The word just means anything on a skewer and you find them everywhere from Sicily to the Dolomites. In Sicily, they are thinly beaten escalopes of beef, veal or chicken that are rolled up with a breadcrumb-based stuffing, secured with skewers and then baked. In Puglia, they are pieces of kid wrapped in pancetta, threaded and grilled. In Umbria, they’re a mixture of pork, chicken, lamb and pig’s liver, again wrapped in bacon and grilled. Up in the Alto Adige, they have a large spiedino with joints of beef, offal and fowl that are grilled and carved like a doner kebab. There are no rules for spiedini. In that, this recipe conforms to tradition.

Lamb spiedini

Serves six

1. Cut the lamb into neat 2cm cubes. Split the kidneys in half, remove the sinew in the middle and cut in half again. Cut the liver into thick 1cm slices and then into 2cm squares.

2. Assemble the spiedini, starting with the end of a slice of pancetta, a piece of meat, the pancetta, the liver and the kidney with a bay leaf between and so on, pushing the meat down the skewer as you go. Sprinkle the meat with plenty of thyme leaves and milled pepper. Once the spiedini are all filled, lay each one on a good-sized square of the caul and wrap them up into neat kebabs, overlapping the caul.

3. Sprinkle with plenty of salt and cook on a griddle plate, ridged or otherwise, on a medium heat — if too hot the caul will break — for about 20 minutes, keeping the meat just slightly pink but well-lubricated by the caul fat, which will have all but disappeared in the process. Serve with some braised white beans and a little salad.

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