José Pizarro and Vicky Bennison’s cookbook, Seasonal Spanish Food, doesn’t look like all the other coffee table tomes that come across our desks. Its size is smaller than most. It doesn’t have a picture on every page. And its recipes are mostly humble, with simple titles like “Meatballs with Onion Sauce” and “Chocolate Toast.” But José Andrés called it “Without a doubt one of the best, true Spanish cookbooks ever written.” And then there’s a foreword from Elena Arzak (of Spain’s Restaurant Arzak). It was certainly worth a look.
After thumbing through chapters on fishing and vinegar and tapas, I decided upon a recipe that would allow me to snatch up all of the fresh produce I’d been eyeing at the farmers markets recently. As Pizarro and Bennison explained, their Summer Vegetable Stew was actually more like a Spanish ratatouille. It called for chopping up a bounty of summer’s ripest produce and cooking it all down, low and slow, until it was a sticky, luscious pisto. You then toast a slice of good bread, ladle on the pisto and top it with a gorgeously fried egg.
About that egg. The book offers a technique for huevos con puntilla – or, in English, eggs with a frilly lace hem. Now, despite having been told time and time again to always cook an egg on low, I have been cooking my eggs the same way since my dad made me my first fried egg as soon as I could walk down the stairs on a sleepy Sunday morning: Get a skillet screaming hot, melt butter until it foams, crack the egg in the center and then turn the heat down to low until the yolk cooks to your liking. It produces that same frilly lace hem around the edges and produces a yolk so golden and gooey that I dream about it as I stare into my cereal bowl most weekday mornings. This version was quite different: It called for heating a half-inch of olive oil until scorching hot and then cracking the egg inside and deep-frying it for 1 or 2 minutes. Lacy hem? You bet. Whites cooked? Absolutely. A golden yolk that oozed just right? Definitely, though it wasn’t quite as sparkly and pretty as mine typically is. Plus the whole thing carried a bit too much of olive oil’s intense flavor for my liking. I should also note that the book recommends using duck eggs for their decadent, rich yolks. A great suggestion, for sure, but I ended up using the free-range organic hen eggs I had in the fridge.
The other problem I had was that the pisto didn’t get quite as “sticky and luscious” as the book promised. This could’ve been an issue of overcrowding. I realized that the recipe simply said to “cube” the zucchini and peppers – no sizes given. A little more specificity may have told me to cube them smaller and possibly created a little more room in the pan.
So I cooked it for another 20 minutes. A lift of the cover, a quick stir and still no sticking. Blame it on my growling stomach or my lack of patience (another thing I inherited from Dad), but I got on with the frying of the egg and toasting of the bread. The finished dish was divine – a rustic and humble way to celebrate the flavors of summer, even if my pisto wasn’t exactly the right consistency. Though next time, I’ll listen to Dad about the eggs.
Summer Vegetable Stew
4 Servings Pisto manchego is the Spanish equivalent of ratatouille. In fact, there are many versions of this combination of peppers, zucchini and tomato all around the Mediterranean. It is an excellent dish when you have a glut of vegetables or when they may have grown a bit big. Either way, this is a great recipe to use them up. You don’t have to be precise about quantities, and you can add eggplant if you want. The most important thing is the long, slow cooking, honoring the traditional Spanish ways of my mother and grandmother. I love the richness of duck eggs, but if you don’t have access to them, then of course free-range hen eggs are fine. 4 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 onion, diced
4 large flavorful tomatoes, chopped
1 bay leaf
2 green bell peppers, cubed
2 red bell peppers, cubed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 medium zucchini, cubed
Olive oil for frying
4 free-range duck or hen eggs (Note: I used hen eggs.)
4 slices of good-quality bread
5 flat-leaf parsley sprigs, chopped
• Heat the oil in a large frying pan, add the garlic and onion, and gently saute until soft and pale, not golden.
• Now add the tomatoes and bay leaf and reduce to a sauce.
• Next, stir in the green and red peppers, season with salt and pepper, and cover and cook over low heat until soft. This will take about 10 minutes.
• Once the peppers are cooked, add the zucchini, cover the pan with a lid and cook very slowly for another 30 to 40 minutes.
• Cook the eggs as described below and toast the bread.
• Lay a slice of toast on each plate, ladle on the pisto, then slide a fried egg on top. Drizzle with a little olive oil and sprinkle chopped parsley over everything.
Fried Eggs Frying eggs is the easiest thing in the world, but not many people do it well. In Spain, fried eggs are called huevos con puntilla – or eggs with a frilly lace hem – and this gives a good clue as to what you’re aiming for: crispy edges! There are a couple of important things to remember. The first is to use a small frying pan, about 1½ inches deep, which you fill to a dept of about ½ inch with oil. Then, before you add the egg to the pan, heat the oil until it just starts to smoke. Add the egg – it will splutter and sizzle deliciously – and deep-fry it for 1 to 2 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to scoop out the egg. Lastly, sprinkle some pepper and crunchy sea salt over the top.
Reprinted with permission from Kyle Books. What’s your favorite way to use all the ripe summer bounty you pick up at the farmers market or pluck from your garden? Tell us in the comments section below for a chance to win a copy of Seasonal Spanish Food by José Pizarro and Vicky Bennison. We’ll announce the winner in next week’s By the Book column. And now, we’d like to congratulate Nam Dang, whose comment on last week’s By the Book has won him/her a copy of My Vietnam. Nam Dang, keep an eye out for an email from the Sauce crew.
This article appears in August 2012.