Sauce #52 | Italian Hybrid

beef shin ossobuco x peposo with tagliatelle ~ smoked mackerel pâté

---

The Fence Special Offer
I’m thrilled and overjoyed to be offering Sunday Sauce subscribers a juicy discount when they subscribe to The Fence, ‘the UK’s only magazine’. It’s an excellent quarterly that manages to be very funny and very enlightening all at once. Recent contributors include Geoff Dyer, Nesrine Malik, Eva Wiseman, and, me. Stirring stuff.

Their weekly newsletter makes for essential reading - caustic, catty, occasionally other adjectives beginning with ‘C’…and extremely funny. Gary Stevenson, Alex James, Thomas Straker and Peter Hitchens all receive the side-eye in the latest missive.

There’s also their new mail-out, Capital Letter, which most recently featured a guide to London’s best pubs, which you’ll enjoy reading and getting frightfully irritated by due to its omission of [redacted], [redacted], and the Devonshire.

The Fence is offering a staggering 20% off if you subscribe to any and all of its offerings - print, digital, or both (do both). Just enter SPRING20 in the relevant box when you check out. You know it makes sense. Ts and Cs apply, naturally.

---

It was one of those weekends that went all too quickly. A long lunch on Saturday that culminated in Thom falling in a pond while trying to catch a frisbee. A chicken and rabbit pie. Guinness cake. Five quid down the drain on the Grand National.

And a slow start on Sunday that accelerated with the realisation that Rosie’s brother and family were about to materialise on the doorstep. With superhuman foresight I’d defrosted some beef shin on-the-bone, forgetting that it’s only a couple of months since the last recipe for BSOTB. Call me a one trick pony.

In this instance rather than take a Thai angle on the shin I headed, figuratively at least, to Tuscany. They keep things simple there which is generally what you need on a dusty Sunday morning. Peposo only requires a handful of ingredients and, while it’s tempting to overcomplicate with soffritto and other adornments, it’s worth holding your nerve and leaving it be. Just beef, red wine, black pepper (lots, as the name suggests), garlic and salt. OK, I added bay and rosemary but that was it.

I left it on a very low heat and we set off to meet the in-laws and nephews at Hackfall, a spectacular bit of woodland between Grewelthorpe and Masham. If the gardens at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal, a few miles down the road, are all formality and straight lines, Hackfall - designed by the son of the Studley designer, William Aislabie, in the 18th century - are an ordered chaos of follies and fountains and ersatz ruins. I’ll continue to be unofficial brand ambassador for this part of Yorkshire if it kills you.

We had a beer in the newly and belatedly reopened Crown Inn in Grewelthorpe, whose reappearance has been very welcome to, as far as I can tell based on three visits, every single Grewelthorpe Primary School parent out there. All of a sudden everyone wants to be on pick-up duty. The fried gherkins are very good and the staff are completely delightful.

The beef shin had been ticking over and ticked over some more while we sunned ourselves and listened to the woodpecker go about its business. I sent the kids off to pick yet more wild garlic.

Peposo is traditionally served on a piece of grilled bread, as fancy restaurants call it, or toast, as everyone else calls it. Ossobuco is usually served with a saffron risotto, often with a scattering of gremolata - chopped parsley, lemon zest, and garlic. We all fancied pasta. I imagined what gremolata would be like if it was a pasta sauce, rather than a semi-austere garnish for boiled meats.

The results were good though I was a little heavy handed with the lemon juice and, as per the below recipe, would blanch the greens rather than braise them in order to ensure more of a livid green finished product. That said, if there’s one thing Italians enjoy it’s cooking green vegetables to a surprisingly appealing sludge.