Bocconcini
Cut up the meat, lamb, veal, mutton, or fresh pork into pieces about two inches wide. Sprinkle on salt and pepper and put them aside. Then cut an equal number of pieces of bread about one-half inch thick, and a little bit bigger then the pieces of meat. Next cut pieces of ham, fat and lean, the same size as the pieces of meat, but double the number. Then take a skewer (or two if one is not sufficient), and put on it first a piece of bread, then a piece of ham, then a leaf of sage, then one of the pieces of meat, then another leaf of sage, then the ham, then the bread, and so on in this order, having always the meat between two leaves of sage, two slices of ham, and two pieces of bread. Coat everything well, and especially the bread, with olive-oil or melted butter, and then broil them over a hot fire for a good one-quarter of an hour, turning them constantly until they are colored a golden brown and are crisp. If preferred, these can be cooked in the oven. Put them on several wooden skewers, and lay them in a pan and cook until brown and crisp. Serve with lettuce salad.
This is a skewered mixed grill built in a strict repeating order, and the order is the recipe. Everything else is technique.
- The hinge: fat between bread and meatThe ham sits on either side of the meat so its fat bastes the meat while the bread absorbs the drippings. If you substitute a lean deli ham the bread will scorch dry before the meat cooks. Use prosciutto, pancetta, or a fatty country ham, and keep both the fat and the lean as instructed.
- "Two inches wide"Read this as thin slices roughly two inches across, not two-inch cubes. Cubes that thick will not cook through in fifteen minutes over a hot fire. Slices about a half inch thick, cut to two-inch squares, cook in step with the bread.
- BreadA firm day-old country loaf, crust removed, cut half an inch thick. Soft sandwich bread disintegrates on the skewer and burns rather than crisping.
- SageFresh leaves only; dried sage will simply char. Large leaves can be halved. Two leaves per piece of meat is not decoration, it is the dominant flavor of the dish.
- Oven equivalentOven version -- the recipe gives no temperature. A hot oven, around 425F, on a rack set over a sheet pan, turning once or twice, roughly 20 minutes, works. Soak the wooden skewers 30 minutes first, or use metal ones.
- Timing and donenessA quarter hour over a hot fire suits lamb, veal, and mutton cut thin. Fresh pork should reach 145F at the center, which usually happens within the same window if the slices are thin; check rather than trust the clock.
- Fat for coatingBrush olive oil or melted butter on generously and especially on the bread, as directed, and brush again when you turn the skewers. The bread is what makes the dish and it needs more fat than seems reasonable.
- YieldFigure five or six pieces of meat per person, about 1 1/2 lb of meat and half a small loaf for four, with the ham scaled to twice the number of meat pieces as the recipe directs. Serve straight off the skewer with the lettuce salad.
Bocconcini means "little mouthfuls," from boccone, a mouthful or morsel; the word today more often names small balls of fresh mozzarella, but in older Italian kitchen usage it covered any small savory bite, and this skewered version belongs to the wider family of spiedini and uccelletti — "little birds," a name traditionally explained as referring to skewered meat and sage arranged in imitation of the spitted songbirds once eaten in parts of Italy. The bread-and-fat-between-meat construction appears in central Italian cooking and is often described as a thrift device: the bread catches what would otherwise drip into the fire, and a modest amount of meat feeds more people. Simple Italian Cookery (1912) was published under the pen name Antonia Isola by Mabel Earl McGinnis, and it belongs to the early wave of books introducing Italian home cooking to English-speaking households — hence the careful, almost diagrammatic instructions for a dish an Italian cook would have assembled without thinking.