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Fried Bread with Raisins
Take some rather stale bread, cut it into slices, removing the crust. Fry the bread in lard, and then arrange it on a platter; meanwhile prepare the raisins as follows: Take a small saucepan and put into it two tablespoons of good raisins, a good slice of raw ham chopped into small pieces, and a leaf of sage, also chopped up, one tablespoon of granulated sugar, and two tablespoons of good vinegar. Put these ingredients on the fire, and as soon as you have a syrup (stir constantly) pour the raisins onto the pieces of fried bread, and the sauce over and around them. Served with cold meat these are very nice.
A small agrodolce crostini: fried bread under a sweet-sour raisin sauce. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes, and the only difficult moment is knowing when to stop cooking the syrup.
- The hinge: stop at a loose syrupTwo tablespoons of vinegar and one of sugar reduce very fast in a small pan. Pull it off the heat while it still pours freely — a few seconds too long and the sugar seizes into a hard caramel around the raisins as it cools.
- "Raw ham" means prosciutto crudo"Raw ham" here most likely stands for dry-cured ham — prosciutto crudo — rather than uncooked fresh pork. A thick slice of prosciutto or speck cut into small dice suits the dish; fresh raw pork, which would not be cooked through in a few seconds of syrup, is not what is wanted.
- Quantities and yieldTwo tablespoons of raisins and a slice of ham will sauce roughly four to six small slices of bread — a plate for two alongside cold meat, not a main dish. Scale up proportionally if you want more.
- The vinegar"good vinegar" is not specified further; a wine vinegar suits the sweet-sour balance. A sharper vinegar will need a little more sugar to balance.
- Frying in lardLard gives the flavour the recipe assumes and takes the heat well. Olive oil or butter clarified of its solids both work; whole butter will brown before the bread crisps.
- The breadDry crumb absorbs less fat and holds up better under the wet sauce, whatever the thrift involved in using up stale bread. Slices around half an inch thick from a plain loaf work well.
- SageOne fresh leaf, chopped fine. Dried sage is coarser and dustier in a sauce this small; if that is all you have, use a pinch and expect a different result.
- ServingAssemble at the last moment and eat warm. Held on the platter, the bread softens within a few minutes.
Sweet-sour combinations of raisins, vinegar and sugar — agrodolce — run deep in Italian cooking and are usually traced to the medieval and Renaissance kitchen, when sugar and dried fruit were treated as seasonings rather than dessert, and often paired with cured pork. The style survived mostly in regional dishes and in small savoury preparations like this one: stale bread, two spoonfuls of raisins and an offcut of ham, turned into something meant to sit beside cold meat left over from another meal.