Ingredients (serves 6 people):
- 200 grams of boiled sturgeon;
- 200 grams of boiled pike;
- 100 grams of ground almonds;
- 20 grams of pine nuts;
- 150 grams of rice;
- half a litre of almond milk (you know how to make it from the Capons in Dorre);
- a teaspoon of sugar;
- an egg yolk;
- ground cinnamon;
- salt.
For the pastry:
- 400 grams of flour;
- 150 grams of butter;
- 2 eggs;
- water;
- a pinch of salt.
The villain in this sequence was a pike, in case you’re wondering.
Recipe:
For the pastry:
Build a small volcano with the flour, break the eggs in the crater and work everything together with the salt. Pour water on it little by little until the dough is elastic and not too soft. It’s going to be sticky, so you need to dust your hands with more flour. Also, remember that the water needs to be cold and so do your hands, or else the eggs in the mixture start misbehaving and the dough — as we say in Italy — goes crazy.
Chop the butter into pieces and incorporate it in the mixture as well, work it into the dough until you no longer see the pieces but this requires for the mixture to warm a bit, so you’ll want to be quick about it. As soon as you’re satisfied, drop the dough in cellophane or in a cold cloth, and throw it into the fridge. Three hours is the optimum, but half an hour usually suffices.
For the pie:
Bring the almond milk to a boil and cook the rice in it. Do not overcook it: you’re not trying to make a pudding, so you won’t have to wait until all the milk has been absorbed by the rice. Twenty minutes should suffice. Maybe less. Then pick it up with a strainer. You will need the rice but you won’t need the milk anymore, so you’d better find another use for it.
Clean the fish and remove all bones unless you want to kill your guests. Place the boiled fish inside a pan, add the ground almonds, the pine nuts, the sugar, the cooked rice, and mix it all together with a pinch of salt.
Grease a pan with butter, lay the pastry, pour the filling inside and then cover it with another layer of pastry. Brush it with the egg yolk and then sprinkle it with the ground cinnamon.
Cook at 180 °C in the oven for around 50 minutes.
Sturgeon?
Oh yeah. In Italian tradition, sturgeon is a bit like caviar and, since it was already considered food for the rich, it’s of course connected with the Pope.
One of the earliest testimonies around sturgeon and caviar dates back to 1570 when Bartolomeo Scappi, private chef to Pope Pius V, created a menu entirely based on caviar and sturgeon. Other testimonies come from Cristoforo da Messisbugo (1557) and Bartolomeo Stefani (1663), who contributed to creating recipes and crafts of caviar production in Italy.
According to Ars Italica, 16th-century painting provides testimonies of the presence of sturgeon in Italy: in the painting Fish Sellers by the Cremonese Vincenzo Campi, the background shows us a faithful representation of one of the three native Italian kinds of sturgeon.
Legend also has it that Leonardo Da Vinci himself, upon seeing a sturgeon from Ticino, had the idea of giving its precious eggs enclosed in a casket set with stones and gems to Beatrice d’Este during her wedding banquet with Ludovico Sforza.
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