Sardinian-inspired cooking

This winter, I didn’t manage to take a holiday with my family. Work has been too hectic and perhaps the winter wasn’t, with the exception of an extreme week, “wintry” enough to send me shivering to warmer climes. But one of the joys of being a chef is the ability to conjure up a virtual holiday by cooking with the specific tastes of a foreign location. Here, I’ve opted for Sardinia, Italy’s second biggest island: a land of mountains and beaches and wonderful food, home to shepherds and fishermen. Their pecorino cheese is one of the best; but for me, and for most food enthusiasts, the thing to get excited about is the bottarga.

You don’t have to restrict your dried-roe “holiday” to Sardinia: bottarga is found in other places, too. As well as in different regions of Italy, you’ll find it in France, where it is called bouttargu e. In Lebanon they like to slice batrakh and serve it with thinly sliced raw garlic and olive oil. In Japan it’s known as karasumi, served sliced and warmed gently over a charcoal grill with a glass of good warm sake. It’s really a testament to its deliciousness that all these different cultures hold it in such high esteem. Historically, it seems likely that the Arabs brought it first to the south of Italy. Karasumi seems so different that perhaps the Japanese just worked it out independently, as they did so much else.

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