Couscous: past, present, future

Today our series of articles dedicated to the great 5 dishes which will enrich the food-side of the Rome Food&Festival begins. This is the first edition of an important event which will take place from Friday 17th to Sunday 19th of May at Eataly Roma, in the Ostiense neighbourhood. The splendid wines of 60 vine-dressers – selected by Helmuth Köcher – will find their perfect complement in the dishes prepared by 15 chefs, 5 dishes every day, each one marked according to three versions: past, present, future.

We couldn’t begin this sequence of emblematic dishes in Italian cuisine - chicken, veal with tuna sauced, pasta carbonara, baccalà and couscous – if not by starting from the latter. This is so because of its noble origin (it is mentioned for the first time in a 13th cent. book on the cuisine of Andalusia), its widespread use (it is basically consumed by all the people on the lower part of the Mediterranean sea, from the Sahara’s Berbers, to the inhabitants of Western Sicily) and the Identità Golose particular inclination for this dish, finely summed up by Paolo Marchi: «What I like about couscous is the fact it is a friendly dish, a palette on which a chef can show off his knowledge and unleash his creativity, I bit like with risotto. Couscous is just the name of a door which, once crossed, leads us into a world ready to be discovered and understood, just like rice, pasta, sushi».

This effective synthesis was used to introduce the Identità Couscous dinner, on April 16th, when at the Erba Brusca in Milan 4 chefs - Fabrizio Ferrari, Eugenio Boer, Alice Delcourt and Mario Peqini – built a memorable menu based on couscous which made many people incredibly happy. In fact, the very Ferrari of Porticciolo 84 in Lecco and the French-American chef of the Erba Brusca will again be protagonists in Rome: the former will interpret a couscous of the past, during the dinner on Sunday 19th in Rome, while Delcourt will interpret today’s couscous, again on Sunday but at lunch time. Francesco Apreda of the Hassler hotel’s Imàgo restaurant in Rome, will have the task of cooking tomorrow’s couscous on the evening of Saturday 18th.

Here is a little preview, given by the persons concerned. «My “yesterday” will be based on fish», Ferrari, who was already very appreciated both in San Vito Lo Capo and in Milan thanks to his delicate Couscous salad with tuna made with umbrina, pears, almonds and kefir, explains. «In Rome, instead, I would like to express all my recent drying-fetish: I was thinking of using some powdered fish – in the drying-machine, 1 kg of fish becomes 300 grams – and then mix it with the couscous. This because my drying machine works virtually 24 hours a day and I put all sorts of things inside it».

Alice Delcourt’s today will be, instead, a vegetable couscous, the logic epilogue to the Smoked mackerel on mackerel and herb couscous and to the Couscous with stewed lamb with which she had won, respectively, the Cous Cous Fest in 2011 and 2012. «Vegetable couscous must have a character of its own», she said. She will be certainly helped by all those spices chosen following her daily inspiration: «cumin and fennel seeds, a little cinnamon, juniper berries, cloves, cardamom...».

Spices, finally, will play the main role in “tomorrow’s” couscous by Francesco Apreda. To him, tomorrow is considered in the sense of “globalisation”: the Neapolitan chef will thus extend the audience of couscous-fans to Indian latitudes, his second home: «I would like to do so with a Roman lamb prepared in an inverted barbecue process: first smoked, then prepared as a skewer. I will certainly use curry, curcuma, some Goa watercress and some nutmeg. But I’m also making some tests with a sauce made with organic tomatoes from Puglia. And I also have a surprise made with Grana Padano in mind». The Mediterranean sea meets the Subcontinent.

For info on the programme and for tickets to the Rome Food&Wine Festival click here.