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Pretty as a Picture

Castelfranco Salad with Pears and Blue Cheese

We have become familiar not just with the deep maroon

colours of radicchio but also with the asperity of its taste.

While there are even more bitter members of the endive

family (cicoria and puntarella come to mind) radicchio is

still quite a shock to the novice palate and used sparingly

in those salad mixes so beloved of supermarkets.

I am not a fan of those bags of salad. Unless we are

talking about mesclun – the Niçoise mix of various leaves

picked in infancy, with an intense, herby flavour – I am a

one-leaf sort of man. I do not want a salad to be a marriage

of texture and dressing; I want to acknowledge the delicate

flavour of a buttery lettuce heart, or a crisp, mildly bitter

Cos (a.k.a. Romaine) or the full-on milky bitterness of

an endive. I use a fresh head of lettuce and prepare it –

washing and spinning – for the occasion and the dish. No

leaf incarcerated in a plastic bag for several days can

possibly compare.

There is also an aesthetic involved. No one could ignore

the splendour of a whole curly endive with a snow -white

core, radiating out to primrose yellow, then a deep, coarse

green exterior, all splayed out like an unruly mop.

However, the most beautiful salad, the real looker, must

be the radicchio di Castelfranco, more prosaically entitled

the Castelfrank, or speckled endive.

The varieties of radicchio are named after their place of

origin: Chioggia being the most familiar, round-headed

radicchio beloved, apparently, of Tony Blair, while Treviso

produces the elongated maroon and white striped bulbs

that have become increasingly popular, as well as their

extraordinary offspring, the hydroponically forced tardivo

with its tendrils arising from a single core. Castelfranco is

an elegant little town some forty kilometres inland from

Venice, famous not just for its beautiful salad but also as

Giorgione’s birthplace, master of the pittura senza disegno

(‘picture without drawing’).

As with all radicchios, you can cook Castelfranco.

Quartered and coloured in oil and butter, then stewed with

a pinch of sugar, a jigger of lemon juice and a glass of red

wine, it is an excellent accompaniment to steak or roast

lamb, but it seems a bit of a shame not to show its leaves in

all their raw splendour. The recipe below, I have to admit,

tastes just as good when made with an escarole or Batavia

lettuce, but would be just a little senza pittura.

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