When Il Chiostro is in Venice, I always prepare dinner for the group at our apartment.
I don’t have a large kitchen, or enough pots or even a good chef’s knife, so it’s a challenge to cook for 25. But it is one of the nicest activities we offer in our Venice program because people always love a home-cooked meal. We have a large living room in our apartment which we set up with small café tables with candles so it looks like an intimate little restaurant – except that after the meal, we transform the restaurant back into our home, returning all those sweet little draped café tables to their rightful places as desks, coffee tables and nightstands.
This particular week I couldn’t come up with a menu that excited me.
Venice has a terrific fish market in a large, gutsy piazza just behind the Rialto Bridge where fishermen bring their daily catch. It’s quite vivacious. We love taking our photographers there early Tuesday mornings. They goad the fishermen, chattering and slogging around in their big rubber boots, to pose with eels and cuttlefish glistening in black ink.
But I was there to shop for dinner.
I stopped in front of a stand towards the end of the bank. The vendor was a very handsome blonde man with a thick blue cable knit sweater and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, occasionally dropping ashes all over the catch. I spied the fresh tuna but skipped it because I knew I didn’t have the equipment in my Venetian kitchen to prepare it for 25. But then Aunt Lina came to mind. Could I do it? I took a chance, and scooped up all the tuna he had (at a nice discount which made both of us happy!) It turned out that I had a pot, but not a container to marinate the tuna. So, a quick trip to the local housewares store in our own Campo Santa Margherita turned up the perfect thing – a plastic tub sold as a box for cat litter! Even though I knew it was unused I scoured it well and covered it with tight plastic wrap so the tuna could marinate in the onions and vinegar for the next 2 days.
One of my fond memories of creative cooking in Italy.
Aunt Lina’s Tuna
For 30 people:
- 10 lbs tuna cut into 1” steaks
- 4 medium Spanish onions sliced
- Fresh mint (1/2-2/3 the bulk of the onions)
- Red wine vinegar
- Sugar
- Olive Oil
- Flour
- Salt
Salt and flour steaks. Shake off excess flour and pan fry until light brown on medium high heat. Set the steaks aside.
In a pot, saute the onions in olive oil, adding salt; cook until translucent. Add whole fresh mint leaves (omitting stalks). Cook with onions until leaves become wilted. Add enough vinegar to almost cover onions. Add just enough sugar to add a slight sweetness to the vinegar (start with ¼ cup and add to adjust flavor). Simmer for about 10 minutes to dissolve the sugar and mix the flavors.
Next, add the tuna to the pot, being sure that all the tuna is surrounded by the onion-vinegar mixture (depending on your pot, you may need to layer). At this point the liquid level should be just shy of covering the tuna (about ½’ below). Simmer for about 45 minutes uncovered. Move the tuna around from top to bottom a couple of times during this time to ensure even flavor distribution.
Set aside to cool. Transfer tuna to air-tight containers, breaking steaks into 2” pieces. Cover with onion-vinegar mixture, and marinate in the refrigerator for at least 2-3 days.