Mother, daughter dish out Italian Maine chefs offer cooking classes

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At the beginning of a cooking class last week in an upstairs room at The Market Basket in Rockport, Nancy Harmon Jenkins spread her arms wide, like an Italian mother in a movie, and welcomed a dozen or so food enthusiasts to her cooking class. “There’s almond cake in the back of the room,” she said. “Take a big piece.” The room has a counter area with an oven and stove at one end and a long table at the other. Bowls and baskets of onions, celery, fennel, lemons, capers, eggs and carrots separated the demonstration area from the bar stools where experienced home cooks sat eager for instruction.

Behind the stove stood Nancy, who is best known for her literary-minded cookbooks on Mediterranean food and culture, and her daughter, chef Sara Jenkins, who has run kitchens in Boston, Italy and, most recently, New York City. Cooking classes are a regular event at The Market Basket, a gourmet store owned by Nancy and her sister, Jane Carr, both of whom grew up in Camden.

Typically, the classes feature Maine chefs such as Sam Hayward from Fore Street in Portland, Melissa Kelly from Primo in Rockland, Tom Gutow from The Castine Inn, and Clark Frasier and Mark Gaier from Arrows in Ogunquit. Earlier this year, Nancy shared her experiences and recipes from a six-week tour of southern India. On Sundays in April, Gerald Sabatino (The Eating Gallery in Camden), Brian Hill (Francine in Camden), Rich Hanson (Cleonice in Ellsworth) and Rob Evans (Hugo’s in Portland) are among the chefs offering two-hour classes to groups of about 15 atThe Market Basket. The cost is $40.

Last week was the first time Nancy and Sara, who also was born in Camden, have taught a class together in Maine. Nancy splits her time between Tuscany and Camden, and Sara, who turns 40 this year, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., after having spent most of her early years in Italy. Finding them both in Maine at the same time is rare.

So is their collective understanding of Italian food. They worked as a tag team, with one filling in the small gaps in the other’s considerable knowledge. On both Wednesday of last week and Sunday of this week (they teach a third and final class together tonight), they discussed Italian cooking and prepared four recipes, all of which will appear next spring in Nancy’s latest cookbook on the food of southern Italy.

Though abundant in her knowledge of the culture and cuisine of Italy, where she has owned a home since the 1970s, Nancy was often whimsical, sometimes chuckling at her own foibles, such as forgetting to put raisins in filling for stuffed swordfish rolls) and replacing the word lemon with “antioxidant.” As in: “Pull off the leaves of the artichoke and rub it with the antioxidant to keep it from turning brown.”

Sara was focused on preparatino, sometimes leaning over her cutting board as if talking to the onions she was chopping or the blood oranges she was sectioning. She often offered helpful tips. Stirring tomato paste into boiling water before adding it to soup is a “really Italian thing to do,” she said. “It gives softness and tenderness to the tomato paste. You don’t get that acidity.”

“Patience, I think, is the most important part of cooking,” said Nancy. Sara backed up her mother by saying: “I’m in favor of slow cooking meats for six hours. It you cook protein at a slow temperature, it’s tender.” A woman who looked like Isabella Rossellini said: “At our age, we have the patience. It’s the time we don’t have.”

At the Sunday lesson, the mother and daughter showed how a tasty four-course meal of risotto with Maine shrimp, swordfish with savory stuffing, fennel salad and a lemon cake made with olive oil could be prepared easily within two hours. Of course, they had Lisa Tapken, a Thomaston caterer who organized this season’s classes, assisting as dishwasher and all-around kitchen staff.

Nancy developed the recipes from her European research jaunts. “You ask someone in Italy how to make a dish and they tell you: Add a little artichoke and potatoes, and then mint at the end,” Nancy said. “You know it’s more than that. So you start reading and talking to other cooks and you rely on your instinct.” She paused and smiled. “You put it all together and test it, and your daughter comes along and tells you what you’ve done wrong.”

Sara made small modifications along the way, tossing in extra salt or pouring wine freely onto sauteing onions. “You can see I’m not measuring carefully,” said Sara with a wry smile. “I try to get that across about cooking. With the exception of baking, a little more or less wine, a few more or less capers – leaving out the raisins, it’s all personal taste. What do you like?”

In the last 10 years, Nancy has come to appreciate her daughter’s facility in the kitchen. Between the two of them, she says Sara is the better cook. According to Nancy, Julia Child, a family friend, once said that the best food she tasted in Tuscany was made by Sara.

“Both of my children are very good cooks,” said Nancy, referring also to her grown son. “Doing stuff together was something Sara and I fell into. We don’t do it that often. But it works out nicely because we do have the same sensibility about food. I have a lot of respect for her. When she says, ‘This recipe freaks me out because it doesn’t have enough salt,’ I think she’s right.”

For Sara, patience is not only a good quality for a cook, but also for a daughter whose profession overlaps with her mother’s.

“It has taken me awhile to get to this point,” said Sara, a graduate of Gould Academy in Bethel. As with many daughters who are close to their mothers, she had to take other paths – she studied photography at Rhode Island School of Design and worked as a newspaper photographer before becoming a chef at Figs in Boston – to find her way back to something her mother taught her to love.

“I never wanted it to look like I was riding on her coattails, but I’ve developed enough of my own reputation to not worry about that any more,” said Sara. “We have so much shared history of tasting food. We share the same palate.”

As for the onlookers, they were mostly silent. They were eating, their own palates delighted by the Jenkins’ mother-daughter lessons.

Risotto ai gamberini di Maine

(Little Maine Shrimp Risotto)

Makes 6 servings

Maine shrimp are so tiny and delicate that they can’t stand up even to the 20 to 30 minutes of cooking for a normal risotto. We adapted a normal shrimp risotto to take advantage of the incredibly sweet, briny flavors of our local shrimp, which are in season for such a short period each year. For the rice, carnaroli and vialone nano are preferred by chefs in Italy, although arborio, which is more widely available there (and here), is an acceptable substitute. Note that these are short-grain varieties of rice, and not brand names. What won’t work in risotto is a long-grain variety such as basmati or Carolina gold.

For the stock:

3 pounds whole, unpeeled Maine shrimp

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 cup dry white wine

1/2 tablespoon tomato paste

fish bones from white-fleshed fish, such as haddock or halibut

1 leek, split and cleaned

1 onion

1 celery stalk

8 sprigs parsley

1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns

For risotto:

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons minced yellow onion

1 1/2 cups rice for risotto

1/2 cup dry white wine

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon finely minced flat-leaf parsley

Peel the shrimp, but do not discard the heads and shells. Set the flesh aside and put the shrimp heads and shells in a large saucepan or small stock pot with the olive oil. Set over medium heat and cook, stirring until the shells turn bright pink. Add the white wine and tomato paste and stir to dissolve the paste. Add the fish bones, leek, onion, celery, parsley and peppercorns. Add water to just barely cover the stock ingredients. Set over low heat, cover the pan, bring to a simmer and cook very gently for 30 minutes. Strain the stock through a fine-mesh sieve, discarding the solids and transfer to a saucepan. Keep the stock warm, just barely simmering but never boiling, on the stove while you make the risotto. In the bottom of another stock pot, combine the butter and olive oil and set over low heat. As soon as the butter has melted, stir in the minced onion and cook gently, stirring until the onion has melted into the fat. Do not let the onion brown.

When the onion is soft and transparent, stir in all the rice and cook, stirring until the rice is thoroughly coated with the oniony fat and becoming opaque. Add the white wine and raise the heat slightly. Cook until the wine has almost evaporated. Then start adding ladlefuls of the barely simmering stock. Add two or three ladlefuls at first and stir them into the rice. As soon as the shrimp stock has been absorbed – and this will happen quite quickly at first – stir in another couple of ladlefuls. As the rice cooks, it will swell and absorb the stock more slowly, but the rice should never get dry: There should always be a king of velvety, starchy coating of stock around the grains for rice. Venetians, great risotto cooks, call this riso all’onda, rice on the wave, indicating that when you shake the pan there should be enough liquid to make a thick, sloppy wave. Continue adding ladlefuls of stock and letting the rice absorb each one. (You may not need all the stock.)

The rice is done when it is al dente, meaning with a little bite to the center, and the stock is thick and rather soupy – not so much that you need to use a spoon to eat it but definitely a part of the dish. Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in the shrimp flesh. Quickly cover the pan with a tight-fitting lid and set aside for 5 to 10 minutes to let the rice settle and the shrimps cook very, very gently in the heat of the rice. Transfer to a serving dish and sprinkle with a very little, very finely minced flat-leaf parsley.