Bake the Drum Slowly

Movies can be inspirational. You sit in the dark for an hour and a half and come out transformed. You suddenly find yourself wanting to do things you never thought about doing before: traveling to exotic places, going out with Sharon Stone, karate-kicking Jackie Chan.

After watching “Big Night,” Stanley Tucci’s sweet little picture about an Italian restaurant, I needed to make a timpano.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, timpano is the fulcrum on which the big night in question turns. It is a big pastry drum stuffed with all manner of things: meatballs, sausages, tomato sauce, filled pastas. The slicing of it, in loving close-up, sends the dinner party spinning into delirium. It makes Isabella Rossellini very happy.

I had to try it.

The first problem was finding a recipe. In all my shelves of Italian cookbooks, there wasn’t a single timpano, though there were timballi aplenty, and some sounded quite a bit like the timpano in the movie.

Basically, timballo refers to anything baked in a pastry case, and it shows up all over Italy in a wide variety of forms--all of them fairly ostentatious and obviously intended for celebratory feasts. There are timballi filled with rice, timballi with noodles, timballi with red sauce, timballi with white sauce, timballi with stuffed pastas. . . .

Some are even more elaborate than anything an American filmmaker could imagine. Consider the description of one of the more Frenchified versions at one of the banquets in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel “The Leopard,” set in the late 1800s among the declining Sicilian aristocracy:

“The appearance of those monumental dishes of macaroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they evoked. The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a mist laden with aromas, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles in masses of piping-hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede.”

I was about ready to give up and settle for a timballo when I checked my source of last resort: the Grande Enciclopedia Illustrata Della Gastronomia (Selezione dal Reader’s Digest--Milano), a kind of Italian Larousse Gastronomique, only better.

There, between timo (thyme) and tinca (a kind of freshwater fish) was my timpano, with a recipe from a book called “La Cucina Napoletana” by Jeanne Carola Francesconi. (I have since been told by Piero Selvaggio, owner of Valentino restaurant, that there are actually seven versions of timpano in her book.)

Once I had caught my timpano di maccheroni al ragu, the problem was what to do with it. Slowly, I began to translate in my rusty Italian.

The first step: “Make a ragu Napoletana.” I flipped to the section on ragus, and there was a recipe by the same author (with a note that this was the preparation that was sung about by Eduardo De Filippo in “Sabato, Domenica e Lunedi” and by Giuseppe Marrotta in “L’Ora di Napoli”).

This was real old-style cooking--none of your fresh, bright, light stuff here. In the original recipe, a big piece of pork loin is larded with prosciutto and pancetta. It is braised over very low heat for two hours with a mixture of onions, lard, garlic and pancetta that has been passed through a meat grinder. Then red wine is added and it is cooked for another two hours. Then tomato paste is stirred in and it is cooked for two more hours.

At this point, the recipe says, the meat should be tender. The pork is removed, crumbled sausage is added in its place and the sauce is cooked for an hour more.

In the first place, I don’t know where you can even buy a larding needle anymore. So I substituted pork butt, a naturally fatty piece of meat. And rather than digging out the meat grinder, I chopped everything coarsely in the food processor. Other than that, I tried to follow the recipe as written.

This is not the kind of cooking I normally do. The idea of cooking a piece of meat for six hours is foreign to me--and notice that when the meat is done it isn’t even used. Essentially, it uses two pounds of pork as a seasoning. And all that tomato paste. Tomato paste!

It was delicious. The sauce turned out--in the words of the original recipe--”scurrissima, untuosa, lucida e densa,” a benediction that translates as “very dark, unctuous, shiny and thick.” This is the kind of cooking on which all that old-fashioned New York-style Italian food was based but too often doesn’t match. The dark brown sauce tasted of neither tomatoes nor meat but of some other alchemic third thing that was a melding of the two.

The pork butt was moist, tender and flavorful. I made sandwiches with it that night, shredding it by merely pressing it with my fingers through the plastic bag. (In Naples, the meat traditionally would be served as a main course, after pasta sauced with the ragu.)

The next day, I set to assembling the other components. First came another cooked mixture, a Baroque-sounding combination of pancetta, chicken livers, wild mushrooms and green peas. Strange, huh? But when I tasted it for seasoning, I was amazed at how deeply flavored and complex it was. In that sauce, I cooked some simple little meatballs made from ground beef, Parmigiano-Reggiano and bread crumbs.

Next was the pastry crust. For someone raised on chicken potpie, making a savory pastry dough that contains almost a cup of sugar is really flying on trust. But the ragu was so good, the peas and chicken livers so wonderful . . . how could I argue?

Then it was time to assemble the timpano. I lined a springform pan with the pastry crust and smoothed in a first layer of thick perciatelli noodles sauced with the ragu and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. Next came some slivered sauteed chicken thighs (the original calls for pigeon breasts, which you can get at some Asian markets, but the meaty, gamy flesh of chicken dark meat is a good substitute). Then came the pea mixture, some chopped mozzarella, more sauce, then more perciatelli and ragu . . . .

I lightly pressed the mixture with my hands to pack it into the pastry drum, then folded the remaining pastry over the top. This was the hardest part of making the whole dish. Because the pasta frolla dough is so short (a full cup of butter), the pastry crumbles easily, making it difficult to press into place. In the end, I ended up patching and patting quite a bit.

Into the oven it went. Every 15 minutes, I nervously opened the door and peeked. Slowly, the top crust turned golden, then brown. After about an hour, when the edges were dark brown and the whole thing looked set, I pulled it out.

In the movie, Primo, the chef, makes a big deal out of waiting a while to cut the pie, and the recipe calls for letting it rest 10 minutes to allow the contents time to firm up. So I did. And that was the second-hardest thing to do.

I freed the ring from the springform pan and gently lifted it away, being careful not to catch any pastry edges. There it stood, a shining golden-brown drum of pastry. Finally, carefully, I sliced it open, sticking the knife through the top crust, gently working it down through the side.

In cutaway, the slice revealed tan, crumbly crust, neatly sliced hollow noodles, chicken, meatballs, a gooey layer of cheese and more noodles. The only worrisome note was that the peas had turned pallid. Obviously, the extra hour of cooking was too much for them.

And for the rest of the dish, too, as it turned out. As much as I would like to say the timpano was a triumph, that the room stood up and danced, that Isabella Rossellini smiled . . . it just wasn’t happening.

In this case, the whole was much less than the sum of its parts. I’ll make the ragu again, and very happily (in fact, I can’t wait for the first cold, rainy day so I can serve it with thick ribbons of homemade pasta). The combination of peas, mushrooms, chicken livers and pancetta will also show up as a sauce for pasta, or maybe polenta. Even the pastry crust has a melt-in-your-mouth quality to recommend it--in a dish where its overpowering sweetness will be better appreciated.

But I guess the bottom line is that I’m no Leopard. Ostentation cuts no mustard at my table unless it’s accompanied by flavor. Cinema paradiso, indeed.

TIMPANO DI MACCHERONI AL RAGU

This recipe was adapted from “La Cucina Napoletana” by Jeanne Carola Francesconi (Delfino). There were many changes even from the adapted version I tested. I reduced the amount of fat in the ragu to try to make it a little brighter. I increased the amount of pastry used and divided it for easier handling. You still might need to pat and press it into the springform pan, though. I also reduced the amount of sugar to cut down on the sweetness. I delayed adding the peas until the sauce was cool to try to keep them a little fresher tasting. Finally, I broke the recipe into usable components so you don’t need to make the whole thing if you don’t want to.

NEAPOLITAN RAGU

1 1/2 pounds boneless pork butt, in 1 piece

Salt, pepper

2 tablespoons finely minced parsley

1 pound onions, quartered

2 cloves garlic

2 ounces chopped pancetta

1/4 cup olive oil

2 1/2 cups dry red wine

1 (6-ounce) can tomato paste

1 cup tomato puree

Water

1/2 pound Italian sausage, crumbled

PASTRY CRUST

3 1/3 cups flour

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup butter

5 egg yolks

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

PEAS AND MEATBALLS

1/2 ounce dried mushrooms

Water

1/2 pound ground beef

1 egg

1/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

1 sprig parsley, minced

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup dried bread crumbs

1 tablespoon butter

1 chicken liver

1 chicken heart

2 ounces sliced pancetta

1/3 cup minced onion

1/2 cup dry white wine

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1/2 pound small green peas

ASSEMBLY

2 boneless pigeon breasts or 2 boneless chicken thighs

Salt, pepper

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons finely chopped onion

1/2 cup dry white wine

1 pound perciatelli or bucatini

3/4 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano

1/2 pound mozzarella, cut in strips

2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped

NEAPOLITAN RAGU

Season pork all over with salt and pepper to taste and parsley.

In meat grinder or food processor, chop together onions, garlic and pancetta.

Cook pork, ground pancetta mixture and olive oil in large casserole, preferably earthenware, covered over very low heat, turning meat only once, until onions begin to color, about 1 hour. Add red wine and cook, stirring occasionally. After about 2 hours, onions will be well-browned and most liquid will be evaporated.

Raise heat to medium, add 2 to 3 tablespoons tomato paste and cook, stirring constantly, until tomato paste mixes in and becomes dark brown. Repeat, using 2 to 3 tablespoons at a time, until all tomato paste is used. Add tomato puree and 1/4 cup water, lower heat, cover and cook another 2 hours, adding water from time to time to keep sauce from drying out.

When pork is tender enough that meat fork slides in easily, remove from sauce and set aside. Add sausage and continue cooking sauce 1 hour more. Sauce should be “dark, unctuous, shiny and thick.”

PASTRY CRUST

Combine flour and sugar in large mixing bowl and cut in butter. Beat egg yolks and salt until light and add, little at time, until flour mixture just holds together. Divide in 2 parts, 1 slightly smaller than other. Gather both into balls, flatten into discs, wrap tightly and refrigerate 1 hour.

PEAS AND MEATBALLS

In small bowl, cover mushrooms with hot water. Set aside 1 hour.

In large bowl, combine ground beef, egg, Parmigiano-Reggiano, parsley, salt and pepper to taste and bread crumbs. Form into walnut-sized meatballs.

Melt butter in small skillet over medium-high heat and briefly fry chicken liver and heart just until cooked through, about 5 minutes. Remove and reserve.

In large saute pan, cook pancetta and minced onion over low heat until soft, about 10 minutes, then add white wine. Cook until wine evaporates. After 10 minutes, add mushrooms and soaking liquid, tomato paste, cooked chicken liver and heart and meatballs. Simmer for 10 minutes, then set aside to cool. When cool, add peas.

ASSEMBLY

Season pigeon breasts with salt and pepper to taste and fry in butter on both sides until brown, 3 to 5 minutes. Add finely chopped onion and white wine and cook, covered, until wine evaporates. Cool breasts and cut into pieces.

Roll out larger pastry ball into large circle and place in 9-inch springform pan. Gently push into corners to cover bottom and sides of pan and leave remainder draped outside.

Cook perciatelli in rapidly boiling water until just tender. Dress with 1 cup ragu and 1/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. Spread half of perciatelli over bottom of pan. Scatter pieces of pigeon breast over, then peas, meat mixture, then mozzarella, then hard-boiled eggs. Cover with 2 cups ragu and 1/4 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano, then another layer of sauced perciatelli. Finally, cover everything with remaining 1 cup ragu and remaining Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Roll out smaller pastry ball and drape over top of pie. Trim to fit just inside of pan and fold excess from bottom crust over top. Crimp to seal, making sure edges are inside of springform rim.

Bake at 400 degrees until brown and firm, about 45 minutes. Set aside to cool for 10 minutes before unmolding and serving.

Makes 10 to 12 servings.

Each of 12 servings contains about:

824 calories; 926 mg sodium; 307 mg cholesterol; 54 grams fat; 49 grams carbohydrates; 27 grams protein; 1.10 grams fiber.