There were – and still are for the rest of my family – grey days during our annual camping holidays in Pembrokeshire in Wales when I was growing up: tents that floated away, and rainy-day visits to the butterfly museum. But the many good days – those perfect beach picnic days – shine like Lyle’s golden syrup in our collective memories.
Sometimes the sun shone so hard, it burned our backs as we stared into rock pools, then we flung ourselves in the freezing sea to be swallowed up by waves twice our size, our legs turning mottled blue before charging back to the patchwork of towels and rugs. Lunch would have been made that morning. Sandwiches for 15 – ham, ham and cheese, cheese and pickle, all bundled in foil; eggs hard-boiled, and sausages fried, then cooled and packed along with pork pies, more cheese, and fruit in the icebox. A pitstop at the shop in Dale for bags of welsh cakes, Jamaica ginger or golden syrup cake and caramel wafers, before our convoy continued down lanes and across the disused airfield so we could all clamber down the path to the beach at Marloes.
A foil-wrapped sandwich, a hard-boiled egg and a slice of cake is always tasty, I think – even more so when you are wrapped in a towel with sand between your toes. Picnics are a thrilling reversal of normal rules: air instead of walls, sand in place of tables, fingers where knives and forks would otherwise be called for; licence to reach and grab, to swirl eggshells into the sand; to lie down and close your eyes for a while, before eating again. Sand in both suncream and sandwich and reports from one child that another has fallen off a rock or found false teeth in the surf only made things more thrilling.
On the other side of Europe, meanwhile, my partner Vincenzo and his Sicilian family had their own picnic habits, which basically meant bringing a cold Sunday lunch and lots of umbrellas to the beach in Gela: tomato- and breadcrumb-laden pizza (which still strikes me as the most unlikely beach picnic fare), a sturdy torte, baked pasta and breadcrumbed meat, and a whole watermelon to bury in the wet sand so it kept cool, which ran the risk of it floating away like an edible buoy.
The word “picnic” comes from the french pique nique, meaning you pick your spot and everyone brings something. Our family affairs now are a collision of these two worlds, hard-boiled eggs or cold sausages meeting some sort of sturdy pastry torta with a cheese filling, and slices of shop-bought cake jostling for attention with cold halfmoons of watermelon, ready be dropped in the sand and rinsed in the sea, then eaten.
I have several recipes for savoury torta dough, some with yeast, some without. For no reason other than habit, the one I use for a broccoli/ricotta filling is adapted from Marcella Hazan’s Sicilian sfincini di San Vito, which, unlike the classic deep Sfincini pizza, is a pie with a top and a bottom. It is a sturdy bake, although the yeast means the pastry plumps nicely.
Broccoli and ricotta torta
For the dough
1 tsp dried yeast
1 small pinch sugar
250g plain flour
200ml lukewarm water
1 pinch salt
1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsp whole milk
For the filling
500g broccoli or other greens
300g ricotta
1 egg
5 tbsp grated parmesan
Salt and pepper
Dry breadcrumbs
Put the yeast in a large bowl, add a third of the water, stir and leave for 10 minutes. Add half the flour and another third of water, a pinch of salt and sugar, the oil and milk and stir until smooth. Finally, add the last third of water and the rest of the flour and bring everything together into a soft, compact dough.
Turn on to an oiled board and knead and fold for five minutes, pat into a ball, return to an oiled bowl, cover with clingfilm and leave to rise for three hours.
Meanwhile, make the filling: boil the broccoli until tender, drain and leave to cool. In a large bowl mash the broccoli with the ricotta, egg, parmesan, salt and black pepper. Taste to make sure you have a well flavoured filling.
Set the oven to 200C/390F/gas 6 and put a flat baking tray in to heat. Divide the dough in half. Working on a piece of greaseproof paper (so you can slide the pie off later) roll one half into a circle of 25cm diameter, sprinkle with dry breadcrumbs – keeping an inch (2.5cm) short of the edges, and then spread the filling over the crumbs. Finish with a zig-zag of oil in a thin stream. Roll the second half of the dough into a disc large enough to cover the first, lay it over the filling, and press the edges of the dough together to seal.
Slide the pie on to the hot tray, brush with a mixture of water and olive oil or beaten egg and bake for 25 minutes, or until golden. Leave it to rest for at least 20 minutes before cutting, then wrapping it in foil or a tea towel to take to the picnic.
