Lamb in Milk

Some notes on ugly food

Pork in milk (I know that's not the recipe it says in the title, but please bear with me) is a Northern Italian dish that comes under the heading of brutto ma buono, ugly but good. In English we might call this kind of food brown food or beige food or more pejoratively nursery food, school dinners – boiled beef, mince on toast or with potatoes, shepherd's or cottage pie, hotpot, stew, Dublin coddle – in order to dismiss it or to celebrate it in the face of food that is more immediately visually pleasing. In First, Catch I make a distinction between "food that looks good" and "food that looks like it tastes good" which applies here – a bowl of daube that has been cooked for hours might look like a cowpat on a plate but which you know as a result is rich and reduced and winey is a very different proposition to a plate of pretty radicchio and blushing citrus, even if both are lovely.

Brown food is often unfashionably English or Slavic or Germanic rather than Mediterranean but pork in milk (as well as dishes like bollito misto, zuppa forte and macco di fave) and of course the idea of brutto ma buono itself show that the Italians are not immune to its charms – in fact, while it is not uncommon in English to call a plate of food beautiful you would only call it in Italian buonissimo, very good, unless you were specifically referring to its visual effects, and maybe then backhandedly implying that it is beautiful but vapid, tasteless.

Ugly but good - the bollito misto at Casa del Brodo, Palermo