Rotolo is a Tuscan dish, involving homemade sheet pasta, greens (spinach, stinging nettles, borage), ricotta, parmesan and porcini, all rolled up and baked in tomato sauce, then sliced and served with sage butter. When you cut through the rotolo, you get a swirl of the pasta, a swirl of the green, bombs of the white cheese and, in the middle, that beautiful mushroom cooked so it’s tender and intense and meaty and creamy.
It’s not as complicated as it sounds, but it is unusual, which means people like to look at it. And that’s what I was cooking when Christmas at the River Cafe was filmed 23 years ago. It’s the only reason I got discovered and ended up on TV. It’s how I got to where I am today.
I remember the day my boss, the River Cafe’s co-owner, Rose Gray, taught me to make it. I had never tasted anything like it in my life. Pasta as silken as a scarf; greens the very opposite of what most British kids knew, because since the war we had tended to boil the sh*t out of them, whereas here, braised with garlic and butter and nutmeg, they were intense, dark green, delicious. The ricotta, clean and white; the sage as crispy as pommes frites.
Rotolo has been with me ever since. We have it on the menu at Jamie’s Italian. As the seasons change, we go from mushrooms to butternut squash. It’s delicious fresh from being poached, and the leftovers can be baked – al forno – in tomato sauce. I love the ritual of making it.
It taught me a lot about Italian food. It also taught me to see food through the eyes of a woman. Rose was incredible. She wasn’t a chef, but a self-taught cook at a time in Britain when there weren’t many women in the kitchen, and certainly no female owners who weren’t trained chefs. Mostly, Rose didn’t give a damn about protocol. She and her business partner, Ruth Rogers, had spent many years living in the mountains of Tuscany, and instead of the almost robotically methodical way most chefs operated at the time, they would buy fresh ingredients and write two new menus – one for lunch and one for dinner – every single day. They taught me about seasonality, and using the whole animal, and they gave context to ingredients. They weren’t academic about food – they taught me to be more responsive and more nurturing.
Rose was strong and kind and clever. Quite artistic by nature, she surrounded herself with artistic people but favoured simplicity. Restaurant cooking at the time was about garnishes and dressing things up: making food look prettier than it actually was. Rose, by contrast, was paring things down, and buying the very best ingredients. She would happily spend five times the usual amount on the best dried chickpeas, then spend a day soaking them and a day cooking them. She taught me that it wasn’t necessarily about following a tradition of the only way to cook something, but rather, discovering the best way to cook that thing, on that day, with that weather.
If you’ve worked at the River Cafe, you belong to a family – even if you haven’t worked with more recent staff members, you know each other really well because you’ve come from the same school. When Rose passed away in 2010, there were 15 or 20 generations of chefs at her funeral. It was amazing to see the impact she had.
She still berates me every day, in my head – in a nice way. I learned from her to focus on what we can do better, rather than pat ourselves on the back about how good we are. She was a great teacher.
Squash and spinach pasta rotolo
Rotolo is one of the more unusual pasta dishes – many people have never eaten it before. The way I prepare mine means it is closer to a lasagne or cannelloni. It looks really pretty and you get the gnarly, crisp bits of pasta on the top complemented by the softer pasta hiding underneath the sauce.
Prep 20 min
Cook 2 hr 20 min
Serves 4 to 6
1 butternut squash (about 1.2kg)
1 red onion
Olive oil
1 tsp dried thyme
Salt and black pepper
500g frozen spinach
1 whole nutmeg, for grating
4 garlic cloves
1 x 700ml jar passata
6 large fresh pasta sheets (15cm x 20cm each)
50g feta cheese
20g parmesan cheese
A few sprigs of fresh sage (optional)
Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas 4. Cook the squash whole on a roasting tray for around 1 hour 30 minutes, then take out of the oven. Meanwhile, peel and roughly chop the onion, put into a medium pan on a medium-low heat with a glug of oil, the thyme and a pinch of sea salt and black pepper, and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Stir in the frozen spinach, cover with a lid and leave to cook slowly for another 15 minutes, until the liquid has evaporated, then take it off the heat. Cut the squash in half, discard the seeds and skin, then mash up with a fork. Keeping them separate, season both the squash and spinach to perfection with salt, pepper and a grating of nutmeg.
Peel and finely slice the garlic, then put it into a shallow 28cm casserole pan on a medium heat with a splash of oil and fry for a couple of minutes, until light golden. Pour in the passata, add a splash of water to the empty jar, swirl it around and pour it into the pan. Bring to a boil, simmer for just three minutes, then season to taste.
On a clean work surface, lay out the pasta sheets facing lengthways away from you. Working quickly so the pasta doesn’t dry out, brush them with water, then evenly divide and spread the squash over the sheets. Sprinkle over the cooked spinach and crumble over the feta. Roll up the sheets and cut each one into four chunks, then place side-by-side in the tomato sauce. Finely grate over the parmesan, then pick the sage leaves (if using), toss in a little oil and scatter over the top. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes at the bottom of the oven until golden and crisp. Delicious served with a fresh green salad.
From Save with Jamie, by Jamie Oliver (Penguin Random House)
