Like most Italians, when it comes to food I have a rather conservative palate: we like what we know (even if I am also open to exploring less trodden paths). What makes cooking Italian so rewarding is that almost every family will have a different version of the same dish. Take, for instance, pasta alla carbonara: I have encountered versions with guanciale, with pancetta, with whole eggs, with yolks only, with pecorino, with parmigiano and, yes, even with a dash of cream. All of them are the same dish and yet each one is different. The more I dig into Italian food, the more amazed I am by its diversity, vibrancy and liveliness.
It is a balancing act for me, comparing and contrasting the old with the contemporary. I browse through yesterday’s books and grandmothers’ recipes and I then look at the present, trying to understand the changes that have occurred – in knowledge, tastes, produce availability, social context. Cooking never stays still and I feel it is important to have one foot in the past and the other grounded in the present. I do not share the notion that there are recipes that are fixed forever, ones that should never be adapted to a different context, and I have become sceptical about notions of authenticity and tradition. Often, what is regarded as traditional now, was regarded as a doubtful, even objectionable newfangled thing a few generations ago – pasta, for instance, now a quintessential Italian food, was a mainly Southern Italian food until well after the second world war.
Of course I do not eat and cook only Italian, but Italian food is the one I go back to most often, the one that comes to me as naturally as breathing. I cook the kind of food that you are likely to find in most Italian homes: generally uncomplicated, with an emphasis on the quality of ingredients, rather than on technique.
After writing two cookbooks in Italian – one called English Puddings and one about lunch break food – I decided to try a more active life by opening a restaurant in Lyme Regis. I’m proud of what came out of that tiny kitchen and I learnt an awful lot but restaurant life wasn’t really for me – I missed my books and cooking on a small scale. So after three years, I decided to return to London, moved to the lovely Highbury Fields in Islington and carried on my writing and research.
I did not learn how to cook from my mum (a reluctant cook), I do not have an heirloom of nonna’s recipes lying in my drawer. I learnt from books, from daily cooking, from writing, from running a restaurant, from mistakes and successes. My mentors are the great writers and cooks: Elizabeth David, Anna del Conte, Jane Grigson, Marcella Hazan, Pellegrino Artusi, Ada Boni, Anna Gosetti della Salda, Luigi Veronelli, Carol Field, Lynne Rossetto Kasper, among many others. I now live between London and Lucca, in northern Tuscany and this has become another source of knowledge: talking with local cooks, shopkeepers and growers has given me endless material to research and try.
I hope you will enjoy my posts as much as I do researching and writing them.
Italian home cooking 