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| Mercedes (left), in her Venice home, cooks with Catherine Nixey |
Lunchtime in Venice. Outside Gino’s, Dino’s, and Giulio’s, sweating tourists are served lasagne and lamb chops by Polish waitresses. I, however, am sitting in Giorgio’s, and am being offered not food, but photographs by an Italian mamma. “Mia figlia...” She waves another picture. “Mio marito...” For Giorgio’s isn’t an Italian but an Italian’s: the family home of Mercedes and Giorgio, two of that increasingly rare commodity – real Venetians. I’ve come to learn a little about Mercedes’ cooking. Another photograph appears. “E mio figlio!” And rather a lot, it transpires, about her family.
The Italian family meal, as immortalised in a thousand olive oil advertisements, has an almost mythical status: a culinary Arcadia that one admires and aspires to but can rarely hope to experience. However, thanks to a small Italian organisation called Home Food, now you can. Sign up as a temporary member and the organisation will provide you with a menu of matriarchs everywhere from Sicily to the Alps: real life mammas who, for a small fee, will show you their cooking. And their photo albums.
For good measure, I decide to visit two: Mercedes (first names only are given) in Venice, and Ronnie, a septuagenarian grandmother, in Bologna.
Though Home Food is an entirely domestic operation, its aims go well beyond the home. Its founder, Egeria Di Nallo, is a sociology professor at Bologna University. Some years ago, her research led her to observe Italian eating habits and she was worried by what she saw. “Traditional Italian food was in decline in restaurants,” she says. “It takes time – ragù bolognese alone has to be simmered for five or six hours. To make fresh bread for lunch you have to start at 5am.” Lengths of time beyond the means of most restaurants, which today simply buy in their pasta, bread and ragù ready made, she says. “We were starting to forget our own food.” So, in 2004, Di Nallo founded Home Food, with no lesser aim than saving Italian cooking.
To help her on her mission, she sought out not chefs, but home cooks. This was partly because the chef’s tendency is usually towards innovation, whereas the cook’s is towards conservation. But partly also, one senses, from a certain impatience with professional posturing. “Mothers know more,” she says. “The roots of real Italian food are in the family.”
So Di Nallo’s cooks (or Cesarine as they are termed, in honour of a name once common among matriarchs) are all unpaid volunteers. But all have had to pass a rigorous selection process during which Di Nallo examines not only their cooking skills but also their homes and their families. “They must have learnt from a mother, not a book,” I am told. Italian food does not come much more Italian than this.
But, beware, because for those (such as me) raised on imitation Italian, the “real” stuff can come as something of a surprise. Any Brit who first encountered pizza in a Pizza Hut rather than in Palermo will probably recall a sensation of mild horror experienced upon seeing the real thing for the first time. Where, one couldn’t help wondering, was the sponge base? And the fat?
A gauche gastronomic reaction that, after the passage of several years, several pizzas and a few trips to Italy, I had assumed I was beyond. However, I have not been long in the (extremely tidy) kitchen of Ronnie, the first cesarina I visit, when I experience an almost entirely identical reaction; this time to lasagne. Ronnie has just explained to me how to prepare a real lasagne, a process that, in the latter stages at least, involves some assiduous watching of the kitchen clock.
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| A Pincia cake |
As a reward for my hard clock-watching work, I am sat at the table and promised a slice of this lasagne. I eagerly anticipate a swirling soup of saturated fat. What I get instead, is a rather prim, perfect construction. It has, I am told, 12 layers of pasta and has taken two days to prepare. It is also, I am told, Ronnie’s finest creation. The lovely Ronnie beams. So do I. But secretly, I can’t help wondering why she hasn’t put a bit more Cheddar on it.
In contrast, Ronnie’s chocolate torta de Teresina, a darkly delicious creation, could not be less prim. And the only surprising thing about it is that something so succulent and sophisticated could be so simple to prepare, taking probably only 10 minutes in total. What does take time, says Ronnie, is finding the right chocolate. “It must be perfect. No Nestlé. No Lindt.” (A ruling that I am rather shocked by. I had always rather considered Lindt the last word in luxury). Ronnie’s chocolate has, I am told, been bought at an artisan chocolatier in the centre of Bologna.
In the kitchen, Ronnie sets a bain-marie bubbling. The chocolate, which comes in enormous squares, is put in and left to melt. Stirring, explains Ronnie, when the chocolate is the right quality, is hardly necessary. Our role is simply, therefore, to stand, and admire it as it slowly, fragrantly dissolves. Once it has gone, we add eggs, sugar, a few puffs of flour and it is ready for the oven. About 30 minutes (and some even more careful clock-watching) later, it is ready. And extraordinary.
However, even if the food you cook with your Cesarina is not entirely to your taste then, in a sense, that doesn’t really matter. Because, according to Di Nallo, Home Food is, as its name suggests, as much about home as about food. As she explains: “Food isn’t only about taste; it is also about the atmosphere. At Home Food you don’t just get food. You get to eat around a table, to be a member of the family.”
Back in Venice, Mercedes is showing me how to bake Pincia, a traditional Venetian cake made from dried fruit and stale bread. However, because Mercedes, unlike the assiduous Ronnie, never uses scales (she doesn’t even own any) and doesn’t believe in measuring, it is a little hard to follow. She adds a splash of flour, a handful of raisins, gives a final stir, and bangs the cake into the oven. “How long?” I ask, tentatively. “Oooh,” says Mercedes, with a shrug. Clearly timing isn’t a forte either.
Impressive though this is, I feel a little disappointed. I had hoped, at the start of this trip, that by entering the inner sanctum of Italian families I might see enough trade secrets to be transformed from mere worshipper of Italian cooking to actual Italian initiate. But these cooks seem to do everything differently: where Mercedes measures nothing, Ronnie measures everything; where Ronnie is meticulous, Mercedes is relaxed. There seems to be no secret, no common culinary creed to copy at all.
Or almost none. Over each lunch, in a final attempt to understand, I ask both women why they cook. I am expecting an earnest answer about ingredients, or the importance of preserving Italian food. It doesn’t come. In fact, neither really mentions food at all. Both talk instead about family.
As Mercedes says: “To me, food isn’t so much food. It is about family, and friends; about sitting at a table having nice things.” I cheer up. It seems I was an initiate already.
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Details
Temporary membership costs €3.50, and lessons with Cesarine cost €35-€55 (www.homefood.it). Catherine Nixey travelled with Expedia (www.expedia.co.uk), which offers three nights at the Mercure Bologna Centro from £234 per person including flights with British Airways from London.
The closest town to where I am holidaying in southern Umbria is a 20-minute drive away. It has a garage and a pizzeria at the bottom of the hill, a baker halfway up and at the top in the old centre there are two bars, two grocery shops and a little butcher’s shop, tucked into an alley. We entered this boutique one evening last week. Two years ago it was run by a small old lady who was both kindly disposed towards us and deceptively adept at handling large pieces of meat. This time it was a lady I imagined to be her daughter who sat in a corner of the room. She rose languidly as I reviewed the contents of the display cabinet. This did not take long as, barring a small tray of what may have been rather dry fresh sausages or fairly fresh salami, the cabinet was bare. “Carne fresca?” I inquired in the little Italian that I can muster. A long and definitive “si” issued from this formidable matron and she disappeared into the small coldroom behind the counter, reappearing with a large but uninviting piece of silverside. I asked for something else, lamb or pork perhaps. No. She barred my entry to the coldroom but managed to extricate the real prize, a massive rib and loin of beef. I had little choice but to be wildly enthusiastic.
Ingredients
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