When I was about 5 years old, I proudly stood on a chair in the kitchen of my
childhood home in Tuscany and learned how to make the most perfect risotto in the
world. That memory is one of pure, intense happiness, and most importantly it is
the single moment that established my future. In an instant, I became immersed in
the ritual, rhythm, emotion and tradition of cooking, and all these years later I’m still
there.
The magical house that wove that spell, is called La Tambura, and is named after the
drum-shaped mountain that stands some distance behind it and is part of the Apuan
Alps range, where the Carrara marble quarries are still yielding their precious stone
after thousands of years. These are my mountains, with villages and pathways that
are as familiar to me as the streets of any town.
The light that bounces off these mountains sparkles with tiny crystal fragments
embedded in the marble, and as you pass the mills, you can hear the permanent
“shush shush shush” sound of the hard diamond blades slicing back and forth
through the blocks, with trickling sand and water to help the process. With my
father, I would come to these mills as a child and stand with my hand in his, awed by
this process of slicing through rock; in those days one block of marble could take a
whole year to cut though.
These outings to the mountains would be part of one of my parents’ famous epic
picnics, which always had to include cooking in the open air. My parents loved
creating picnics for us when we were children. There was always a routine to be
observed. First the fire had to be lit, but in order to make it safe and to allow us to
cook steaks or any fish we might catch, or toast bread to be drizzled with olive oil
over the glowing embers, a circle of flat stones had to be hauled into position, after
which the fire could built from wood we all gathered together, and then lit. Often,
our picnic would be followed by a snack in a little village café on the way home, such
as fragrant basil leaves wrapped in fluffy pizza dough and deep fried in piping hot
olive oil until perfectly crisp.
At home at La Tambura, as a family we were almost self-sufficient. Thanks to the
hours of work that Beppino (our caretaker ) put into the huge vegetable garden, we
grew most of our own produce, made wine, made bread, often fished for our own
catch, kept chickens, rabbits and a pig for salame and sausages – there was even a
still for grappa. I grew up not just understanding where food comes from, but also
about it’s cycles and natural logic.
I thought tomatoes would always taste sun-warmed and sweet, that everybody
gathered their own green beans straight from the plant and plunged them into
boiling salted water within seconds of picking them, and that skinning and gutting a
rabbit was a completely normal thing to do.
We’d go and drop our fishing nets into the sea at dusk, spreading them out into a
wide arc overnight. At dawn, Beppino would wake us gently to go down to the
shoreline and pull them in, matching the rhythm of our arms with the waves.
Then there were the conversations, always about food, that flowed across the
kitchen table, the aroma of freshly brewed espresso hanging between the words as
the discussions went back and forth. I hungered for every word, asked questions
about every part of the process, about every ingredient and every cooking method
and it drew me into the whole amazing process of cooking as a participant in the
truest sense of the word. Beppino, even then, would rant on about the evil of
additives and chemicals in our food. He would shout at me if he saw me eating a
shop-bought ice cream or a packet of sweets, claiming that the deadly contents of
such a perceived treat would do me no good in the long run.
I was never unwelcome in the kitchen; however young I was there was always a job
for me to do, or somebody to help. I learned so much, and it was all so incredibly
simple and crystal clear to me. I was so lucky that my parents entertained on such a
huge scale, there never seemed to be less that 20 or 30 people around our table at
any given time, so there were always plenty of recipes, ingredients and dishes
around to practise with, and I was always absolutely sure that all this was just life,
and that everybody treated food and eating like this, and on this kind of scale.
By the time I was 8 years old, in 1964, I had inaugurated my first restaurant. It was in
the garden of the house, under a thatched bamboo roof over a 9-foot square
sandpit, the sand transported from the beach just ten minutes away from the front
gate. Beppino and his pals made it, like they seemed to make everything else we
needed, and as sandpits go, it was a fairly luxurious affair. I could easily perch my 8-
year-old bottom on the smooth concrete boundary wall, and in the corner was a tap
with a polished concrete, tiny sink.
I ran this restaurant for family and friends, with one table, one set of china, one set
of cutlery and many variations on the mud or sand pie with an extensive grass and
leaf salad range. I served our dishes with a pure white cloth draped over one arm,
wrote out neat bills and was as deferential and polite as possible to all my
customers, who were mostly my mother pretending to be various other people. It
was pretend cooking, but it all felt very real.
Then came the big change from pretend to real food. At around the age of ten, my
parents, with typical nonchalance, gave me several camping stoves, a very large box
of matches and spare gas canisters.
From then on, every penny of my pocket money went on buying real food, and the
menu at Il Pino, (named after Beppino of course, whose name shortens to Pino)
improved dramatically. Now, pasta al pomodoro, scaloppine al limone and bistecca
alla pizzaiola all began to feature. Simple dishes possible to prepare in a sand pit
replaced the ingenious sand and mud pies and leaf salads overnight. I also made a
lot of Pasta al Burro e Parmigiano, other wise known as Pasta al Inglese. This is my
ultimate comfort food, and is still the dish my whole family turns to in a crisis, or
makes when they feel ill! It is just boiled pasta, drained and then quickly mixed with
copious amounts of unsalted butter and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Top tip: it
is really important to not add the cheese until the butter has coated the hot pasta;
otherwise it will clump together and be wasted.
Buon appetito!
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