I’m not interested in taste from a food-snobbish, status sense (please, I’m just not interested, so stop going on about it!). I am, above all, a practical cook. I realise that the average person doesn’t have the time or money to go out and buy a massive list of exotic ingredients and then spend seventeen hours in the kitchen sweating over a pestle while waiting for the lime coulis to reduce.
The recipes in this book are simple, rarely calling for anything more than a few bowls, some saucepans, a set of poultry shears and – on one or two occasions – a nitrogen infuser. What’s more, I’m no purist either. If my recipe calls for stock and, instead of slaving for hours over a boiling pot of bones, you want to pick up some shop-bought concentrate – then go right ahead. Provided you can live with this sort of compromise, the decision is entirely yours.
A word on ingredients
There’s no need to worry if you can’t make it to an authentic Tuscan market! Fortunately, Italy now exports many of its finest products, so anyone can enjoy making these dishes at home. A few specialities, such as lard from Colonnata or sheep’s bile from Pienza, cannot be obtained unless you are willing to import the raw ingredients or build your own slaughter pit (see my website for specifications), but most of the recipes in this book consist of easily obtainable items.
While every effort has been made to ensure that the recipes in this book are accurate, I can take no personal responsibility for errors or omissions that may have occurred. I’m still getting correspondence related to my last publication which included the instruction to season a dish with ‘freshly ground black people’. (Honestly, I sometimes I think readers go out of their way to be offended, don’t you?). The fact is, I have many dark skinned friends and would never wish to see used to enhance the flavour of foods.