I wanted to call this book Made of Italy, because that is what I am – but I could as easily have called it La Convivialità – because that is the word I use most to explain the way Italians feel about food. For us the sign of welcome is to feed people. At the heart of all cooking, whether you are rich or poor, is the spirit of conviviality, the pleasure that comes from sharing a meal with others. And there is no enjoyment of food without quality.
The way I think about food is entirely in tune with the Slow Food movement, started in Italy back in 1986 by Carlo Petrini in defiance of the opening of a McDonald’s outlet in the Piazza di Spagna in Roma. Now a worldwide force, Slow Food champions local, traditional produce with real flavor, made by caring people with skill and wisdom, which is celebrated every two years – with wonderful conviviality – at the Salone del Gusto, the famous food fair in Torino.
In the U.S. it is easy to blame supermarkets for chalking up air miles, for persuading us that we want fruit and vegetables that look perfect but often have little flavor; for luring us on to diets of things that are salty, fatty, sugary and easy to eat; for packaging everything into convenient parcels so that we almost forget where our food comes from; and conditioning us to think that as long as our food is cheap, we are satisfied. But we have responsibilities too, and we have the power to change things. Of course I understand when you have kids you want to go to the supermarket, not traipse for miles trying to find a good butcher and fishmonger and greengrocer, and I’m not sitting here in my restaurant saying you must do this and that, only remember that every time you pick up food in a supermarket, you are making a choice that has consequences. Where do you want to invest your money? In the profits of a supermarket, or in a farm rearing fantastic old breeds of pigs, or a small dairy making beautiful cheese?
You will see the letters DOP (PDO in the UK) and IGP (PGI in the UK) throughout the book. DOP represents Denominazione di Origine Protetta or Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), and it appears alongside the specific name of a product such as Parmigiano-Reggiano or prosciutto di Parma. What it tells you is that in order to earn the stamp of the DOP and be allowed to use this name, the food must be produced in a designated area, using particular methods. IGP represents Indicazione Geografica Protetta, or Protected Geographical Indication (PGI), which is similar, but states that at least one stage of production must occur in the traditional region, and doesn’t place as much emphasis on the method of production. Whenever you buy Italian produce, look for these symbols.
Salt should ideally be natural sea salt, and pepper freshly ground and black. Spend a little extra on good extra virgin olive oil and vinegar, and it will repay you a thousand times. And whenever possible buy whole chickens, and meat and fish on the bone, not portioned and wrapped in plastic.
All recipes serve 4, unless otherwise stated.
“Pass the prawns … the prawns … where are they … are they ready?” I had been helping with the cooking in my uncle’s restaurant since I was five years old, but now, at sixteen, and a few months into my first real job, I used to get picked on all the time by the head chef. Now he wanted the prawns and they weren’t ready. The water in the pan was almost boiling. It needed to be boiling before I put in the prawns, but I panicked and put them in anyway. He saw it and shouted at me, “You will never be a chef, Locatelli. You are an idiot,” and he sent me to clean the French beans.
I couldn’t forget those words: “You will never be a chef.” By the end of the day. I wanted to cry like a baby. I went home and my grandmother was waiting. “What does he know?” she said. “Who is he?” “He is The Chef!” I told her. I would have run away, but as always my grandmother put everything into perspective, and she told me I had to go back and show him. So I went back. And I did show him.
My first feelings for cooking came from my grandmother Vincenzina. But my first understanding of the relationship among food, sex, wine and the excitement of life came together for me very early on, when I was growing up in the village of Corgeno on the shores of Lake Comabbio in Lombardia in the north of Italy – long before I was suspended from cooking school for kissing girls on the college steps.
My uncle Alfio and my auntie Louisa, with the help of my granddad, built our hotel and restaurant, La Cinzianella – named after my cousin Cinzia – on the shores of the lake, on the edge of the village of Corgeno in 1963.
There were eight founding families in the village. The Caletti family, on my mother’s side, was one of them; and on my grandmother’s side, the Tamborini family, along with the Gnocchi family, who are our cousins, and who have a pastry shop in Gallarate, near Milano, in the hinterland, before the scenery changes from city to green and beautiful space, and where the specialty is gorgeous soft amaretti cookies.
The shop gave me my first taste of an industrial kitchen. I used to love going in there as a kid, because the ovens were so big you could walk into them. In the season running up to Christmas, over and above the other confectionery, they would make around 10,000 panettoni (our Italian Christmas cake). It was fascinating to watch the people take the panettoni from the ovens, and then, while they were still warm, hang them upside down in rows on big ladders in the finishing room, so that the dough could stretch and take on that characteristic light, airy texture. Years later, when I first started in the kitchens at the Savoy, I felt at home immediately, because I recognized that same sense of busy, busy people, working away in total concentration.
Of course, everyone in Corgeno seems to be some sort of cousin, though none of us can remember exactly how we are related. Six generations of our families are buried in the village graveyard, and the names are etched many times into the war memorial outside the church with the two Roman towers, above the makeshift football pitch where we kids played every day after we had (or hadn’t) done our homework.
Life in the north of Italy is very different from the way it is in the pretty Italy of the south – the idyllic Italy, still a little wild, that you always see in movies. The south fulfills the Mediterranean expectation, whereas the north is the real heart of Europe. Historically we have been under many influences: Spanish, French, Austrian … at home we are only around 12 and a half miles from Switzerland, and Milano is the most cosmopolitan city in Italy. In the north I don’t know anyone who hasn’t got a job and everyone comes to the north to find work – the reverse of the way it is in England.
The industrial north of Ferrari and Alessi can be more stark: but somehow I think it has a tougher, more impressive and real kind of beauty than the regions that have been written about so much, like Toscano and Umbria. You might not think they are very far down the boot of Italy, but where I come from anything below Bologna is south. In the north, we are famous for designing and making things, things that work properly. Northern Italians always tell jokes against southern Italians, and vice versa. We like to say that in Roma, if you have to dig a hole in the road it will take eight months; in the north everything will be fixed and running like clockwork in a day. And while most of Italy used to stop for a big break at lunchtime – especially in the south, where it was too hot to work – in Milano and around Lombardia it would be one hour only. The factory whistles would go at 12 noon – the signal for the wives and mothers at home to put in the pasta – and then the road would be full of bicycles and scooters and motorcycles, as everyone shot home to eat and then straight back to work.
In the south, they are used to delicate foods like mozzarella and tomatoes and seafood. In the north, we are proud of our Parmigiano-Reggiano and prosciutto di Parma and big, warming dishes like polenta and risotto. And if we haven’t used our food to promote our area around the world as strongly as other regions, it is not because it is less important to us, but that we haven’t needed to, because we are known for other things.
Corgeno is a place steeped in history, first because of its twin Roman towers and more recently because of its pocket resistance to fascism. On one of the old walls you can see the faded words of one of Mussolini’s slogans that still makes me angry every time I see it, with its call to the youth of Italy to put down their picks and shovels and take up arms. There are many stories in our village of the local men of the resistance who used to hide in the woods, where the women would bring them food. One of them, my father’s brother, Nino, was shot on one of his trips, trying to help 40 Jewish people escape over the border into Switzerland.
Below the village is La Cinzianella, only a few steps to the edge of the lake, which I love, especially in autumn, my favorite time of year. Almost tragic, isn’t it, autumn? But so beautiful. Early in the morning, you can’t see the lake because it is hiding in a mauve mist, but when it rises the sky is bright blue and the trees around the lake, with their red and gold leaves, stand out clearly against it. And it is so quiet: all you can hear are the birds calling and scudding over the water – and across the lake the faint buzz of motorcycles going a hundred miles an hour across the superstrada, the straight toward Mercallo, and into the turn, as if they were on a racetrack.
We are only 45 minutes’ drive from the center of Milano, and right next to the bigger and more famous Lago Maggiore, so now a lot of people from the city come for weekends; they have bought houses, and the village has grown. But when I was growing up, there were only about 2,000 people and everyone knew everyone else: who was just born, who died: it was all-important to our lives.
I remember one of the first new families to move into Corgeno, from Sicilia – the wife worked at La Cinzianella, and we nicknamed one of the kids Mandarino after the oranges that came from Sicilia. They spoke a dialect that sounded foreign to us, and the father was loud and dramatic when he talked: tragic, comical … so different from my father, who never raised his voice.
Almost everything we ate and drank was produced locally. We even picked up the milk every evening from the window of the house of Napoleone, who kept a few cows. Each family had its own bottles and he would fill them up and leave them for us to collect – in winter outside the window, in summer in the courtyard under a fountain. Later, when I was a young boy and I was working in restaurants abroad, when I came home for the holidays, people would always open their windows to lean out and say hello. They still do. Whenever we go to Corgeno, my wife, Plaxy, complains that it takes an hour to walk through the village, because someone will always shout, “Hey, Giorgio” – and it always seems to be an ex-girlfriend.
I remember coming back home after one summer when I was a teenager. I stopped in at the tobacconist to buy cigarettes, and by the time I got to our house, my grandmother already knew that I had changed from Camel to Marlboro. That is how small our village was.
My auntie and uncle and my father and mother all worked in the hotel and my uncle ran the restaurant where I worked, too, as soon I was big enough. Later we had a Michelin star, but then we just served good, honest Italian food and on Saturdays we did banqueting and wedding receptions in a big beautiful room at the top of the hotel, looking out over the lake. We used to feed around 180 people and when we were at our busiest, we would make 45 pounds of dough for the gnocchi and everyone, from the waiters to the women who did the rooms, would come into the kitchen to help shape them. In summer, our guests could sit out on the terrace under big umbrellas. If it was raining they gathered inside around a big table in the corridor, and no one ever complained.
There are ten rooms in La Cinzianella, and we would send food to the rooms, too. Every Sunday a well-known gentleman from the village. Luciano, would come to the hotel in his Mercedes, with a woman named Rosetta. Everyone knew that his wife had been ill for a long time and that Rosetta was his mistress. So on Sundays his room would be ready for him from about two o’clock, and by six, six-thirty, he would call us and order a bottle of champagne. I remember my mother would put it on a tray and, of course, somebody had to take it up – all of us young boys wanted to do it, because we wanted to catch a glimpse of Rosetta.
I still remember her – warm and round and womanly, like my auntie Maria Luisa, who was beautiful too, the nearest thing to royalty. Maria Luisa was the only one who had any power over me when I was wayward, and could tell me off without ever losing her temper, unlike my mother, who is quite a nervous woman. When my granddad died, we sat down for our first meal all together without him, and we all expected that my father would take his place at the head of the table, but Maria Luisa came in and sat down in the place of my granddad and she has been there ever since.
My auntie and Rosetta – for me they represented sexuality, but all bound up with good food and wine and generosity, because by seventhirty, showered and beautifully dressed, Rosetta and her gentleman friend would come down to eat dinner and we would welcome them warmly; we were part of their lives, and they were part of ours. There was a complicity between restaurateur and guest, which is one of the things I have tried to create in my own restaurant.
Even in the heart of London, I feel we have a special bond with our customers. Eating is not just about fueling up to get through the day: it is about conviviality, friendship and celebration. I like the fact that people come to us again and again for an anniversary or a birthday. I want them to bring their kids, so I can take them into the kitchen, and they can help prepare the dessert for their mums and dads. I like to feel that I can come and sit down and chat with them in between cooking; and if I see them on the street one morning. I can invite them into the restaurant for coffee. Sometimes people who have eaten at Locanda, and before that at Zafferano, whom we have known for many years, come to see us after a husband or wife has died, or they have split up, because in a strange, poignant way, we have become part of their lives. For my wife, Plaxy, and for me that is so special; because this is our restaurant, an extension of our family; and everything that happens in it is personal to us. I know how important it is to have that intimacy, because the memories of our relationship with the local gentleman and Rosetta at La Cinzianella have stayed with me all my life.
