Rachel Roddy’s homage to Anna del Conte and Vincenzo Corrado’s fennel with pistachio, lemon and anchovy sauce | A kitchen in Rome
An ancient recipe for a sprightly side dish or salad with an eccentric ingredient combination that surprisingly works a treatI am looking after a pile of cookbooks at the moment. They belonged to the late cook and teacher Carla Tomasi, who wanted them to be useful, so gave them to the Latteria cooking studio. However, until the studio has more shelves, I have 15 of Carla’s 60 books sitting by my desk. They are a well-loved pile, but five in particular stand out as having been used and used. The first is Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet, which, thanks to grey duct tape, is just about holding together, and the second is Thane Prince’s Perfect Preserves, also duct-taped. The third is a 1985 edition of Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food, the fourth Elisabeth Luard’s 1991 The Flavours of Andalusia and the fifth Anna del Conte’s 1987 Gastronomy of Italy, all of which are missing at least one cover, have loose pages and bite marks (dogs?), are covered in brown paper and have their titles written on them with marker pen.As anyone who worked with or was taught by Carla will know, she was a cooking snowball: always gathering. Also, that she was immensely generous in her acknowledgements, carefully noting the place, book or person from whom she had gathered it. Del Conte, in particular, was someone who came up constantly, and Carla referred to Gastronomy of Italy, which she bought a few years after arriving in London, as a life-changing book that taught her about the country she had left. Continue reading...
An ancient recipe for a sprightly side dish or salad with an eccentric ingredient combination that surprisingly works a treat
I am looking after a pile of cookbooks at the moment. They belonged to the late cook and teacher Carla Tomasi, who wanted them to be useful, so gave them to the Latteria cooking studio. However, until the studio has more shelves, I have 15 of Carla’s 60 books sitting by my desk. They are a well-loved pile, but five in particular stand out as having been used and used. The first is Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet, which, thanks to grey duct tape, is just about holding together, and the second is Thane Prince’s Perfect Preserves, also duct-taped. The third is a 1985 edition of Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food, the fourth Elisabeth Luard’s 1991 The Flavours of Andalusia and the fifth Anna del Conte’s 1987 Gastronomy of Italy, all of which are missing at least one cover, have loose pages and bite marks (dogs?), are covered in brown paper and have their titles written on them with marker pen.
As anyone who worked with or was taught by Carla will know, she was a cooking snowball: always gathering. Also, that she was immensely generous in her acknowledgements, carefully noting the place, book or person from whom she had gathered it. Del Conte, in particular, was someone who came up constantly, and Carla referred to Gastronomy of Italy, which she bought a few years after arriving in London, as a life-changing book that taught her about the country she had left. Continue reading...
