What are your earliest memories of food?
In our house, food was often about conviviality, hosting and being with friends. My parents would do big Sunday lunches, either a barbecue cooked by my dad, which was always very Italian with long pieces of rosticciana (pork ribs), spatchcock chickens or Florentine steak and vegetables. Or it might be very British, when my mum would go all out on a Sunday roast with beef, horseradish and Yorkshire puddings. My mother was well known for being a fabulous cook. When she moved to Italy in the early ‘80s, food was how she learned about the language and culture, and she would ask Italians to teach her dishes or how to make pasta. The butcher in Greve in Chianti, where we lived 35 years ago, still remembers her as the English woman who would come in and talk about every cut of meat and how they would cook it.
How would you describe your relationship with food?
I love it, I’m greedy, so I love thinking about what I’ve eaten and planning what I am going to eat at my next meal. I love talking about it and menu planning. I think food, or pondering what I might have for lunch, has the power to bring joy and lightness to a mundane day, particularly if you’re planning a meal to share with friends.
What was the first meal you learned to cook?
My mother’s roast chicken with grapes, balsamic-glazed lentils, roast cherry tomatoes and potatoes. I was twelve and I’d been watching my mother make this meal for years, so I recreated it, half-supervised. I roasted chicken, put the cherry tomatoes in a roasting tray with olive oil and salt before putting it in the oven, and boiled the lentils before dressing them in balsamic and olive oil. I laid the table, lit the candles and made a meal for the people I loved most in the world. From that moment on, I’ve been hooked on the feeling of feeding people and making them feel looked after.
How did working with food become your career?
I always worked in food and hospitality when I was a student to make extra cash. I waitressed, I assisted chefs catering for photoshoots, and cooked simple meals for small groups renting my parents’ friends’ houses in Tuscany. When I worked as a waitress at the River Café in London, I realised that through my upbringing, I had so much of the knowledge which is very valued outside of Italy, and it made me feel confident that I could cook for groups of people. It was when I founded the Arniano Painting School in 2014 with William Roper-Curzon that I started doing it professionally and learnt on the job, sometimes with disastrous results, most of the time with delicious ones. Over the past twelve years, it’s become a career that has developed into my becoming a food writer.
What’s your go-to breakfast?
Lots of strong coffee, followed by boiled eggs with buttered toast and chopped cherry tomatoes doused in good olive oil and sea salt.
If you’re impressing friends and family at a dinner party, what are you serving up?
I love ‘aperitivo’ hour, which is basically drink o’clock with delicious tidbits to snack on, so I’d start with the coccoli from my new book, Winter in Tuscany. They are heavenly little fried dough balls that you eat with Parma ham and creamy stracchino cheese—super moreish and delicious but also deceptively easy to make. I never bother with a starter so as to minimise washing up, so for dinner we’d have lemony meatballs with garlicky rosemary cannellini beans and cavolo nero, a very fabulous combination. To finish, a creamy vinsanto and cantucci semifreddo, served alongside an ice-cold glass of vinsanto (a Tuscan sweet dessert wine, which translates literally as ‘holy wine’).
Who is your culinary inspiration?
My mum has always been the main source of inspiration, as most of the recipes in my repertoire are hers, as were most of the recipes that made up my first book. She’s always made one of the most comforting soups, which is homemade chicken broth with mini malfatti. Malfatti are little ricotta and spinach dumplings and they are delicious in the broth, it’s so yummy and warming on a cold night. It was such a hit when she started going out with her partner that he calls it her ‘seduction soup’.
Dining and Cooking