Читать книгу Made in Italy: Food and Stories - Giorgio Locatelli - Страница 12

Very little of the traditional antipasti misti involves hot food – just a few deep-fried dishes, such as courgette flowers or squid, or the panzerotti and frittelle I mentioned earlier. Personally, I don’t like to eat too many fried foods at the start of a meal. So, instead, for our hot starters at the restaurant we look to the kind of main dishes that every Italian knows – great classics with brilliant flavours, such as sardines baked in breadcrumbs, or pig’s trotters – then we refine them and scale them down into starters. We play a bit of a game with the presentation, or make them easier for people to eat in a restaurant environment. Sometimes, when I see some of our famous customers thoroughly enjoying a starter of gnocchi fritti with culatello, it makes me smile to see something that you would find in any antipasti bar in Italy being celebrated in such a way, when I am only playing around with an idea that was worked out hundreds of years ago in Mantova. But perhaps that is the magic of a restaurant like Locanda – with a little imagination, the essential flavours and combinations of ingredients that have stayed in people’s hearts and minds for centuries can be elevated into something glamorous.

What we do in the restaurant and what we do at home, however, are two different things. At home, the idea is to keep things simple. But if you can approach cooking for family and friends with a little of the organisation we need in a professional kitchen, you will enjoy a good meal as well, instead of being in the kitchen with smoke everywhere, and your hair standing on end, so when someone comes in and says, ‘How are you?’, you want to scream. Use this chapter more as a source of inspiration than as a series of recipes. You don’t have to serve the dishes as individual starters, as we do in the restaurant. If you are having friends round, use the idea of shared antipasti to your advantage. Buy some good prosciutto, salami or mozzarella, which need nothing doing to them, then choose a few of the recipes and dedicate your time to working on them, doubling the quantities if necessary, so you can serve everything on big plates to hand round. You can make your dessert in advance too, so you have only a main course to cook, which can be as simple as you like. It is my job to stay in the kitchen and cook for people. Your job is to make life as easy as possible, so when your friends arrive you can just put everything down on the table and sit and have a drink and talk with them.