Читать книгу Tony & Giorgio - Tony Allan, Giorgio Locatelli - Страница 5

I remember very well the first time I ever tasted Marmite.It was also the last time I ever tasted Marmite.Giorgio

giorgio

To an Italian, life is an opera, a drama. Every little thing that happens is like front-page news. If someone drops a glass on the table, it’s a major incident. Everyone yells, everyone has an opinion, it’s chaos.

Italians have a totally different lifestyle from the English. The sun has a lot to do with it, of course. We spend a lot of our life outdoors, and it makes us more outgoing, more expressive. Maybe that’s why we yell and gesticulate so much. Basically, deep down, we’re all drama queens.

The Italian writer Umberto Eco once said that we Italians are who we are because, throughout history, we were the ones who could sit down and do nothing. It sounds strange but the fact is we have raised the act of doing absolutely nothing to a fine art. We call it non far nulla, and it is something that every Italian understands instinctively. The English don’t have these instincts and feel somehow guilty if they do nothing. They always have to be doing something, and that’s why they’re always on the move.

In England, if you do nothing you’re a loser. In Italy, the people who do nothing are running the country. What does that tell you?

tony

We Brits are hard working, methodical and unemotional - and that’s the good side of our character. We’re stoic, proud and strong, and we place great importance on politeness and ‘doing things properly'. If Italians are opera performers, then the English are the opera critics, sitting back, considering, analysing and judging.

It’s not that we don’t have emotions, because we do. It’s just that we believe that showing them in public simply isn’t good form. The worst thing an Englishman can do is embarrass himself. So it’s easier not to take the risk and not to stick your neck out - not be the loudest, the tallest or the silliest.

As a nation, we’d much rather stew about something than get it off our chest. If you ask diners in your restaurant if they’ve enjoyed their meal, they’ll say, ‘Yes, of course!’ And then they’ll go home and write the most vicious letter to you, outlining everything that went wrong with it.

Italians are different. They act first and think later. When I was in Rome, I bought a slice of pizza from a little pizza joint. It only cost a quid but after I took my first bite the owner ripped it out of my hands and gave me another slice. ‘I could tell from your expression that you weren’t enjoying it,’ he said. ‘This one is better.’ That’s not really an English thing to do.

To Italians, food is the most important thing in their lives (the second most important thing is how they look). This obsession is based on their belief that eating good food isn’t a privilege, it’s a basic right.

Everyone eats well in Italy. Eating well is a sign of well being, of the normal functioning of a family. It doesn’t matter whether they’re eating in an expensive restaurant or buying a panino (bread roll) from a kiosk at a railway station, they will still insist on the best. And if they don’t get it, they will complain - loudly, of course.

In truth, there is really no such thing as Italian food, because the individual regions of Italy are so strong and distinct. Sicilian food is nothing like the food of Tuscany, while Sardinian cooking is a million miles from the cuisine of Emilia Romagna. There are still a lot of people in Italy who will only eat the food of their own particular region. When I was growing up, chilli was something you would never find in our kitchen, because chilli was from the South and I came from Lombardy, in the north. I don’t think my grandfather ever tasted a chilli in his whole life. I can’t take my father to a restaurant because he won’t eat anything that isn’t from the north. It’s a real pain, but I respect him for it.

Wherever you grow up in Italy, however, you grow up with food. I often think about the times as a little boy when I would walk in the mountains with my grandfather. We would drop into Cecchino the baker’s and buy his freshly baked michctta rolls. Then we would go to the salumeria and buy a hunk of mortadella di fegato (liver sausage). Then we would sit down on a big stone wall and my grandfather would pull out his hunting knife and slice up the sausage. A bite of sausage, a bite of bread - the flavours were fantastic. Whenever I think about that wall, I can still taste that mortadella. I once took my kids there and showed them the wall, but I don’t think they were terribly impressed. To them, it was just a wall.

The big day of the week was always Tuesday, when my grandparents would close their restaurant and my grandmother would cook a big lunch for all the family and friends, usually about sixteen of us. It was such an event. If my grandmother wanted to cook rabbit, for instance, my grandfather would bring her the rabbits, she would pick out the one she wanted, and he would kill it, skin it and prepare it for cooking, right there in front of us. It wasn’t anything horrible, just a natural thing to do.

These days, children don’t have that sense of death being a part of life. I once brought home a live crab and cooked it with spaghetti for dinner. When the kids sat down at the table and looked at the crab in the pasta, they both turned and stared at me. ‘You’re an assassin!’ they yelled.

I can’t imagine what would happen if I brought home a rabbit.On Italian food

I am naturally drawn to Italian things. I drive a Ferrari (that’s when my mate, Vinnie Jones, hasn’t commandeered it), I wear Italian clothes and I love Italian furniture. If I go more than a few days without pasta, I start getting withdrawal symptoms. Giorgio, of course, rides about on English-built motorbikes and puts on English manners but says things like ‘pero’ and ‘allora’ and ‘andiamo’ all the time. I’m a would-be Italian but I talk like a Cockney geezer.

For me, it’s the simple things Italians do best: like an honest plate of spaghetti, a good loaf of crusty country bread just pulled out of a wood-fired oven, or a magnificent new-season white truffle from Alba shaved over a freshly made risotto. That’s real food, and real flavour.

But it’s not just the flavours, it’s the way they’re put together. I am knocked out by the theatrical way in which the Italians stage-manage everything they do.

I’ve always felt envious of Italians. What you can never take away from them - whether you’re talking Italian footballers or Italian chefs - is their unfailing sense of style. Let’s face it, they look better than us. Even if they lose a game ten-nil, the Italian football squad still look better, move better and hold themselves better than the winners.

Being Italian, Giorgio has been born with a passion for food already in his veins. Being English, I had to find this passion for myself. It’s the difference between a highly trained chef and a self-taught cook. My passion is self-taught.

On English food

My mum was a very good but very English cook. The most exotic thing she ever made was pavlova. There was no such thing as Caesar salad or rocket salad or Tuscan bread salad for her. In our house, salad was usually some tomato and lettuce and not much more. I guess that explains this inbred craving I have for salad cream.

I was brought up on comfort food, like shepherd’s pie, eggs and bacon, and steak and kidney pudding. I also inherited my father’s love of Scotch eggs, pork pies, and pickles such as gherkins and pickled onions. I remember when I was five or six, I picked up a pickled onion from my dad’s plate and popped it into my mouth. That sharp, tongue-curling hit of vinegar was such a shock, yet such a pleasure.

Ironically, we never had fish in our house. My father was allergic to seafood, which didn’t help. So my first real experience of fish was at the school canteen, when they served up glowing yellow, artificially dyed smoked haddock in tinned tomato sauce. I remember standing there feeling like Oliver Twist in reverse: ‘Please sir, I don’t want any more.’ It was horrible of course and, to add insult to injury, I got a bone stuck in my throat. It’s a wonder I ever became so passionate about fish.

The turning point was discovering fish and chips. What a great dish. Suddenly the world seemed a sensible place once again.

When I was growing up, meals were just fuel stops. It was stop, fill up the tank, and you’re off, without having to think too much about what you’ve just put in your gob. Things have changed enormously in Britain since then.

There is some pretty remarkable food in this country. For my money, British produce is the best in the world but we rarely do it justice. English apples are sensational. Our oysters, our venison, our wild fish and our cheeses are all bloody brilliant.

Show me a perfectly cooked standing rib of beef with fresh horseradish sauce and roasted English onions, a new season’s grouse straight from the oven, a wheel of carefully aged farmhouse Cheddar, and some magnificent wild Scottish salmon poached in a simple courtbouillon, and I’ll show you why we haven’t got a thing to be ashamed of.

I love English food - chicken tikka masala, hummous and spaghetti bolognese. You can’t get more English than that.

When I worked at the Savoy, I started to appreciate English food. I soon discovered steak and kidney pudding, which taught me how good food in this country could be. The kidneys and steak would be cooked slowly and then left overnight to build up flavour and character. Then they were put in a big bowl and covered in a mixture of flour and fat from the kidney, and the whole thing would be steamed for about two hours. When it was finished, you could push your fork in through the pudding and the steam would rush up into your face while the aroma wrapped itself around you. For something that wasn’t Italian, it was amazing.

I also love Yorkshire puddings, and the great British Sunday roast, and those marvellous bread and butter puddings. But not all English flavours are so thrilling. I remember very well the first time I ever tasted Marmite. It was also the last time I ever tasted Marmite. And I can’t stand English-Italian food – chicken surprise and spaghetti bolognese. It’s terrible.

It took me four years to discover the one true pièce de résistance of English cooking. When I was at the Savoy, I was taken to Smithfield meat market early one morning and experienced my first full English breakfast. It was all there: the salty, thick-cut bacon, the just-runny egg, the kidneys, the fruity black pudding, the greasy sausage, the baked beans, the thin, buttered toast. I loved it. Suddenly I started to understand the English.