A Kitchen in Italy

Introduction

In the fall of 2013, I was putting the final touches on my first cookbook, A Kitchen in France. It was a huge surprise to find myself, night after night, in that rustic country kitchen in a remote part of France, fine-tuning recipes. I had grown up in bustling Hong Kong, and I had studied finance, so surely my fate was to live in a city and work in an office. And dogs were not exactly part of my plans either, a cat perhaps. Yet here they were, several of them sleeping under the table.

Plus a new child every year, it seemed; an Icelandic husband; and a life so wholly dedicated to food that “spring/summer collection” now meant peas, asparagus, and strawberries rather than shorter hemlines, linens, and flowery prints.

We had left Paris for a bucolic existence in what many describe as a “cul-de-sac” of France. They said we were crazy, but I loved it from the very start. The conversation at lunch was always the same: “What should we do for dinner?” When I was growing up, food was very important to me, but my culinary adventure, one I’m still on, started for real in that farmhouse, cooking for my family. I began sharing my experience on a little blog called Manger (that’s what people did in those days), and before I knew it, as luck would have it, I was invited to write a cookbook. Another surreal and unexpected twist; sometimes life just happens. The book was an earnest documentation of what it felt like to live in the French countryside, go to markets every day, and cook with seasonal and mostly very local ingredients. It was the life we led and the meals we had together, all photographed by my husband in our home. No sets, no props, no stylist. It was our life, on a page.

A second book, French Country Cooking, documented our next chapter in the French countryside, a new home with two kitchens and half the rooms devoted to cooking. It wasn’t a restaurant, but with so many children and friends at our table, you could say we were fully booked every night.

We left that life as gently as we fell into it. We wanted to live in Italy, and a third book (or maybe that’s just an excuse) opened the door. In Old World Italian, I wanted to explore the extraordinary diversity of Italian cuisine, travel the regions, meet locals, and seek advice.

I wanted to find my “cooking legs” in a new territory, build a new home. I wanted to cook like an Italian.

These days I find myself sitting in a fairly rustic kitchen in Italy, a few dogs still under the table. It’s a new kitchen in a new apartment here in Torino, where we have now lived for over six years. It’s not necessarily that we’ve come full circle, but writing this book feels in many ways what is often called “back to basics,” or a return to my culinary roots. What has always driven me as a home cook is feeding my family, and sometimes dazzling them, when the gods of succulence smile upon me. To host friends, to conjure up simple feasts (and feasts can be simple, especially in Italy, where nothing is simple but the food).

In A Kitchen in France, I wanted to share my life and communicate what it’s like to take a step back from the roar of the city, to live a simplified life of reduced complications but often heightened pleasures. A life where Mommy bringing home foraged mushrooms is the highlight of the day or when someone cycles to the chicken farm to fetch those delicious sausages we all loved so much.

In this book, I’m back in a city, though Torino does have the charm of a much smaller town and a closeness to nature I have never experienced in a city this size. I hope to demonstrate that you don’t have to leave it all behind for a better quality of life. Life is what you make it. What we eat is important. Time spent with family is even more important. Taking the time, every day, to cook something delicious, healthy, and thoughtful is possible. A perfect toast on a Sunday can be a revelation. A good broth can be the best food you ever had (and broth, by the way, is just a bunch of vegetables and often meat that’s left simmering while you tend to other things).

Many, though not all, of the recipes in this book are dishes I have discovered since we moved here over six years ago. These are recipes that have found their way into our daily lives and our hearts. Some you will not really find in restaurants or, if you do, only locally. It was a pleasure to discover that even if we are now surrounded by delicious restaurants, I cook as much as ever at home. Yes, a night out is really fun. We love good restaurants, and ordering a pizza is perfect when we’re tired or have little time. But there are few greater pleasures than buying simple and good ingredients and cooking a beautiful meal from scratch.

Italians eat very seasonally, at least as much as they do in France, and that’s how I’ve organized the book here.

We have vegetable markets in every neighborhood and butchers on every corner. Everyone eats porcini mushrooms and pumpkin soups in the fall, they treat themselves to truffles during the festive season, and during the week we spend in Venice every winter, it seems that there’s hardly a dish that doesn’t have the delicious local radicchio in the recipe. If you go back in summer, there’s no radicchio in anything. The same goes for asparagus and peas in the spring—they’re everyday food for most people until the season is over, and then they won’t have them again until next year. One of the more embarrassing things you can do here in Italy, at least foodwise, is ask your greengrocer if he’s got something that is most likely out of season even if you know it’s a long shot. He will shake his head at the ignorance, and when you try to make it better by explaining in your rustic Italian that you actually knew he wouldn’t have it, he will still wag his finger. “Next year,” he will say, then he will lift up something that has just arrived and say, “Try this, it’s a marvel.”

The recipes in this book are approved by my family; I’ve been tweaking and testing most of them for years. The reason they are in this book is because they’ve passed the test, and that test is simply that I cook them over and over again. There is demand for this food in my house. There are the universally beloved dishes, like meatballs and spaghetti, that everyone likes. But each kid has a dish or two outside that roster that they particularly love. There is something beautiful about a child asking for a favorite dish, especially if it’s unusual and healthy. I can never say no to that.

In this crazy world, the sentence “I don’t have time to cook” is perfectly understandable. But it can be done. And more important, it can be enjoyed, so very much. My accountant, Claudio, says it best, bless him: “I work all day at a desk, looking at numbers.” Then he smiles and continues, “At night when I come home, I want to forget about the numbers and do something with my hands. That’s why I love cooking.”

This is my kitchen in Italy—now let’s cook something good together.