Made at Home: The food I cook for the people I love

Made at Home: The food I cook for the people I love
Giorgio Locatelli

From Tuscan tomato and bread soup to monkfish stew, simple spaghettis or lemon and pistachio polenta cake, Made at Home is a colourful collection of the food that Giorgio Locatelli loves to prepare for family and friends.With recipes that reflect the places he calls home, from Northern Italy to North London or the holiday house he and his wife Plaxy have found in Puglia, this is a celebration of favourite vegetables combined in vibrant salads or fresh seasonal stews, along with generous fish and meat dishes and cakes to share. Early every evening, Giorgio’s ‘other family’, the chefs and front of house staff at his restaurant, Locanda Locatelli, sit down together to eat, and Giorgio reveals the recipes for their best-loved meals, the Tuesday ‘Italian’ Burger and the Saturday pizza.In a series of features he also takes favourite ingredients or themes and develops them in four different ways, amid ideas for wholesome snacks, from mozzarella and ham calzoncini (pasties) to ricotta and swiss chard erbazzone (a traditional pie), crostini to put out with drinks, and fresh fruit ice creams and sorbets to round off a meal in true Italian style.

Copyright (#u14dfd70d-fd96-5245-959c-526d60710041)

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)

This eBook edition published by 4th Estate in 2017

Copyright text © Giorgio Locatelli 2017

All photographs © Lisa Linder 2017

Design and art direction: BLOK

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Giorgio Locatelli asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008100513

Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN: 9780008100520

Version: 2017-08-18

For Plaxy

Contents

Cover (#u08162ae9-117d-5765-a21c-9ee766be35e9)

Title Page (#ua58e647e-a46f-5494-a55d-a038173c27ff)

Copyright

Dedication (#uff8c5d25-cd3c-5fc5-8c5e-caaca23ba465)

The places I call home

Seasonal salads and vegetables

Simple soups

Panini, crostini, pies and other snacks

Pasta, rice and pizza

Favourite fish and seafood

Grilled meats, roasts and stews

Cakes, treats and ice creams

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

The places I call home (#u14dfd70d-fd96-5245-959c-526d60710041)

Home means many things to me. Home is north London with my wife, Plaxy, and now grown-up ‘kids’, Jack and Margherita, who come and go but still expect to raid the fridge as soon as they walk through the door. When Plaxy and I are at home on our own, the meals we share are about simply cooked fish, vegetables and salads, and many of our favourite recipes are included here. But when Margherita was small, much of our cooking had to begin with something that she could eat, since shortly after she was born we discovered that she had an allergy to around 600 foods, especially fish, tomatoes and eggs. So for years we could never have fish or tomatoes in the kitchen, and ingredients like almonds would be kept in jars in separate labelled cupboards to keep her safe. We never wanted her to feel different, so we would always find a way of making something for her that looked like what everyone else was eating, even if the ingredients varied. But for me, that should always be at the heart of all home cooking: the idea that you adapt and change according to what you buy fresh that is in season, what you have in your cupboard and your fridge, and who you are cooking for.

Home, for me, is also Corgeno in Lombardy, northern Italy, where my whole family was involved with my uncle’s restaurant, La Cinzianella, on the shore of Lake Comabbio, so my grandmother was in charge of the cooking in our house while my grandfather raised rabbits and chickens and grew vegetables in the garden. Many of the meals that my grandmother cooked, I still cook at home for my own family, and when I do, it is as if I am back in Corgeno with her and my grandad again.

According to the day of the week, we might have risotto with saffron, pasta with homemade passata, fish from the lake, and once a week fresh prawns; or stews, such as osso buco or my favourite, spezzatino, made with beef, potatoes and peas, according to whatever pieces of meat Stefanino, the village butcher, had kept for my grandmother.

When my elder brother, Roberto, and I would come home from school there would often be a soup made with my grandmother’s broth and maybe a scallopine to follow: a sliver of pork, veal or chicken, encrusted in breadcrumbs from the big jar in the kitchen and fried. I still think that in a family environment, soup is very important. It is a great comfort food; it doesn’t need so much planning, and you can make a potful and freeze some in a container for next time. If I get home late from the restaurant, or from filming, having tasted so many dishes during the course of the day, all I want is a simple soup to soothe and settle the stomach. Or a simple pasta.

I never tire of a plate of spaghetti with a brilliant tomato sauce, but I often think that while the great advantage of pasta is its familiarity, that is also its worst enemy, because we all have our one or two favourite recipes that we make over and over again, when actually a dish of pasta should reflect the changing seasons. It is a perfect medium for introducing kids to ingredients with different textures and flavours throughout the year.

My grandparents, who had been through the war, never lost the fear that there might come a day when there was no food – something that Jack and Margherita have no reason to understand – but in Europe plentiful food has come at a certain cost to society. There is no doubt that we have to address the problems of eating too much sugar and salt, the way we have made food ‘convenient’ by packing it full of additives, our wastefulness, and the fact that we cannot go on extracting so much from the earth and emitting so many gases. But one huge step is to go back to the essence of home cooking – buying fresh ingredients, preparing them simply, enjoying them with your friends and family, and keeping anything you don’t eat to transform into another meal – and that’s it.

Home, too, is my restaurant, Locanda Locatelli, where I spend most of my waking hours with my other family, the team of chefs and front of house staff, many of whom have been with me for a long, long time. You have to look after the people you work with. Ever since I sat on a rubbish bin outside the kitchen of the Tour d’Argent restaurant in Paris where I worked long, long hours for a pittance, eating sausages at the end of the night, while inside the diners paid a small fortune for the famous classic French dishes we had made for them, I vowed that when I had my own restaurant, I would make sure that everyone ate well. So each day at 4.30p.m. everyone sits down together to eat something simple that we have made in the kitchen, because that is when you have the time to talk to people, share ideas and news, find out what is going on in their lives, if someone needs help with something or has a problem. Exactly like a family sharing a meal around the table at home. The two favourite meals are ‘Italian’ burger night on Tuesday, and pizza night on Saturday, when even those who are due to finish their shifts, or on a day off, seem to find a reason to stay behind or drop by! So those recipes are included in this book, too.

And now Plaxy and I have a second home perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea in Puglia, a region we discovered and fell in love with after spending so many amazing summers across the water in Sicily. In the winter, it feels like you could be on Mars, with the rocky cliff falling away beneath you, but in spring and summer the water is a stunning blue and that is all you can see.

In London, I am spoilt by so many different ingredients and cultural influences, which have pushed the way I think about food way beyond the northern Italian flavour palate that I grew up with. But on holiday everything is stripped back to a few knives and some pots and pans and whatever I find when I go out each morning – maybe with some money in my hand to meet the fishermen coming off the boats, or at the market to buy fresh local vegetables or rich, creamy burrata. So Puglia, too, has inspired some of the recipes in this book. The ingredients may be more limited, but their quality is exceptional, and that is when I feel at my most creative. I look at what I have and decide then and there how to prepare it for family and friends to share. Just as my grandmother did all those years ago in Corgeno.

Seasonal salads and vegetables (#u14dfd70d-fd96-5245-959c-526d60710041)

I find myself focusing more and more on vegetables, not only for flavour but for the beauty their different textures can bring to a salad or a dish, sometimes just by the way you cut them. I am excited by the idea of vegetable butchery.

Pan-fried cauliflower salad with anchovies and chilli

When I was cooking at the Savoy I thought of myself as the King of the Cauliflower, because one of my jobs was to make the cauliflower soup, and I made a cauliflower cheese that was a work of art, really light and perfectly glazed. But the truth is I never liked cauliflower much. In the cooking of countries like India it is treated to interesting spices, but in European cuisine it often seemed like the boring enemy of gastronomy. In Italy they used to say that cauliflower was for priests, because it kept the sex drive down. But my opinion changed forever a few years ago when I tasted a cauliflower pizza made for me by a husband and wife team, Graham and Kate, when I was a judge at the BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards.

This sweet couple, who now have a restaurant in Bristol, drove around in a bright yellow Defender van with a wood-fired oven called Bertha in the back, and they would come to your party and make maybe 70 or 80 pizzas in a night. Back then it was quite a revolutionary thing to do. I asked them to make me a pizza margherita and another one of their choice. The margherita arrived and it was unbelievably light, Neapolitan style, and I was already thinking, ‘These guys are good,’ when they brought out their anchovy and cauliflower pizza. Graham had sliced raw cauliflower very thinly and used it instead of cheese. I cannot even describe the way in which it was almost melting and yet it kept its structure and flavour, and its tanginess worked so well with the flavour of the anchovy and a little touch of chilli and lemon zest. It was so delicious and like nothing I had tasted on a pizza before.

When someone presents to you, in such a different way, a vegetable that you have put into a certain compartment of your mind for years and years, it is a total shock. I went back to the kitchen at Locanda and I immediately said to the boys, ‘Do we have some cauliflower?’ Of course we didn’t, because I didn’t like it. So I had to go and buy some. We played around with a lot of ideas, and this way of pan-frying the cauliflower and incorporating it into a salad with anchovies, in a little echo of the pizza flavours, was the one we loved the most. It is exactly the kind of quick and simple salad I like to make if Plaxy and I are at home on our own, or as a starter if friends come around.

When a cauliflower is quite big and loose it is easy to break it into small florets of the same size which will cook evenly, as I suggest here, but if it is smaller and very hard and compact, it can be easier to cut a cross in the base and cook it all in one piece, until just tender. As it cools down, the heat will penetrate evenly all the way through to the centre. Then you can cut it into slices. It’s your call, depending on the size and density of the cauliflower.