Cookbook offers classic Italian dishes
Cookbook contains the classic dishes from all regions of Italy
“It's like origami folding,” says author Mimi Thorisson. “It's all about the folds and the movement of the hand — knowing which flour to use and how it should feel.”
Months after moving to Turin, Italy, from Bordeaux, France, studying alongside her “pasta coach,” Claudia (a fourth-generation pastaia, or pasta maker), made her feel like she “had finally arrived.”
After spending eight years immersed in French cooking it was time for a new adventure, Thorisson says. Two-and-a-half years ago, after frequent travels throughout Italy, she and her photographer husband Oddur and their eight children left their 19th-century farmhouse among the vineyards for a fresh start in Piedmont.
Thorisson had written two books in the idyllic setting — A Kitchen in France (2014) and French Country Cooking (2016) — while running a pop-up restaurant and holding cooking workshops.
Her third cookbook, Old World Italian (Appetite by Random House, 2020), while “written in ( her) head” in France, she says, only started to take shape once she'd set foot in Turin.
“One of my favourite things to do is just be in the market, be at the butcher's and hear what the people are saying. What they're buying. How they're cooking it. Observing,” says Thorisson.
“You really have to be here and have all the experiences felt by living here. I like things to grow organically as well. I needed to be here. I needed to meet the right people and have coincidences and meet people by chance.”
Old World Italian, she writes, is really two books: the story of her family and the people they've met along the way.
The book's 100 recipes are a mixture of “the great classics” — such as spaghetti alla carbonara and brasato al Barolo ( beef braised in Barolo wine) — family favourites like a simple broccoli pasta her children love and dishes shared by chefs at some of their favourite restaurants, which she's adapted for ease at home.
“The greatest thing about Italy is the regional cooking. How different it is, how rich it is,” says Thorisson.
“This book is a small selection of all the things that you can find and there's so much more. But I really took some of my favourites and squeezed them in on these pages.”
On the day we spoke, Thorisson had just visited her friends at Magazzino 52, a restaurant and wine shop down the street from her family's apartment in Turin.
Head chef Dario Rista contributed his recipe for spaghettoni with bagna cauda and she hand-delivered a copy of the book in thanks.
Settling into a new city was a gradual layering of such relationships and experiences, she says — finding new restaurants, meeting new chefs and making new friends who don't hesitate to lend you their pots and pans.
Born and raised in Hong Kong by a Chinese father and French mother, Thorisson grew up spending summers with her mother's family in Moissac, in the Tarn-et- Garonne region.
“France is my culture and identity,” she says. But whether French cuisine or Italian, “the traditions are what we love the most — it's preserving history.”
By cooking, hosting workshops and bonding with so many different people, she has learned a great deal about Italian food culture. As well-acquainted as Thorisson was with the cuisine prior to relocating there, she's gained new insight into how Italians cook, how produce is grown and how foods are made.
It took meeting her “pasta coach” Claudia for Thorisson to feel at home in Turin.
This sense of belonging, though, wasn't merely the culmination of hours spent kneading, cutting, filling and folding.
“You have to move to Italy and just make pasta until you feel Italian. Get that feeling through the dough and the fold,” says Thorisson. “I think when you finally get that perfect fold is when you can say, `OK. I feel a bit Italian now.'”