`Move to Italy and make pasta until you feel Italian,' Mimi Thorisson

Welcomed into the fold: Mimi Thorisson shares a taste of Old World Italian

`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 — first in Paris, then in Médoc — 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 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 — “our Italy”; and the people they've met along the way. Regional snapshots of Piedmont, Abruzzo, Liguria, Emilia-Romagna, Campania, Veneto, Lombardy, Umbria, Lazio-Rome and Sicily are interspersed throughout.

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 (“One of my biggest hits to this day”), 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.

“Entering other people's kitchens is my favourite thing. And I think the best way to learn and to be taught is through someone else's kitchen, and hopefully becoming friends,” says Thorisson. “Living here, one thing leads to another. It's like … a puzzle that you're adding all the pieces to in person, in the right place. It's been an amazing experience, and it still is. I'm still learning so much and that's what I find so exciting about Italy.”

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.”

Thorisson describes the journey from Bordeaux to Turin as one of two colours: “From the regal blue of France to the warmer yellow of Italy.” This golden warmth permeates the pages of Old World Italian, starting with the striking cover bearing Oddur's photograph of torch-like zucchini blossoms. Cooked in a frittata, deep-fried, stuffed and baked, or sautéed and served with spaghetti, they represent the beauty of seasonal Italian ingredients.

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, produce is grown and 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. Watching her daughters improve their technique, and seeing how usual it was for families to make pasta at home sparked an affinity. “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, laughing. “I think when you finally get that perfect fold is when you can say, `OK. I feel a bit Italian now.'”

Excerpted from Old World Italian: Recipes and Secrets from our Travels in Italy by Mimi Thorisson. Copyright © 2020 Marie-France Thorisson. Photography Copyright © 2020 Oddur Thorisson. Published by Appetite by Random House ®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.