Magnifico veg, the Italian way

Why Jamie Oliver’s mentor Gennaro Contaldo wants us to cook vegetables Italian style

Gennaro Contaldo has a bone to pick with traditional British Sunday roasts. The Italian chef has lived in England for over 50 years now, and he suggests the food here could see one big improvement.

“When you have a Sunday roast somewhere, [you get] three vegetables: boiled potato, boiled broccoli, boiled beans – they don’t taste of anything! Sometimes you get the beans and they’re so hard,” Gennaro says.

Instead, he wants “flavour” in his veg – and it’s really not that difficult to do.

“Salt it, put a bit of garlic in, season it with olive oil, or squeeze a lemon on top – hallelujah!” he says with his signature enthusiasm, often seen on TV when he appears alongside his protégé, Jamie Oliver.

These are “the humble things you buy every day”, Gennaro says, so it’s about time we treat our veg properly.

“Where I come from, we celebrate all the vegetables – they used to call us ‘leaves eaters’, because we used to eat a lot of vegetables,” says Gennaro, who heralds from Minori on Italy’s Amalfi Coast.

In the “small village” he grew up in, Gennaro says everyone had an allotment and it was the done thing to swap different types of fruit and veg with your neighbours – all of which was, of course, in season.

And when you get Gennaro talking about his favourite varieties, he can barely contain his excitement.

“It is all such a pleasure. Even the zucchini – you fry, you soak it, you cook it with pasta. The humble onion – onions are so beautiful! Onions, you don’t just fry them. Onions can be done in so many different ways. And the potato – it’s not just a chip.”

There are “hundreds of different ways” to cook vegetables, Gennaro says, and that’s part of “Italian culture”.

Despite what you might think, “Meat plays little part where I come from”, he explains.

“We used to have lovely meat – but once every other week.”

That’s why Gennaro has dedicated his latest cookbook to vegetables, aptly called Verdure. Each chapter is dedicated to a different vegetable – from artichokes, fennel and rocket, to mushrooms, aubergines, beetroot and more.

Vegetables might be central to the book, but it’s not entirely vegetarian. “There is a lot mixed with meat – guanciale, pancetta, fish – combined all together, but the hero at the end is the verdure, the vegetable.”

Now a septuagenarian and still going strong – constantly writing recipes, appearing on TV shows like Saturday Kitchen and updating his Instagram account for his 800k followers – Gennaro gives a lot of credit to his Mediterranean diet.

“I eat a lot of vegetables – whatever is in season – I eat a lot of pasta as well,” he says.

“All the people I know where I come from, they all eat a lot of vegetables and beans.”

Gennaro Contaldo has called England home for more than 50 years