A cooking school owned by a countess
At the Enrica Rocca Cooking School of Cape Town, you can learn to cook Italian cuisine using the finest ingredients, writes Penny Haw
YOU will see more Range Rovers and jodhpur-clad thighs in Constantia than anywhere else in Cape Town. Nowhere else are gym bunnies more stylishly attired or more perfectly made up. And even the squirrels that scamper up the old oak trees in the valley are better toned than their cousins elsewhere on the Peninsula. What you might not expect to find in Constantia, though, is a cookery school owned by a Venetian countess, but it exists. Countess Enrica Rocca lives in Venice, where she runs the Enrica Rocca Cooking School from her palatial 19th-century home in the Dorsoduro area.
She inherited her love for food from her late father, Count Rocco, who taught cooking at Venice’s Cipriani cookery school. Rocca studied at a hotel school in Switzerland and owned several restaurants before establishing the school in Italy. She also has a branch in London, which is managed by food-writer-turned-cookeryinstructor Sage Russell.
Now, as of late last year, you can also learn more about traditional Italian cooking at the Enrica Rocca Cooking School of Cape Town in Constantia under the guidance of the countess’s long-time friend and former student, Emma Freddi.
Originally from a village near the Italian city of Genoa, Freddi has lived in Cape Town for more than 20 years. Her prowess as an Italian epicurean is well known in town. In the 1990s, she and her husband opened a fresh pasta business, Pasta Freddi’s, which operated a factory and several retail outlets.
Rocca, who was living in Cape Town at the time, used Freddi’s pasta in her restaurant in Wynberg’s Chelsea region. (She also had a Venetian-style tapas bar called Il Bacaro in the centre of town.) When Freddi sold the pasta business, the countess, who was back in Italy by then, suggested her energetic friend open a branch of the cookery school in SA. “I would never have entrusted one of my cooking schools to anyone,” says Rocca. “It took years of hard work to build up my reputation and see it grow around the world. The person who represents my name has to be not only extremely experienced and competent but has to serve food using the best products with the same love and passion that I do.”
It took some convincing but, once Freddi had renovated her home on the fringes of the vineyards of Groot Constantia
We let the fresh ingredients inspire our creativity and we want to show people what fun that can be
and modified the kitchen into a spacious, open-plan area with a magnificently large kitchen island perfect for teaching, she agreed to take on the task. And so the Enrica Rocca Cooking School of Cape Town was opened, offering half-day, full-day and evening options for a maximum of eight in a class.
As is Rocca’s teaching style in Venice and London, the school doesn’t provide lessons in the prescribed sense of the word. Classes are informal, friendly affairs around the stove. Activities are shared and conversation is welcomed. The idea, says Freddi, is not to teach people how to recreate Italian food, which is, after all, relatively simple. Instead, she and Rocca want to impart Italy’s passion for fresh, seasonal ingredients and encourage people to be more curious and adventurous about using them.
“Although Enrica and I come from different sides of Italy (Venice is in the northeast on the border of the Adriatic Sea, while Genoa is on the Mediterranean in the northwest) and the food from the regions differs because of the availability of ingredients, we follow the same philosophy. We let the fresh ingredients inspire our creativity and we want to show people what fun that can be,” she says.
Freddi seldom measures ingredients when she cooks — “although it’s necessary for baking” — and began writing recipes down only when she started the school “because people like leaving with written instructions”. And certainly, although I left with printed copies of Freddi’s recipes, the primary thing I learned at the school is that, although it is useful to follow tradition, precision is unnecessary if you have the finest ingredients available, and understand them and how they will respond to the techniques and other flavours.
During the evening course I attended, five of us (including Freddi) gathered in the kitchen and — drinking wine and beer and laughing a great deal — created muscoli alla Genovese (mussels Genoa style), lemon risotto, vitello tonnato (cold veal in tuna sauce), baby beetroot salad and an apple, almond and Limoncello cake.
Mussels have never tasted more delicate — Freddi taught us to sauté the garlic in the olive oil but throw it away before adding the shellfish — and the juice and zest of the lemon gave the risotto a deliciously fresh zing I haven’t experienced before. As we went along, Freddi, whose own garden produces many of the vegetables and fruits she uses for her classes, described exactly where she had found each ingredient, right down to the best day of the week and time of day to buy each and the names of the suppliers who provide the best. She doesn’t skimp on quality and insists it is better to go without and create something else if you can’t find the right ingredients. It is ideal, says Freddi, to dedicate a whole day to the school. That means you can enjoy the “full Enrica Rocca Cooking School experience”, which involves finding, smelling, feeling, tasting and selecting your own ingredients.
If you were to spend a day with Rocca in Venice, you’d head off to the Rialto market. Attend the school in London and you would source ingredients at the Portobello or Borough markets. Spend a day with Freddi in Constantia and she would take you on a tour of the Peninsula, show you where to buy the best seafood and meat, invite you to taste and select wine from the wineries in the valley and pick vegetables and fruit from her garden, and then help you prepare a feast.
“Italian food is about a lot more than just the cooking,” she says.
Half-day course €60, full-day course including vineyards €195. www.enricarocca.com.