RAISE A GLASS
Top Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo chats to LAUREN TAYLOR about cost-cutting recipes and how he never lets anything go to waste
I hope you know by now, that this space dedicated to all things drinkies is basically a reflection of my life. If not, where have you been? This time around I’ve been pulled and tugged in the direction of “things that I like” and perhaps you may like them too.
My first is a wine from a region I visited last year – I explored Picpoul de Pinet wines by the Mediterranean ocean in the south of France.
One wine has arrived back in my life: Picpoul de Pinet Domaine Félines Jourdan 2021 (left, £9.75, online at The Wine Society). It has been recommended by the society’s buyer Marcel Orford Williams as one of his picks of the range. I sipped it on a cold-ish night, alongside a wakeme-up spicy prawn chilli noodle “thing” I rustled up.
This wine has an affinity with seafood – its zesty, lemon-fresh appley characteristic, with a good acidity, was a smashing partner.
Now to an unusual wine with a label I love. I try not to be drawn in by labels. I like to read the wine and not the marketing.
But nevertheless, here we are, with Troupis Route Gris Moschofilero 2021 from Naked Wines (right, £13.99, or £16.99 for non-members).
Moschofilero is a pink-skinned grape and the wine has been crafted in Arcadia, Greece, by winemaker Yiannis Troupis.
The grapes are usually at the heart of white wines, but here Yiannis has allowed them to macerate with the juices, bringing texture and a pink hue.
The flavours have notes of grapefruit, peachy, and tangerine, with a pithy texture.
Finally, to a red which a pal has been nagging me to try. I’m glad he did. You can enjoy a flavour pot of a wine for £7 in the form of Tesco Finest Montepulciano D’Abruzzo 2019 (left).
This vintage won three awards at last year’s International Wine Challenge (IWC): The Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Trophy, IWC Great Value Champion Red 2022, and the IWC Great Value Red under £8.
You’ll find concentrated cherry and black fruits, just enough of a tannic grip and a tingle of spice on the finish.
■ Jane is a member of the Circle of Wine Writers. Find her on social media and online as One Foot in the Grapes.
GENNARO CONTALDO puts a bowl of penne in front of me. “Eat! Enjoy it!” he says. It’s 10am, but you don’t turn down pasta at a famed Italian chef’s house – no matter what time it is.
He made it from bits and pieces he found in his kitchen yesterday: Parmesan rind, carrot, a chunk of guanciale (cured meat), a jar of chickpeas, one shallot, celery, a single potato, some romaine lettuce – cooked down for 45 minutes with stock and served with a scoop of starchy pasta water and a glug of olive oil from the enormous vat sitting on his outdoor kitchen worktop. Very simple, very tasty.
The 74-year-old – known affectionately as Jamie Oliver’s ‘London dad’ (he taught him everything he knows about Italian cooking) says he throws “nothing” away, adding it doesn’t just annoy him when people waste food: “It really upsets me”.
And not only for environmental reasons. In a cost-of-living crisis, throwing any food away is literally money in the bin. Knowing what you can do with leftovers is the key to cutting your food bill, Gennaro believes.
“If [people] knew how to cook, they would save at least half – at least! I really, really press everyone to learn how to cook because once you’ve learned how to cook, you can go around and use whatever you find in the house.”
Classic, Italian cooking, at its very heart, is cost-effective. The basis of many of the most famous dishes is known as ‘cucina povera’ – literally translating to ‘poor kitchen’ or ‘poor cooking’ - “Because there was not much, whatever you had you cooked in many different ways and nothing used to be thrown away.” This is reflected in his latest cookbook, Gennaro’s Cucina, which focuses on hearty, money-saving meals.
For Gennaro, cucina povera is “proper Italian cooking: few ingredients, maximum flavour”. And in that vein, “It’s not ‘poor’, actually it means rich in a way”.
If you’re trying to save money in the current climate, Italian food makes perfect sense. Pasta is the ideal vessel for odds and ends languishing in your fridge. “If you go to a restaurant to buy fresh tomato pasta, it costs £11 or £12. From the market one bowl [of tomatoes] is £1 because they’re off the vine and they’re very good,” says Gennaro. “People spend so much money on takeaway when you can actually do it yourself. Tomatoes, I can do in five minutes, I do a beautiful sauce. Cook them with a little bit of olive oil, a crush of garlic, a little bit of chilli, a little bit of water, boil the pasta at the same time, throw in the starch – if you’ve got some breadcrumbs, throw them on top.”
In Gennaro’s home in Walthamstow, east London, where bunches of tomatoes hang from hooks around his kitchen/diner (“They become very sweet and last at least a month”), a meal will last several days.
People chuck away leftovers far too soon, he says. “If you do roast chicken, do you know how much stuff you have left? Remove a bit of meat, chop it up and do some kind of ravioli, boil it, then serve it with the same gravy as you had for roast chicken.
“Then, when you think you can’t do anymore – get that chicken, celery, carrots, carcass, put it in water, boil it, you get lovely chicken stock.”
Beans, lentils, chickpeas and bread all play an important part in this way of cooking too. From passatelli in brodo (breadcrumb and Parmesan pasta) to acquasale (bread salad) and even padding out mondeghili – beef meatballs – with stale bread to make the mixture stretch. “I hate expiry dates,” says Gennaro. “Just smell it, look at it – there’s nothing wrong with it except when it’s rotting. Even if you’ve got some milk left, when it goes sour you’ve got lovely ricotta.”
He won’t touch out-of-season fruit and veg flown thousands of miles to give us year-long supermarket produce. “Cherries are everywhere at the moment – when I see them in a shop, I won’t even taste it,” he says.
Gennaro, who moved to the UK in his early 20s, grew up in the village of Minori on the Amalfi coast and fondly remembers artichoke season in January to mid-spring.
“Everybody uses them, we enjoyed making it in many different ways. And then when the season is finished... Something else comes to the market. We remember those beautiful days when we sat altogether [eating artichoke] but when it’s finished, we leave it, we forget about it, we wait for the next season – and look forward to it.”
Gennaro’s family sold linen, but food was intertwined with all aspects of life. “We had to go around up the hills and mountains to collect money, because not everyone paid you. Instead of taking money, you take a live chicken, a goat, salami, cheese, fruit, in exchange,” he remembers.
He learned to cook because, simply, everyone did. “Inside my house papa wanted to cook, grandfather wanted to cook, my grandma would cook, my mama would cook, my sister was taught by my grandma.
“Not many people wrote recipes down – I, myself, have a recipe book here,” he says, tapping his head. “The Italians are very proud of whatever they’re making, they express themselves through food. You see them at the table, ‘Try this’, ‘Try that’, they love feeding you.”
If [people] knew how to cook, they would save at least half – at least! Gennaro Contaldo
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