The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Italians do it better
Angela Missoni’s kitchen secrets
Angela Missoni is in A rush. her dark-chest nut nails a re st ill wet a nd she is racing out for dinner after our interview. The creative director of the eponymous italian fashion house celebrates her 20th anniversary at the helm of her family’s business this year, and is in london on a flying visit, having presented her autumn/winter 2017 collection – slouchy knits in sfumato rainbow stripes; sky-blue zigzags segmenting zipped jackets – in Milan a few weeks earlier. she never has enough time to do london properly, she explains, but hares ‘in and out’ for shows. i promise to discuss her clothes, but she’d much rather chat about her other passion: cooking. When we begin, it’s clear she could talk about food all night.
As a little girl, Missoni’s playground washer parents’ factory in V are se, about 30 miles nor t h-west of Milan. ott av io a nd rosit a based t heir knitwear company, founded in 1953, there. ‘i witnessed everything[ to do with the business] from a very young age ,’ Missoni explains ,‘ and have always been beside my mother in fashion.’ since she ‘was the youngest, and the girl’, she was by rosita’s side, too, on trips to the grocer’s and the butcher’s. ‘i knew exactly how many pieces of meat were needed to make the bollito misto.’
When did she learn how to cook? ‘ i honest ly don’t k now. i was ver y young. i just think i had that sensibility.’ Biscuits and cakes were her first endeavours, whose scents would greet rosita at the door when she got home from work – for her to find nothing but crumbs left. ‘i was always ver y golosa [greedy],’ Missoni says. By the time she was 13, t he fa mily ’s favour ite dishes were a ll pa r t of her reper toi re: osso buco wit h cit r us-spiked g remolat a; bollito misto with salsa verde; trippa
alla Romana (tripe with tomatoes and Parmesan). she was adept at r isottos and pasta, as well as Christmas vol-auvents filled with a beak-to-tail rendering of chicken – bone marrow and all.
Just as an affinity for kaleidoscopic patterns runs in Missoni’s genes, so too does the ar t of playing host. For large reunions, t he family rarely ate out at restaurants. ‘it was our habit to invite
‘My mum always said it was the ultimate luxury to have your own chickens’
people to our home.’ At her own house, set on the same hillside as her mother’s, with the factory minutes away, Missoni and her partner, Bruno R ag azzi,a textiles magnate, regularly have 10 or 12 people round for dinner. While t hey have a cook during the week, at weekends she entertain sin a kitchen that overlooks Lake Va rese a nd t he Alps beyond. Glass cupboard doors reveal her collection of crockery and glassware( brightly coloured, naturally– ‘this is my way of decorating the kitchen’), and the table is an homage to a house Missoni remembers staying in when visiting her grandparents. ‘The huge kitchen had a marble table, with a big wooden board that would be pulled out from inside and placed on top to work the pasta.’ Recently, her version was in use while she showed her grand son, three-year-old Otto, how to make biscuits and raspberr yjam-topped crostata.
Misson i’ s family often gathers around her table. Margherita, 34, her eldest daughter and Otto’ s mother, moved back to the area when she was pregnant; Teresa ,28, eight months pregnant when we speak, has also returned and drops infrequently. Rosita came by to help Otto stamp out his biscuit dough, and Missoni of ten takes lunch at her mother’s house.
A few nights ago, Mis so ni made tortellini en brodo (in broth) using pasta she brought home from a recent trip to Bologna. She says she always travels with food, ‘taking vegetables from my garden to our house in Sardinia ’, bringing back the island’ s speciality cart a
da musica bread, or, as she recounts gleefully, driving back from Tuscany in Ragazzi’s new Porsche with mountains of beef for a bollito misto she planned to make for her son’s birthday .‘ We were carrying so much that Bruno said it looked like a pickup.’
Missoni is proud of her vegetable garden, with its raised beds of winter cabbages; then later in the year, peppers, courgettes and tomatoes. Olive
oil comes from friends who produce it in Sicily and Lig uria, and neighbours are generous with their produce. ‘My mum always said it was the ultimate luxury to have your own chicken sin the garden. She and my grandmother kept them. But I think the bigger luxury is for your neighbour to have them,’ Missoni says with a laugh. She marks each egg with a pencil, as her mother and grandmother always did, to note the date it arrived. It’s a tradition she holds dear, as she does her regular flea-market visits with Ros it a, Margherita and Teresa. Her finds, often cut-glass bowls or ceramic B am bis (which she collects), become the centrepiece decorations at dinner parties.
A pro at people management and menu planning, Missoni is the strategist behind every family birthday party and wedding. Last November, she hosted 135 guests for Ros it a’s 85 th birthday. Three types of polenta with meat toppings we reserved from copper pot sin the kitchen .‘ I arranged different areas for aperitifs, drinks, and for people to help themselves ,’ Missoni explains. Hundreds of miniature fruit tarts spelled out ‘85’ on the patterned tabletop she uses for presenting birthday cakes. To celebrate her special anniversary this year, she jokes ,‘ perhaps we will have 20 celebrations ’. If anyone can pull that off, it’s Angela Missoni. missoni.com