Perfect recipe as Herald columnist given OBE
THE Herald Magazine’s food columnist Mary Contini has been awarded an OBE for “services to the Scottish food industry and Scottish-italian relations”.
She said: “It is a great surprise and joy to me to have been put forward and to be receiving such an honour. I am completely overwhelmed.”
The grand-daughter of Italian immigrants who moved to Scotland at the beginning of the last century, Ms Contini grew up with her seven brothers and sisters in a house above her father’s ice-cream and fish and chip shop just outside Edinburgh.
She was involved in her parents’ seaside restaurant and catering business from an early age.
She and her husband Philip Contini took over the Italian food and wine emporium Valvona & Crolla, established in
1934 by his grandfather Alfonso Crolla, in 1983.
And she opened the Valvona & Crolla Caffe Bar in 1996, using high-welfare ingredients sourced from artisan producers and farmers in Italy and Scotland.
Ms Contini, a BSC graduate in Biological Sciences with a postGraduate degree in Management and Business Studies, became one of the first female trainees at Littlewoods Stores in Edinburgh.
She is the author of several food books and memoirs addressed to members of her family in which she relates the stories of her and Philip’s Italian forebears who emigrated to Scotland and transformed its food culture.
She said she “grew up with strong women who were all distinctive great cooks”.