This food is about love
ELLA WALKER talks to Jamie Oliver about his new Italian cook book and TV series and finds the celebrity chef in a
THREE years ago, Jamie Oliver turned 40, and he really “didn't enjoy it much.” The prospect of entering his fifth decade made The Naked Chef more than a little “reflective”, he admits.
Meanwhile, his long-time mentor Gennaro Contaldo – who guided Oliver through his early days at the late Antonio Carluccio's Neal Street Restaurant during the Nineties – was edging towards the big 7-0.
“He was in a similar but different reflective kind of moment,” remembers Jamie. Getting away, escaping for a bit became increasingly appealing to them both. “Me and Gennaro felt we needed that time personally.”
Italy, Gennaro's homeland, became the destination, and the pair spent months travelling from the northern mountains to the southern islands, across the seasons. The result is Jamie's latest cookbook and Channel 4 series, Jamie Cooks Italy.
It's not just about the duo barrelling around Italy gorging on pasta in an effort to scrub out the years though. Instead, the pair set out to learn from the last generation of Italian ‘nonnas', women in their 80s and 90s who “didn't grow up with fridges, freezers, microwaves, gas, electricity – we're talking about old school,” notes the Essex-born restaurateur.
The aim was to capture “a snapshot, a moment, a bit of history”, and by meeting the “matriarchs of the best cooking on the planet”, help preserve a way of cooking and eating that could cease with a generation.
“I am, and I think they are,” says Jamie, when asked if he's worried the food of the nonnas is being eroded. “Things fade, things go, things that are loved and important and really good for family nutrition, or communities or farming or fun, they can be going for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, [but] it only takes five years for something to completely die off.”
“Every single nonna, without question, said, ‘Share this, get this to as many people as possible, people aren't cooking that in this village anymore',” he continues.
“It's fair to say that the new generation of young Italian boys and girls are not cooking like the one before, and the one before and the one before that.”
Strangely, he says the recipes in the book are “almost smoke and mirrors”– the food is important, but with every encounter, whether it was making orecchiette by hand with nonna Graziella in Puglia, or eating sweet and sour rabbit with nonna Marina in Salina, it increasingly became apparent that Jamie and his crew were working on more than a cook book, they were making a record of “life and being grateful”.
“It's about love and seizing the moment,” he says, keen to not sound overly romantic. “We laughed and cried a lot.”
He tells of making tiella, with nonna Linda in Puglia, a baked long grain rice dish bejewelled with tomatoes, courgettes and mussels (“She shucked these mussels, not for mussels' sake, but almost as a seasoning – it was delicious”).
“She was so welcoming,” remembers Jamie. “I was introducing everyone outside in this square, but I kept doing really s*** Italian.
"I kept getting it wrong, and every time I got it right, the bells would ring.
"We started giggling and we just giggled like kids for 15 minutes.”
Eventually they got to around to the tiella, and “while it's cooking you've got an hour to talk. We're talking about how hard the winters were and life and money and family.
“Then it was, ‘How many kids have you got? (Jamie has five).
"As a parent, food is originally used to nourish your growing baby, and then your child, and then your teenager, and then they leave and you use food to bring them back because you want to see them again. You use it like a magnet, it's like currency.”
“It's about knowledge,” he adds. “If you truly love something, regardless of how old (you are) or what people think of you, it's still OK to hunt and search and grovel for knowledge.”
■ Jamie Cooks Italy by Jamie Oliver, photography by David Loftus, Penguin Random House (c) Jamie Oliver Enterprises Limited, £26.