The past week has been an absolute blur, so for those of you who have been waiting ... just waiting! for another blog entry, I’m sorry, but this is the best I have been able to do. As you read the unfolding story below, I think you’ll understand why ... I am writing from my little room above a trattoria in Cogello ... it has been quite a week ...
Let’s see ... about 30 – 35 years ago a remarkable man, Gualtiero Marchesi (said mar-kay’-zie) single-handedly reinvented Italian cuisine with his book, “The Marchesi Code”. He approached food, cooking and living as an Italian with a strong philosophical focus, reflecting a sensibility of the possibility of art, nourishment (in every sense) and a deep and abiding understanding of what it means to him to be Italian. In this remarkable cookbook and personal statement he elaborates Italian cooking and culture through 13 recipes. (For the interested, you can order the book in English through http://www.marchesi.it/ )
Consider a cookbook, an entire cooking school, arranged around these 13 principles: harmony, beauty, civilization, colour, genius, taste, invention, lightness, myth, territory, tradition, truth, simplicity. These are what my cooking school, ALMA, in Colorno, Italy, is trying to share, get us cooks to consider and aim towards, to be both an initiation and a portal. Sound too weird for words? Try it! This is all our teachers here have been trying to do ... get us all to think more simply. Most of us have our heads so busy with detail that we forget the big stuff. We’ve been given time to consider, to become open, to the big stuff. Maestro Marchesi spent almost an hour with the George Brown students on Thursday of this week, talking about life and answering questions. We didn’t spend too much time talking about the ‘how’ of cooking, but quite a lot on the ‘why’ that he wrote about in his cookbook, and spent his whole professional and personal life developing. Quite a remarkable man, somewhat shy, self-effacing, with a delicious grin that lights him up from the inside. Our cooking teachers at ALMA all worked in his kitchen when he owned a Michelin three-Star restaurant (the first in Italy). Mr. Marchesi refuses to call himself a chef ... he is a cook, embodying everything that the professional cook is and can be.
To get there, we have to understand what we have to work with and who we are, and the tours of producers, of craftspersons’ life-work, has been a series of almost dreamlike trips. The farm visits, the cheesemakers, the prosciutto makers, everyone has been dedicated their whole lives to making something as perfectly as is possible, with the utmost respect for detail, for history, for the area, for every possible input and outcome. If all this sounds too woo-woo for words, let me assure you it is not. Some of the trips started VERY early (up before 5 AM for long trips), and often back late. One of our tour days started at 5 and we got home at half past midnight, and had to be in the kitchen ready to roll before 8 in the morning. Hard work and hard play go together. What a blast! Giovanni, our (probably exhausted) bus-driver is a saint.
An example ... Felsina Winery and olive grove. This gorgeous place is built around three principles; utmost knowledge of the land, respect for the processes of history and customer need, and finding a life balanced properly, with time to work and time to stop and enjoy what one can do. We were welcomed to the winery, given tours of the land, shown the winery and olive oil presses, then greeted by the present owner. His philosophy is profound and simple too ... make something as perfectly as his trained, caring hands can craft, then give it all to his children and hope that they can, and will, do the same. The winery has been in the family for almost 300 years, expanded by the father of the present owner, and is situated in buildings over 1000 years old. The wine ages in history, literally! The olive oils (there are 4 varietals) are presented just as enthusiastically as the gorgeous wines. The wines are available at the LCBO in Ontario (look under Felsina, or Verardenga) and are worth every penny. The family treated us to a gorgeous lunch and extensive, guided wine and oil-tasting.
Our ALMA program included an evening B-B-Q on a farm in the rolling hills of Tuscany. What an evening ... the finest foods imaginable, an outside location, and then a group of local historical entertainers came by and sang typical songs of the area, sharing songs about philosophy, life-troubles and ways of growing as one ages. As Chef Tomaselli told us, we were in for a treat he could not really explain, and he was right. I took a moment out of the evening and texted to my wife “We are having dinner under a Tuscan sun!”. What a gift from ALMA and Italians to us ... examples of the very finest that Italy is, and has to offer, not only to us but to itself.
Question for us all today ... how do we make our dinners special ... how do we make our own Tuscan suns shine?
Let’s see ... about 30 – 35 years ago a remarkable man, Gualtiero Marchesi (said mar-kay’-zie) single-handedly reinvented Italian cuisine with his book, “The Marchesi Code”. He approached food, cooking and living as an Italian with a strong philosophical focus, reflecting a sensibility of the possibility of art, nourishment (in every sense) and a deep and abiding understanding of what it means to him to be Italian. In this remarkable cookbook and personal statement he elaborates Italian cooking and culture through 13 recipes. (For the interested, you can order the book in English through http://www.marchesi.it/ )
Consider a cookbook, an entire cooking school, arranged around these 13 principles: harmony, beauty, civilization, colour, genius, taste, invention, lightness, myth, territory, tradition, truth, simplicity. These are what my cooking school, ALMA, in Colorno, Italy, is trying to share, get us cooks to consider and aim towards, to be both an initiation and a portal. Sound too weird for words? Try it! This is all our teachers here have been trying to do ... get us all to think more simply. Most of us have our heads so busy with detail that we forget the big stuff. We’ve been given time to consider, to become open, to the big stuff. Maestro Marchesi spent almost an hour with the George Brown students on Thursday of this week, talking about life and answering questions. We didn’t spend too much time talking about the ‘how’ of cooking, but quite a lot on the ‘why’ that he wrote about in his cookbook, and spent his whole professional and personal life developing. Quite a remarkable man, somewhat shy, self-effacing, with a delicious grin that lights him up from the inside. Our cooking teachers at ALMA all worked in his kitchen when he owned a Michelin three-Star restaurant (the first in Italy). Mr. Marchesi refuses to call himself a chef ... he is a cook, embodying everything that the professional cook is and can be.
To get there, we have to understand what we have to work with and who we are, and the tours of producers, of craftspersons’ life-work, has been a series of almost dreamlike trips. The farm visits, the cheesemakers, the prosciutto makers, everyone has been dedicated their whole lives to making something as perfectly as is possible, with the utmost respect for detail, for history, for the area, for every possible input and outcome. If all this sounds too woo-woo for words, let me assure you it is not. Some of the trips started VERY early (up before 5 AM for long trips), and often back late. One of our tour days started at 5 and we got home at half past midnight, and had to be in the kitchen ready to roll before 8 in the morning. Hard work and hard play go together. What a blast! Giovanni, our (probably exhausted) bus-driver is a saint.
An example ... Felsina Winery and olive grove. This gorgeous place is built around three principles; utmost knowledge of the land, respect for the processes of history and customer need, and finding a life balanced properly, with time to work and time to stop and enjoy what one can do. We were welcomed to the winery, given tours of the land, shown the winery and olive oil presses, then greeted by the present owner. His philosophy is profound and simple too ... make something as perfectly as his trained, caring hands can craft, then give it all to his children and hope that they can, and will, do the same. The winery has been in the family for almost 300 years, expanded by the father of the present owner, and is situated in buildings over 1000 years old. The wine ages in history, literally! The olive oils (there are 4 varietals) are presented just as enthusiastically as the gorgeous wines. The wines are available at the LCBO in Ontario (look under Felsina, or Verardenga) and are worth every penny. The family treated us to a gorgeous lunch and extensive, guided wine and oil-tasting.
Our ALMA program included an evening B-B-Q on a farm in the rolling hills of Tuscany. What an evening ... the finest foods imaginable, an outside location, and then a group of local historical entertainers came by and sang typical songs of the area, sharing songs about philosophy, life-troubles and ways of growing as one ages. As Chef Tomaselli told us, we were in for a treat he could not really explain, and he was right. I took a moment out of the evening and texted to my wife “We are having dinner under a Tuscan sun!”. What a gift from ALMA and Italians to us ... examples of the very finest that Italy is, and has to offer, not only to us but to itself.
Question for us all today ... how do we make our dinners special ... how do we make our own Tuscan suns shine?
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