Katie and husband Giancarlo Caldesi own and run Caffe Caldesi in Marylebone and Caldesi in Campagna in Bray. Katie also runs the La Cucina Caldesi cookery school, so who better to create a definitive cookbook and course for Italian food?
This is weighty book, not just in the way it makes my IKEA ‘invisible support’ shelf adopt a distinct downward incline, but also in the weight of knowledge inside it. Katie spent three years travelling all over Italy to talk to chefs, old ladies, producers and other experts in food fields to put it all together.
The regions of Italy are each proud of their unique recipes and rarely agree on anything, be it variety of vegetables or cooking technique. Weather and landscape play a large part, from fierce sun soaked coastal regions reliant on seafood, to temperate mountain pastures where succulent meat is grown on the finest grass. To even think about gathering it all up in one book is to make the head spin, but here Katie has managed to edit all the information she has gleaned and make it digestible for us stuck in the UK.
Perhaps it’s because she isn’t Italian that she can do this. Any Italian would have succumbed to partisanship early but Katie simply says ‘show me’ to the cooks she meets and that’s what they do. Specialities of a region, of a village even of one family are brought to the pages with stomach-rumbling effect.
There are 40 masterclasses on technique: such as making and baking bread, making pasta, trussing quails, making stocks and sauces. Each is rigorously explained in simple terms, because at the end of the day Italian cooking is all about simplicity and not fine art. Master these basic techniques and you can’t go wrong with the recipes which are, without exception, totally tempting.
In fact there are around 400 recipes from Italy’s 20 regions with chapters on Pasta,
{ISBN:1856267792}