How cookbook authors Elizabeth David, Marcella Hazan gave chef Joe Trivelli stage fright
- Having worked at London’s River Café since 2001, the author of The Modern Italian Cook reveals why he was anxious about following in the footsteps of giants of the genre
Joe Trivelli, a chef at The River Café, in London, had performance anxiety when it came to writing a cookbook. It’s not that he didn’t know his subject. Born to an English mother and Italian father, he had been going on holiday to Italy since the age of two, and learning how to cook from his grandmother and extended family before going to work at The River Café in 2001. But many excellent cookbook authors had written about Italian cuisine, and he wondered what he could add.
“I am reverential of the cookery classics, the likes of Elizabeth David, Marcella Hazan and Patience Gray, but this reverence translated into stage fright,” he writes in the introduction to The Modern Italian Cook (2018). “It preoccupied me how I could be relevant, useful and ultimately standout in a saturated cookery-book market.
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“And then I found clarity. The cooking that I do at home, today, has become a crystallisation of what I make at work, every day, and what I have eaten, and look forward to eating, whenever I return to Italy. It’s food that I want to serve back to the people who inspired it, whether colleagues, or my aunts, uncles and cousins. I would have even risked presenting some of the best dishes to Nonna – well into her nineties when she died, she was finally proud of what she taught me.”
Trivelli’s take on the cuisine is, as he writes in the book, “prototypical Italian cooking, updated. It reflects how people shop and cook now, but it is a book that I would willingly show to my more traditional, home-making aunties […]
“This is a book that has respect for, and understanding of, the DNA of Italian cooking but is not a slave to its prescriptions. It comes from a solid grounding, professional and personal, in The Rules […] I use fish and meat as much for seasoning these days, enjoying larger cuts too but irregularly.
“Partly this harks back to the cucina povera tradition that was second nature to my grandmother – the moral and economic obligation to stretch flavour, drawing all the value and goodness from an expensive cut – but today it also ties into a very real concern for sustainability and supply.”
The first chapter, on pasta, is especially tempting. Recipes include rigatoni with figs; pumpkin gnocchi and chicken livers; pici with nduja and breadcrumbs; and cavatelli with salted cod and crunchy peppers. The other chapters (on vegetables, fish/meat/eggs, baked goods and sweets) give recipes for dishes such as charred new potatoes and artichokes; fried aubergines with mint; stuffed and roasted chillies; dried peas with purple sprouting broccoli; cuttlefish stew baked on toast; salt cod baked over potatoes with greens; wild asparagus with sausage and egg; fried courgette flowers with tomato; potato pizza; fried pizza stuffed with broccoli; rice and herbs pie; peach ice cream; and chocolate amaretti.
