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Travel Articles
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Travel articles
I write travel articles for various journals, but particularly the Sunday Times, and particularly about food in different parts of Italy. Most of the articles are archived on Times Online. Click on the links below to read the full article It’s not that I have a problem with the guide per se, more that satisfying the demands of a guidebook originally designed to tell haute-bourgeoisie French motor-ists where to find Parisian-style fine dining seems to do strange things to chefs, making them complicit in a production-line approach that, however upmarket, has more in common with the box-ticking of Pizza Hut or Starbucks than with good cooking... The dog is described as a labrador, although it’s fair to say he wouldn’t win any prizes at Cruft’s. Rough-coated and barrel-chested, with incongruously large ears, he has more than a touch of terrier. What’s not in dispute is the eagerness with which he tracks around the roots of an oak tree, urged on by his owner... On the table in front of me is a bowl of Catalan fish stew, a zarzuela. It contains plump, juicy mussels, fresh white fish landed at the harbour a few hundred yards away, saffron and ripe tomatoes, and it smells absolutely delicious. But what fascinates me, as I take the first piquant mouthful, is that it is also a culinary microcosm of an island’s extraordinary history... Venice, famously, has fewer miles of canal than Birmingham, although as you chug down the Grand Canal, the wake from your vaporetto washing up against gothic palace after gothic palace, you are unlikely to wish yourself on the Grand Union instead. Or at least, not until lunchtime, when you might recall wistfully that, these days, Birmingham can boast twice as many Michelin-starred restaurants as its Italian counterpart... In Italy there is a road that links Piacenza, high in the Apennine hills, to Rimini, on the Adriatic coast. It is remarkable for two reasons. First, like many roads built by the Romans, it has almost no bends in its 150-mile length; and second, this is the road that takes you through the greatest gastronomic centres of Emilia-Romagna, and therefore of Italy, and therefore of the world: towns such as Parma, Reggio, Modena and Bologna... One becomes fluent in a cuisine as in a language, steeping oneself in its idioms, getting its accents right,” said the great Italian food writer Marcella Hazan. She might have added that in Italy cuisine does not speak one language but many. Every region has its own distinctive flavours, and nowhere are they more pronounced than in Rome... The lump of dough is the size of a bowling ball and almost as heavy: working it requires real physical effort. Over and over again the pizzaiuolo heaves it onto the marble counter, forcing air into the mixture. Then he takes a chunk the size of an orange, flattens it with a push of his fist, and twirls it on his fingers until, magically, it seems to open up like a cowboy’s lasso into a shimmering, spinning saucer a few millimetres thick, hovering over his hand... |
