Anna Del Conte

Coco: How did your cooking journey start? 

Anna: I started cooking because I wanted to eat. I presume I started cooking when I got married—not before. I presume my husband Oliver wanted to eat too, so we started cooking together. Because I was used to eating quite well, I tried to cook as well as I could.
 

Coco: How did you start to think about creating recipes?  

Anna: I don't think about creating recipes.

The food comes to me naturally, and then there is a set of recipes—Pasta com pomodoro, sugo di pomodoro and so on—and then you can tweak here and tweak there. 
 

Coco: So you're adapting and building on previous recipes?

Anna: Yes, there is a lot of ‘pinching’ from other people's recipes.

One of my recipes is called ‘plums braised in wine with raspberry’, which is quite an odd recipe. In fact, it was a mistake of mine. I said to one of my children, “Put some rosemary in”, and I meant in the roast. They put the rosemary into the plums by mistake.

Anyhow, this chef published his recipe with the same rosemary. I thought it was a bit close to mine, but then I rang up, and he said, “Oh, no, my grandmother, who was Italian, did the same thing”.
 

Coco: How is it to be a female chef?
 

Anna: I’ve never been a chef.

 
Coco: A cook?

Anna: I would call myself a cookery writer.
 

Coco:  What’s the difference between being a cookery writer and a cook?

Anna: I don’t know exactly, but I do know that I cook and then write up my recipes, and from there, I became well-known as a cookery writer.
 

Coco: And that’s more of a female world, would you say?

Anna: I think there are quite a lot of females in it. There were in the past, and yes, I do think more women have probably written cookery books.

Coco: You think it is because the cook is domestic, and the chef is not?

Anna: Cooking is a very demanding business, and I think women, when they have children, they find it too difficult. I remember at one stage, I thought vaguely about opening an Italian restaurant in Barnes, South London.

There was nowhere to eat Italian, and a friend of mine who had a restaurant in Chelsea told me, “Don’t do it. Your family life will be ruined, you'll be spoiled, forget about it.” 
And I did forget it.

Coco: Can you tell me a bit about how your recipes have reflected the times you've been living in?

Anna: The audience does change. Readers have changed immensely.

It was really a disaster when I first came to England in the 50s. There was no food. The food was horrid. It began to change gradually in the 80s and 90s when there were very slight improvements.
 

Coco: So, when you first came, do you think you wrote a more general understanding of Italian food?

Anna: Yes, my first book was ‘Portrait of Pasta’, which happened just by chance.

Coco: A beautiful book!

Anna: Thank you. It's the best cover. 

It was just a chance because I was teaching Italian to this girl who was the daughter of a publisher, and they'd just published a book about bread.

It was a lovely book, and I asked,
 

“Do you think your parents would like to publish a book on pasta?”
I was signed on the very same day.

 
I enjoyed it. I did the research; I went to Italy. There was no computer back then, so I had to go and do all the research myself.
 

Coco: So, that was your first book?

Anna: Yes, my second book was ‘Gastronomy of Italy’. It was luck; it wasn't my idea.
That book was a great success, and the course sold really sold very well in America. That's where I began to be known by name. 

Then, Marcella Hazan, a very successful Italian cooking writer who lived in America, wrote a wonderful book and asked me to edit her American edition for British readers.
After I edited that, my name started to become known for my British edition of Marcella’s book.
 

Coco: Would you say she influenced your cooking?  

Anna: Yes. I really do think she was the best writer on Italian food.

She also had a cooking school in Bologna and one in Venice.
At one stage, she asked me to come down to Bologna and said, “I want to give up Bologna because I want to concentrate on Venice. Will you take up Bologna?”

I said no because it’s difficult to follow in somebody else’s footsteps.
 

Coco: What book did you enjoy writing the most?

Anna: ‘The Classic Food of Northern Italy’. I think it's probably my best.

 
Coco: Did you find it tricky to balance your domestic life and your cooking?

Anna: I was very lucky in that I had a job that was something I needed to do. Everyone got to eat, and everybody enjoyed it.

Coco: Could you tell us about any women who have influenced you?

Anna: Marcella certainty. I like Jane Grigson; she was a great cookery writer. She knew an awful lot about English food. 

In Italy, the scene was more dominated by men, apart from Anna Gosetti Della Salda who wrote Le Ricette Regionali Italiane. She was quite a lady, and I remember meeting her vividly. 

It’s an absolutely beautiful book in which she collected recipes from the 20 regions of Italy. 

Coco: So, she has done it by regions just like yours?

Anna: Northern Italy is done by region, yes. The gastronomy is from A to Z.
 

Coco: Was that because you prefer northern Italian to southern Italy? Or is it just because you're born there?

Anna: Yes, partly because I am from there, so that’s what I knew.
 

Don't forget that a long time ago, there weren't so many things that one knew. Pesto, for instance, which is a basil sauce, was not known in Milan although it is only 200 kilometres from where Pesto was born in Liguria, on the sea.

We used to go on holiday on the Riviera and my mother used to make jars and jars of pesto to take to Milan for the winter.
 

Coco: What about southern Italian food? 

Anna: Southern Italian food is wonderful. Every region is wonderful. Look at the food of Emilia-Romagna with all the tortellini, ravioli, anolini, gnocchi de zucchini, pumpkin.
 

Coco: Oh, zucchini is my favourite!

Anna: But the zucchini’s from Italy, not from England. They are not so good here. Partly because of the sun - the sun is everything. The sun makes all the vegetables and the fruit have much more flavour.

I think there are a lot of things happening in England. They had a very early industrial revolution, which was in the 1780s. The Industrial Revolution happened in Italy in the 1950s, almost 200 years later. In England, in the late 18th and 19th centuries, people left their soil and went into the city. And so , this disconnected them from the food where they came from.

Coco: Could you tell me a little about your favourite ingredients that you like to cook with?

Anna: There are three great oils. Well, actually four, but one is from the Lago di Garda, where there are some olives, believe it or not, that produce this very beautiful, very fine olive oil, which is very rare.
Otherwise, there is the olive oil of Liguria, the olive oil of Tuscany, and the olive oil of Puglia.
 

Coco: And do they have vastly different flavours? 

Anna: Well, they are not vastly different, but they have different flavours. The extra virgin olive oil from Sicily is also a very good one. They make it wonderfully.

Olive oil grows an awful lot everywhere in Italy because the olive trees grow in very arid soil.
 

Coco: What are your favourite ingredients to use in England since moving here? What do you find really great to cook with here?  

Anna: I think pork. I used to find pork very good.
 

Coco: What about fish?

Anna: Funnily enough, for the English, fish means fish and chips. They don't usually buy fish to cook at home. So, you don't find much fish on the market. It is better now. 
But even so, I'm lucky that we have a market in town, here in Shaftesbury, with a fishmonger who comes and brings more than the usual salmon.
 

Coco: What about wild ingredients? 

Anna: We always foraged when I was a child. We used to go outside Milan and forage a little. Chicory in the spring and then nettles. For those, you need to put your gloves on!

Coco: And that's for nettles with risotto, nettle tart…

Anna: I don’t know about nettle tart. Your mum makes a nettle tart. Oh yes, but I don't cater so much to nettles. Your mother does, though. She loves them. She hasn’t certainly learned it from me because I’m not good with them; it’s not part of my tradition. Risotto with nettles, I certainly do.
 

Coco: What about mushrooms?

Anna: Ah, the mushrooms are very wonderful, but not yet in December. Good mushrooms are the porcini, the boletus and the chanterelles.
 

Coco: We used to find those huge puffball mushrooms.

Anna: Oh yes, that's right. The puffballs are not bad.
 

Coco: They're great. We'd make creamy puffball soup.

Anna: When I came to this country, nobody went to find mushrooms or anything. The only thing that the English collected were wild blackberries.
 

Coco: You were saying that you feel happy with your achievement of writing in a foreign language.  

Anna: Yes, that's the only thing I've done that is very good. As far as I know, there is only Joseph Conrad, and he was Czech, who also achieved well. 

Funnily enough, I don’t think there are very many people who have managed to achieve fame whilst writing in their second language.

In fact, it's very funny, but when I write, I write better in English than in Italian.

 
Coco: But it must have been quite tricky at the beginning.  

Anna: I never found it tricky.

Oliver, my husband, helped me a lot because he corrected and checked everything, and that's probably how I learned it. From his corrections, I suppose.

But now I write very easily in English. As I said, it is probably easier for me to write in English than to write in Italian.