It’s a very simple place: a large room with a long bar down one side and wooden tables and chairs where the farmers and the old men of the village drink red wine and play cards. But the moment you sit down, big baskets of bread from the bakery arrive with bottles of local wine, and then the plates of antipasti: salami, prosciutto, lardo, carpaccio, local cheeses, artichokes, porcini. As one plate is taken away, more arrive, and so it goes on and on. Then, just when my wife Plaxy, especially, is thinking that there can’t be any more food, out comes a pasta dish – maybe a baked lasagne – and then a fruit dessert.
The antipasti are based around simple produce, just like in people’s homes and most small restaurants. The members of the cooperativa bring whatever they have that is fresh that day, along with ingredients such as artichokes and mushrooms, prepared when they were in season, then preserved in big jars under vinegar or oil, or salamoia (brine). In Italy, things are done differently from in the UK, especially London, where you buy your food, eat it, and then buy some more. Most people in Italy still behave like they did in the old days, when you would always have a store cupboard full of dried or preserved foods because you never knew when there would be a war or some other disaster.
In smarter restaurants, the kitchen would have the chance to show off a little more with the antipasti. In my uncle’s kitchen at La Cinzianella we really worked at our antipasti, bringing out some fantastic flavours, because we knew that this prelude to the meal said a lot about what you were trying to achieve with your food, and about the dishes that would follow. The slicing machine was right in the middle of the big dining room, so everyone could see the cured meats being freshly cut, and we would prepare seafood salads and roast vegetables. Imagine how I reacted the first time I went to a French restaurant and they sent out some canapés before the meal – those tiny, bite-sized things. I was shocked. I thought, ‘If this is what the rest of the food is going to be like, forget it!’ Italians don’t like to fiddle about with fancy morsels, they just want to welcome people by sharing what they have, however simple, in abundance. An Italian’s role in life is to feed people. A lot. We can’t help it.
In Italy the concept of the ‘starter’ – individually plated dishes that you eat by yourself, just you – is quite a modern thing. Only in the last twenty years or so have restaurants started putting them on the menu. Traditionally, after the antipasti the real ‘starter’ was the pasta course, or first plate (i primi piatti). Then came the second plate (i secondi piatti), which would be meat or fish, and, to finish, fruit or a dessert (i dolci).
When I look at the books I have of old regional recipes, no mention is made of ‘starters’ as we think of them today. One of the books I love most is La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well) by Pellegrino Artusi. All Italian cooks know about Artusi – he was a great gourmet and one of the first writers to gather together recipes from all over Italy. He published the book himself back in 1891, in the days when Italian food was considered a bit vulgar in ‘smart’ society because the food of the royal courts was French.
Artusi spent twenty years travelling around Italy and his knowledge of regional produce and cooking was remarkable. His stories are full of beautiful descriptions and witty comments, sometimes using old Italian words that I have to look up. I keep his book in my office in the kitchen at Locanda to research ingredients and old recipes. But even Artusi has only a short section on ‘appetisers’, which is really just an acknowledgement of the moment before the meal when you show off your capacity to bring out food of a high quality. (Interestingly, he says that in Toscana they did things differently from other regions and served these ‘delicious trifles’ after the pasta, not before.) Artusi talks about various cured meats, caviar and mosciame (salted and air-dried tuna), but the only ‘recipes’ he gives for appetisers are a selection of crostini: fried bread topped with ingredients such as capers, chicken livers and sage, or woodcock and anchovies.
Traditionally, the kind of antipasti you ate was determined by where you lived. Around the coast there would obviously be more seafood, while inland there were cured meats. Every region would have different breads to serve with the antipasti: light, airy breads in the North, white unsalted bread in Toscana and enormous country loaves made with harder flour in the South – fantastic for bruschetta, which these days has become rather elevated in restaurants, but is really just chargrilled stale bread with a bit of garlic and tomato rubbed over it and some oil drizzled on top.
Even now, food in Italy is very regional, but after the Second World War, when everything became more abundant and people began to travel more, some chefs started to be a little inventive and borrow ideas for their antipasti from other regions, and from the street food you see cooked in cities such as Napoli by vendors with gas burners on trolleys: arancini (rice balls), crocchette (mashed potato croquettes), panzerotti (little pasties filled with meat, cheese, tomatoes or anchovies, then deep-fried), mozzarella in carrozza (mozzarella ‘in a carriage’ – deep-fried between slices of bread), and frittelle (fritters filled with artichokes, mushrooms or prawns).
Nowadays in Italy – in the cities at least – like everywhere else in the world, the way people want to eat is changing, though perhaps a little more slowly than everywhere else. Not everyone wants a meal of several courses any more. They want to be more relaxed, so you can order just a bowl of pasta and nobody thinks anything of it. And there are now city bars serving only antipasti, where you make yourself up a plate of whatever you want, and that’s all you have. Then there are the newer, smarter restaurants, which try really hard to make their starters more imaginative than a plate of carpaccio or an insalata caprese (tomatoes and mozzarella).
As for me, I am an Italian chef who has cooked in Paris and come of age in London, and inventive starters are what people expect from me. I might have in the kitchen a salami that is so beautiful it makes you cry, but I can’t just slice it and put it out with some artichokes and bread. I have to present it in a more sophisticated way. We must include such starters in the restaurant, but we can’t lose the pasta course, so the modern Italian menu usually has four sections: starters, pasta, main courses and dessert, which I know can seem daunting. Sometimes customers say, ‘What should I do? Do I have to have a starter, then pasta and a main course after that? Or can I have just pasta and a dessert?’ Of course, you can do what you like; we just try to give a selection of everything an Italian would