Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen
- and the importance of connecting.
My best intentions to research extensively and write furiously on these few days away at the seaside have been all too easily undermined by the temptation to eat oysters, chat with friends and stare at the waves. So this is just a short post about Tuscan vegetables and good cooks. I’ve been Googling too so it’s all the more fun if you follow the links!
This yellowing paperback has been on my bookshelf since this edition was published in 1978 and there is a great back story of Janet Ross and her life in Egypt and Tuscany but that will have to wait for another day … and I promise it will be soon!
I am in Kent, just an hour’s drive from my home in London but it feels like another world. Maybe I should not be as surprised as I am at the frequency with which I bump into old friends and acquaintances here on the streets, folks I know from London and elsewhere who are also visiting. It’s a comforting reminder of the smallness of the world and how connected we all are. This morning it was the vicar from Greenwich who I met passing the door of my holiday rental. He retired and moved away five years ago, just here for a day trip but happy to stop and chat.
Looking into the histories of Janet Ross (1842 - 1927) and Michael Waterfield has also reminded me about the networks within which we operate. Janet Ross wrote her book about the Tuscan recipes she and guests at her Tuscan villa enjoyed and it was published in 1899. Of course, it was actually her cooks and team of gardeners whose efforts produced the meals so admired by the Anglo-Florentine community who enjoyed her hospitality.
The recipes she recorded were edited and updated by Michael Waterfield, her great-great nephew. In his introductory note he includes this quote from Janet -
For years English friends have begged recipes for cooking vegetables in the Italian fashion, so I have written down many of the following from the dictation of our good Giuseppi Volpi … who has been known to our friends for over thirty years …
Michael takes pains to acknowledge that Guiseppi was a fine cook and also names his successors as Agostino Sabattini, Carlo Guerrini and Maria Chiodetti.
Michael was a cook himself and, in the 1970s, was running The Wife of Bath at Wye in Kent which had a fine reputation for good food under his management. He claims to have used most of these vegetable recipes in his restaurant, adjusting as necessary but avoiding those dishes so beloved by the Edwardians who had a passion for the extravagant use of truffles and masking foods in aspic.
He was well remembered by Martin Dwyer who worked for him -
This man was, and still is, the most gentle, unassuming man I have ever met in a kitchen. As proprietor of a restaurant, which was at that time recognised as one of the top ten in England, he had none of the characteristics of a prima donna chef.
Michael ran his kitchen with kindness and understanding, he never raised his voice, didn’t know how to be sarcastic, and still produced marvellous food. He became, and still to this day is, my role model of how a kitchen should be run.
Michael had previously worked at The Hole in the Wall in Bath with George Perry-Smith as had his business partner in the 1960s Simon Mallet. Many others acknowledged the influence of Perry-Smith, including Joyce Molyneux who famously cooked at The Carved Angel, managed by Tom Jaine. It was Joyce who helped train Rosie Sykes and so the tradition evolves and the network spreads ……
Martin Dwyer writes -
Perry Smith is reckoned to be the man who translated the ideas of Elizabeth David into food for restaurants and was responsible for the huge raising of standards in catering in England, the reverberations of which can be felt in modern Britain’s culinary confidence and skill.
The Waterfield Family in the kitchen of The Wife of Bath
Pictured in Vogue Magazine in 1976
Sadly, The Wife of Bath was yet another of those restaurants I dreamed of but never reached. I read that I might have met Mary Berry there. Edward Heath was apparently a regular, eating in the back room, and on one momentous occasion, Elizabeth David herself stopped by for lunch….