Chef Antonio Carluccio taught me how to make a proper, unctuously rich carbonara replete with bursts of salty Parma ham tossed in olive oil, and a shower of parmesan cheese.
Then, the big-hearted, cheerful chef piled a generous serving on a plate and gave me an impromptu lesson on efficiently eating spaghetti. (It involves spearing the ham with a fork first, and then some elegant wrist work with rapid twists and lifts.)
While I dived head first into my carb-laden lunch, as warm and welcoming as a hug, he ate a plate of chicken tikka . “It is low fat, packed with protein and delicious,” he grinned, adding that the best food comes from simple, straightforward cooking.
Hailed as the godfather of Italian cooking, the celebrity chef and restaurateur died at the age of 80 on Wednesday.
Over a career that spanned about 50 years, the London-based chef taught Britain, and the rest of the world, how to cook simple, delicious meals. He wrote more than 20 books, beginning with An Invitation to Italian Cooking in 1986. He focussed on picking good ingredients and using them with respect. In his last book Vegetables, he gives about 120 recipes with different vegetables, describing in loving detail how to buy and prepare them, whether it’s raw, cooked, or preserved.
I met him over his two trips to India in 2005 and 2009, where he worked with the chefs at The Park Hotel, Chennai, training them in Italian cooking. The first time we convened over espresso granita. Dark, powerful and aromatic, it was simply espresso that had been sweetened, frozen and then whipped about seven times before being decanted into shot glasses. In true Carluccio style, a recipe that was simple, but slow.
“You have to have love and passion to cook — not just knowledge and skills,” he said, as he supervised the pasta station. “Cooking is an art of entertaining, of taking time... to think about the people you like, and about how to make them happy.”
Born in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, a village on the coast of Southern Italy, Carluccio was the fifth of six children. Even as a little boy, he said he was passionate about mushrooms and spent his spare time hunting for truffles with his dog. Nicknamed the ‘mushroom man,’ he’s written two books on the subject. A Passion for Mushrooms is a recipe book as well as a guide to foraging and eating wild mushrooms, with a list of the 25 most delicious species and the 14 most deadly. Then came The Complete Mushroom Book: The Quiet Hunt .
The chef’s resume states that he went to Vienna to ‘study languages and work as a correspondent’ for a paper at the beginning of his career. However he chuckled conspiratorially and gave a different version of the story. “At 21, I went to Austria. For a woman, of course. What else?”
He and his then wife Priscilla Conran opened Carluccio’s in London to fulfil an ambition to bring the best Italian ingredients to Britain (Priscilla and Carluccio were divorced in 2009). By 1999, Carluccio’s Café was launched in London. It grew into a successful chain, and there are now Carluccio cafés in the UK, Turkey and UAE. Carluccio was awarded the ‘Commendatore OMRI’ by the Ambassador of Italy — the equivalent of a British knighthood — recognising his services to the Italian food industry.
Intriguingly, he was never really taught how to cook. “It was involuntary,” he said, in an interview with MetroPlus when he was in Chennai. “I picked it up. I would come from school, and lift the lids of bubbling pots and pans... I learnt from my mother how to choose the right ingredients.”
His book talks of how he developed a taste for good food, thanks to his mother’s lunches, delivered to him by a goods train every day. “There was always hot soup, meat or fish, vegetables, cheese, bread and fruit.” Later, he said he would be sent to check whether the trains were running on time, so his mother could start cooking pasta, and then ladle it straight from the pan into warm plates, as soon as his father, a stationmaster, came home for lunch.
As for my legendary carbonara? As the spaghetti curled in boiling water, Carluccio tossed languidly torn bits of Parma ham into hot olive oil. He then added a generous amount of grated parmesan to two well-beaten eggs in a different bowl. He dropped the warm, and still drippy, spaghetti into Parma pan. Then rapidly poured in the egg mixture, carefully and quickly flipping it so that each strand was coated in a rich, silky, clingy sauce. “The trick is simplicity,” he said, “Minimum fuss, maximum flavour.”
