The Italian Woman Who Changed Home Cooking Forever

When Anna Del Conte was 19 years old, she went to jail. Twice. The first time, in February 1944, she was riding her bike past curfew in wartime Italy when a couple fascist soldiers stopped her on suspicion of couriering to partisans in hiding. (She was on her way to a party.)

As she recounts in her 2009 memoir, Risotto With Nettles,

...the commissario began to interrogate me, while delving into my rucksack and fishing out the contents, one at a time—my heavy flannel nightdress, which he declared deliziosa, the toilet bag, and everything I’d packed for the night, including my precious salame, a present intended for my hosts. He looked at it with even more lust than he had the nightdress, then took out a penknife from his pocket and, ponderously, began to skin it and cut it into chunks, one of which he shoved in his mouth, before offering a piece to his underlings, who accepted with unctuous gratitude. I was incensed.

Many want to claim that food isn’t political, but to those people I offer Del Conte. I find that it’s hard to talk about food without situating it within a nation’s context, which in and of itself is always political. The way Del Conte centers the traumatic incident around this salami in 1944, a year and some change before the end of World War II, signals not a skirting of the war at hand, but rather a reverence for food and its scarcity. Obviously her incensation was not just that the salami was stolen, but that the commissario used it as a scare tactic and as a symbol of control.

“It’s good,” he told her, eating her host’s gift, “but a bit too fresh.”

Following this passage, she casually walks through why the salami was so fresh (it came from a neighbor’s pig that was slaughtered just a month prior) and then a detailed account of the many foodstuffs it was later turned into (including the salami and coppa di testa, or pig’s head brawn—what the French call head cheese, “one of the most interesting dishes I learned to make during the war”). The story of the stolen salami is a prime example of food that tells not just personal history, but national history as well.

The second time Del Conte went to jail, nine months later, the Black Brigades came to search the house, taking her and her family to the same barracks where the commissario stole her fresh salami. Though the Del Contes were only held until midday, their friends, the Pellizzis (whose pig was made into salami), didn’t return home for 23 days.

The bounty of the slaughtered pig serves as a dark contrast to what the Pellizzis had to eat in prison: “some soup and a piece of meat, which the soldier on duty fished out from the pot using the same fork he’d been eating with.”

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“One cannot understand a cuisine and its development without seeing it in relation to the history of the country in question,” Del Conte writes in the introduction to her encyclopaedic Gastronomy of Italy (1984), what would become the bible of Italian food for cooks all over the world. It reads a bit like Craig Claiborne's The New York Times Food Encyclopedia, but with lush Roman paintings and little black and white sketches of fish species, pasta shapes, and regions of Italy sprinkled throughout the bulging volume.

There are many analogies one could make about Del Conte’s influence on the way we see Italian food today: What Larousse Gastronomique did for French food, Gastronomy of Italy did for Italian food. Or: What Marcella Hazan did for Italian food writing in America, Anna Del Conte did for it in England. Her number-one fan, Nigella Lawson, calls her "the Marcella Hazan of England."

In fact, Del Conte adapted Hazan’s first two books for the British market: The Classic Italian Cookbook, which she called “the best book on Italian cooking in the English language,” followed by More Classic Italian Cooking. Her own cookery books, including Portrait of Pasta (1976), Entertaining all’Italiana (1991), and The Classic Food of Northern Italy (1995), were all critically acclaimed. As she writes, “the achievement I will always feel most proud of is that I was the first cookery writer to put authentic Italian pasta on the British plate.”

Charlotte Druckman probably said it best in her gorgeous profile of Del Conte in the Post: “One could argue that her ambivalent identity is directly responsible for her success and appeal as a food writer.”

I’ve always felt that Del Conte’s greatest quality was her ability to translate one nation’s food for another. "To emulate an Italian in the kitchen, you need to prioritise flavour," she writes. "Italian food is relatively simple; its success is based mainly on the flavour of the key ingredient, so this must be the highest quality. The Italians spend far more on food than the British, in spite of having a smaller income." It’s precisely this careful attention to cultural differences that has allowed her to bring Italian cooking to the British with such empathy.

How could she not? She was only 24 when she fled Mussolini-era Italy to work as an au pair in England, where she would marry her husband, Oliver Waley, never moving back to her hometown in Milan. Little did she know that she'd soon be crowned "the doyenne of Italian cooking."

"Her prose is considered and understated, her erudition illuminating yet underplayed," Lawson wrote in The Guardian in 2009, when Risotto With Nettles was published. "Above all, she understands that food has a context—historical, social, creative—but that this is nothing if recipes don't work. She is eminently reliable, the trustiest, most inspiring teacher. Every paragraph she writes is shot through with her sensibility, which mixes wryness, intellectual rigour and practical commonsense."

Del Conte's recipes for lemon risotto, spaghetti with tomato sauce, and bucatini alla carbonara, have certainly changed the way I cook and eat Italian food in my own home, as well as the way I taste it in restaurants. She taught me, for instance, to dress my pasta with sauce, not my sauce with pasta. She taught me not to overdo things in the kitchen, to let the ingredients speak for themselves. She taught me to use herbs and spices sparingly ("Both are added to enhance the flavour of the main ingredient, not to distract from it"). She taught me that any Parmesan cheese added to a dish "must dissolve, imparting an overall flavour like a seasoning."

I’ve also always felt that the best leader is one who doesn’t ask to lead. When Del Conte was asked to do cooking demos in front of live crowds, she hated the idea at first. "Frankly, I never enjoyed doing them," she writes in Risotto with Nettles. "I don't like to be on a podium or addressing a number of people. But I thought it would be good for my image.

"At one of these demonstrations I saw a beautiful girl in the front row, listening attentively to every word and, at the end, she came up and introduced herself. It was Nigella Lawson, who became a great champion of mine. I felt honoured. Nigella knows Italian food better than any other British-born cookery writer and is able to describe it so well. A few years later I told her the same words that Sir Walter Scott said to his great admirer, Alessandro Manzoni: ‘Now the pupil has eclipsed the master.’”

Del Conte, now in her 90s, lives in England.

What has Anna Del Conte taught you over the years? Tell, tell in the comments.