Mcalpine - Table in Venice : Recipes from My Home

~ in which you will discover how Venice came to be my home

~ in which you will find sweet breakfast recipes inspired by the Venetian coffee shops

~ in which you will find vegetable recipes inspired by a morning shop at the Rialto market

~ in which you will find classic but simple Venetian lunch recipes

~ in which you will find recipes for a Venetian aperitivo

~ in which you will find recipes for fish, seafood and game, inspired by the fruits of the Venetian lagoon

~ in which you will find sweets and desserts, home-baked goods to round off a meal

~ in which you will find a list of store-cupboard essentials

Casa Mia

How Venice came to be my home

In a quiet corner of Venice, far off the beaten track and away from the crowds that cluster around the famous Piazza San Marco, stands a little house. Its crumbling plaster walls are a soft, dirty pink. Its windows, hidden behind watermelon-green shutters, look out over a sleepy canal. If you were to wander past, you most likely would not look at it twice, too beguiled by the beauty of the streets of Venice all around you. You might even be lost few visitors come to this unpretentious part of town intentionally. But were you to pause for a moment, standing just outside the green door, in the campo where the cherry tree grows, what you would see is my home: the house where I grew up, where my husband and I celebrated our wedding, where my son took his first steps and where I learned to cook.

The story of how the little pink house on a Venetian backwater came to be my home is a serendipitous one. Unlike almost everyone else in my neighbourhood, I wasnt born in Venice, nor is my family from there: we moved to the city when I was tiny and before I can really remember living anywhere else. I have no recollection of my first night in the attic bedroom, nor of seeing the city for the first time from the water. I do remember my mother telling me that we were to move there for a year and my asking if this meant that I wouldnt have to go to school. I was six. I did go to school, of course. And we stayed longer than a year; weve never really left.

When we first arrived, I spoke not a word of Italian beyond ciao and gelato. I went to the local school, a charming old convent with vaulted ceilings and the prettiest of courtyards. My teacher was a petite nun with a kindly, creased face who wore an immaculately starched wimple. We called her Madre Adolfa and, with all the patience in the world, she taught me Italian. She spoke no English: I remember her running water from a rusty tap into her hands, jabbing her wet finger at me and crying goccia, goccia the Italian word for drop of water. For a long time, I thought that it meant finger.

I soon learned to speak the language, though with a heavy Venetian accent and a fair few words of dialect mixed in. With time, the strangeness of living in a city with no cars, travelling everywhere by boat, and splashing through streets flooded with water when the tide came in high, became habitual though it has never lost its charm. As is often the way when you come from one place and live in another, I feel no identifiable nationality: I am neither wholly English nor wholly Italian but I am much of both. Venice, really, has always been home, and over time I have come to think of myself as Venetian, if only by adoption.

As is the way for those who love to eat, my happiest childhood memories are centred on food. Little has changed for me on that front as Ive grown older. I remain the kind of person who remembers life through what they ate and how it was cooked: veal escalopes rolled in crisp breadcrumbs and cooked alla milanese on our wedding night; panettone filled with pistachio cream for pudding the Christmas before last; bollito misto with a sharp salsa verde on the day my husband proposed; and cold tongue with heaps of Dijon mustard, followed by a molten hot chocolate souffl, the night before our son, Aeneas, was born.

I live by the belief that food is so much more than a necessity. It is memories and feelings, a reflection of and a catalyst for our moods, and a profound way to connect with those around us. When I was a child, my parents loved few things more than to gather around the dining table for lunch and linger there until long past sunset. Meals were usually chaotic: shared dishes, hastily tossed together; flowers cut higgledy-piggledy from the garden and plonked on the table. Sometimes lunch was for six, though just as often for twelve or even twenty the more the merrier, with the hum of excited conversation playing out to a satisfying chorus of knives and forks scraping on plates and strains of Verdi opera blaring from the tinny stereo in the kitchen. To me, the chaos was magic. My memories are full of warmth, generosity and fun. Our life played out around the dining table, made richer by the food we ate and the cast of characters who joined us there. Somewhere along the way I learned not only to cook but to love to cook.

Venices best-kept secret

If you know Italy well, you will know that each region boasts its own distinctive cuisine, just as it speaks its own dialect and exhibits an indefatigable sense of regional pride. It is perhaps not so surprising when you think that Italy only became Italy, as such, in 1861. Before that, it was simply a collection of independent principalities and city states, which shared little more than geography.

All of this is by way of explanation of the fact that when you talk to a Sicilian about Italian food they will regale you with tales of pizza and cannoli and when you talk to a Roman you will hear of deep-fried artichokes and cacio e pepe. An Italians view of real Italian food is still determined by where they are from, just as their views on how tomato sauce should be prepared is determined by how their own mother cooks it. The one constant across the country is the simplicity and passion with which Italians cook and eat.

Venice did not become part of Italy until 1866, having passed back and forth between Napoleon and the Austrians between 1797 and 1814, then returned to Austria when Napoleon was defeated. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it dominated the Mediterranean as an independent republic, La Serenissima. Over the course of its rich history, the city has welcomed crusaders, merchants, pilgrims, artists, revellers, romantics, travellers and traders from East and West alike. Each has left a little of themselves behind, and together they have contributed to creating a city that is like no other. These varied influences are reflected in Venices food, just as they are in its crumbling walls and famed frescoes.

Venetian food and by that I mean the food eaten by Venetians remains perhaps Italys most closely guarded secret. Hundreds of thousands of visitors pass through the city each month. They leave having eaten in Venice but not having eaten well, visiting trattorie that cater to a transient trade. It is the food cooked in homes and made with local ingredients, the recipes passed down through generations, that Venetians reserve for their own gratification. That is Venetian food, and that is what I write about here. Romantic and exotic, it dabbles in spices and delightfully foreign flavours. Its pine nuts and raisins, bay leaves and sweet vinegar, heady saffron and creamy mascarpone. Zabaione, where you whip Marsala or Prosecco, eggs and sugar into a frenzy as light as air; buttery risotto made with garden peas so sweet and tender you would be forgiven for mistaking the dish for a pudding. It is the food of my childhood, laden with nostalgia and synonymous with comfort.