As a trained chef, the head gardener of Petersham Nurseries and the daughter of the River Café’s Rose Gray, Lucy Boyd was always going to be passionate about simple, fresh food. Her first book looks back at her childhood in Italy, and the flavours she was introduced to by her mother.
Even as children, and before Rose became professionally involved with cooking, she would get excited about food. The first morello cherries of spring would be de-stoned by us sitting around the table before being thrown into a large pan with sugar and boiled to a sweet and tart dark purple jam to spoon on to her crêpes with generous dollops of crème fraîche. There were no short cuts, no bought jams – the making and preparation of a meal was something everyone would be involved in. An intuitive understanding and respect for ingredients as well as a curiosity about their potential made everything Rose cooked come alive. It was this approach to food that was exciting as well as her gift for sharing with family, friends and later on at the River Café not only with the chefs but also the waiters, getting them involved with the prepping of the ingredients.
These recipes are inspired by memories, by cooking with my mother and by a love of simple, fresh ingredients. She taught me how to cook and that cooking was part of family life, a way of living. Kitchen equipment essentials were quite basic. Pasta was rolled out with a glass bottle if the rolling pin couldn’t be found. Mayonnaise was made in the pestle and mortar; pastry, cakes, eggs and cream were hand-whisked in a bowl. Not having a food processor or KitchenAid made the preparation of food both social and instructive; friends would be given a board, a knife and a glass of wine with directions on how finely to chop the garlic. Peppercorns were crushed in a crude wooden bowl with a large round stone just before cooking so that their oils remained fresh. She was an incredible teacher in that you came away from your experience of cooking with her and somehow life had changed.
But it was in the 1980s when we moved to Italy to a small village called Camaiore, in the hills above Lucca, that the garden and countryside became so important to what was cooked at meal times. Rose, informed through her mother, who grew up in a horticultural family, knew all about plants, weeds and wild-flowers – which ones you could eat and the best parts of the plant for cooking with. A walk up the hill was really a foraging outing for supper – mallow tips, wild rocket, chicory and porcini were collected, then carefully prepped with instructions on which parts to discard and which to keep. Meat was either from a pig (pancetta, prosciutto, cotechino or zampone), rabbit, chicken or the little birds that were shot in the hills around us by hunters and roasted on skewers, but mainly we ate pasta, risottos, soups and vegetables.
I remember a delicious lunch we made once. Dandelion leaves were gathered along with the wild thyme growing by the side of the track that went up the hill behind our house, walnuts were collected from the tree in the garden and lemons picked from drooping branches that hung over the wall that divided us from the road. We had gathered three different fillings for the ravioli we then made for lunch. Each ravioli tasted very distinct from the other. The creamy ricotta, light and sweet with the slightly bitter, earthy taste of the wilted dandelion leaves and the sharp fragrance from the thyme, the bright zest from the lemon in stark contrast to the bittersweet nuttiness of the wet walnuts – three ingredients which couldn’t be more alive with their contrasting differences sitting happily on the same plate. It is this excitement about ingredients that has stuck with me.
Most influential, though, are the memories of our ritual family breakfasts. Our Pavoni coffee machine, which gave us an electric shock as we turned it on in the morning before we were fully awake, anchovies on toast, tomatoes, eggs with chillies, Lapsang Souchong tea with no milk, prosciutto with thick slices of juicy sweet melon; learning to love the taste of the prosciutto and eating the sweet fat with the fruit and it melting in your mouth (tearing the fat off the prosciutto was considered as bad as not eating your crusts). My approach to flavours and the joy of cooking seasonally comes directly from Rose and our time in Italy.
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