Three star cooks

Going to Italy for his latest book, Jamie’s Italy, Jamie Oliver is, in a sense, coming home. Though he learnt to cook in his parents’ pub in Essex, all his early professional experience was in restaurants serving good, authentic Italian food. He worked for Gennaro Contaldi, Antonio Carluccio and, of course, at the River Café, where he was discovered and made a television star. Jamie’s recent television series have had a serious purpose, improving the abysmal standards of school dinners and helping disadvantaged young people find a trade and self-respect through cooking. Though he presents this latest book as a busman’s holiday, irrepressible high spirits to the fore, one senses he is really pondering why Italy has the strong food culture that we lack in Britain. He is not blinkered about modern Italy (acknowledging that these days a salad there can mean a scrap of Iceberg lettuce) and occasionally finds the partisan attitude that will countenance no recipe save that from one’s own village stifling; yet he celebrates the spirit of the people he meets along his journey and their close relationship to their produce and cooking. His recipes are terrific, sophisticated in conception, yet, as always with Jamie, easy to make. The method for cooking dried beans, keeping the skins soft by adding a potato and two tomatoes to the cooking water, is very clever and both his caponata and mushrooms cooked in paper bags are delicious. The book is full of dishes one wants to cook, with photographs to make one feel hungry — just as well, as the helpings are huge.