Skip to content

Journal

  • Passata di Pomodoro

    Passata di Pomodoro

    On Monday our new season passata finally arrived from Sabina and Michele at San Cesareo in Fano. Their lovely old farmhouse, hidden among the trees in the photo, has a kitchen where the tomatoes are taken within an hour of picking. There, they are washed, plunged into boiling water, drained and then put through a mill to separate the skins. The passata is bottled either with or without whole Datterini tomatoes.
    Read now
  • A True Story Of The Fake Black Olive

    A True Story Of The Fake Black Olive

    This is the true story of the fake black olive: the olive that looks out at us from the top of your pizza; from the supermarket shelf, the olive with the texture of a rubber tyre and which sometimes, will taste of soap. Or perhaps we should say: the former olive. Because these olives are finally, at the end of their entirely disenchanting treatment process, effectively dead.
    Read now
  • Fog: The Key To Flavour

    Fog: The Key To Flavour

    Each winter, the flatlands of the Bassa Parmense are lost in a grey whitewash, their fumära, or fog. Rolling off the banks of the Po, it can get so dense that on some of our visits, we can barely see a few meters, and some of Italy’s most ordinary landscape suddenly shifts and finds its character.
    Read now
  • The Ethical Abattoir

    The Ethical Abattoir

    In the UK the tradition of small-scale animal slaughter that our Italian producers sustain has all but disappeared. Many people blame EU laws for forcing the closure of local abattoirs meaning that animals have to be driven many miles to be slaughtered. But in reality this is due mainly to commercial forces that have steadily changed the structure of our meat industry.
    Read now