I'm not a chef, and I don't have a TV show, a restaurant, or my own brand of pasta sauces.. I'm just a home cook, maybe a bit like you.
I’m also, at least genetically, 50% Italian. Over the years, I’ve lived, studied and worked in Italy, and I have to admit to having well over five decades experience of eating and falling in love with all kinds of Italian food, but especially pasta.
Pasta and me are very, very good friends.
In my childhood, absolutely everyone cooked, from my grandmother to my aunts and all of my uncles. It might sound sugary and syrupy, but that’s honestly how it was - focaccia on the beach, after dinner strolls for gelato, decades of family reunions and every single hello and goodbye with my dearest relatives and every friend I can think of, all with food in common.
The luckiest foodie kid on the block
Growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s in a British-Italian home, my brother and I were probably some of the luckiest foodie kids on the block, though, of course, we didn’t know it at the time. We’d experience ‘new’ foods and tastes decades before they’d even been heard of by anyone else. Pesto, pizza, focaccia, bruschetta, minestrone, prosciutto, mozzarella, lasagne, polpette, zabaglione. Everyday foods today, but back then, foreign, exotic and exciting. It was years until I realized that the culinary experience we’d had was so much more than a normal upbringing. It was a priceless gift.
But my own Italian food journey starts, of course, with my mother and my maternal grandparents, Guido Andreani and Maria Botti, from Tuscany. Their family is probably the biggest inspiration behind Pasta & Magic, above all for an unexpected reason: the cooking DNA they passed on to me was the product of their own experience of a handful of different Italian regional cuisines and traditions. From their roots in Carrara and after being obliged to close a business in London at the start of WWII, my grandparents moved to Rome for 20+ years, before finally retiring in Genova, Liguria.
That’s where all my childhood family holidays began and where, each summer, I was raised on a glorious mix of my countless relatives’ cooking traditions, with dishes from Liguria, Pisa, Carrara, Siena, Livorno and Rome. Later and throughout my career, first in advertising and then as a commercial photographer, I’ve always jumped at the chance to spend time, work and just ‘be’ in Italy. Every family reunion, trattoria meal or street food stall I’ve ever experienced in over five decades has helped me in some way to write Pasta & Magic.
You’ve never thought about pasta like this before
Pasta & Magic began as a lockdown project for a family recipe book and quickly developed into a wickedly delicious and addictive obsession - so much so that I promptly decided to set about writing the cookbook that I’d never been able to buy myself. A single book turned into a series of four, each curated under unique themes and each full of a mix of traditional, historically inspired and contemporary pasta dishes.
Early on, when I was planning the book, I stumbled on a unique concept that fixed my pasta inspiration problem overnight and determined the shape of my entire book project.
Any sauce or pasta dish you can think of will either be based on an Oil Sauce, a Pesto, a Dairy Sauce or a Tomato sauce. That's how I've themed each recipe book in the series, and I’ve found it's an incredibly easy way of coming up with ideas for pasta dishes. Pick any ingredient and think about what sauce it would work with. It's practically impossible not to create new pasta dishes when you walk down any supermarket aisle!
Whether you’re cooking for yourself or for friends and family, I hope you enjoy the tastes and the experience of cooking my recipes in Pasta & Magic. Cook the classic combinations, experiment with your own variations, but always give your pasta as much passion as you can and a reason to be loved and remembered.
