Elio Ferrante
Two days a week I survey ships. The rest of it I cook.
I did not train, I have never worked a service, and the closest I came to a professional kitchen was three unpaid weeks on a bakery night shift in Genoa. What I have instead is a small flat, nine years of notes and an unreasonable amount of stubbornness about one pot of beans.
The cards started as a rescue operation. My grandmother cooked judión beans in a pot that lived on the back ring from November to March, and when she died there were three of us who had watched her do it and not one who could reproduce it. It took a year, eleven attempts and a short, unwilling phone call with an aunt.
Once I had that card I could not stop. Everything I cook now gets written the same way: what I bought and where, what I actually did, what went wrong, and what I would change. It is the format I use for damage reports in the port, which is either a coincidence or the whole explanation.
The photographs came later and for a boring reason. I wanted the cards to have a picture and could not afford anyone, so I learned where the light is. There is one good hour in this flat, four until five, and most of what you see here was timed to be ready at ten to four.
Slow pots
Beans, shoulders, anything that improves while you are out of the room.
Bread
One loaf a week for nine years, and a rye that is better on the third day.
Preserving
Four jars of lemons and three of harissa, every October without fail.
Photographs
Window light, no team, no styling kit beyond what is in the drawer.
The port
Started surveying ships for an insurer. Still there two days a week, still writing reports nobody reads.
A mountain refuge
Two winters cooking for twenty a night on one oven, with no delivery after Friday.
Card no. 1
Wrote down the first recipe properly, because the bean pot had been lost and I did not want to lose anything else.
Three weeks in Genoa
Unpaid nights in a bakery, arranged over the phone. The Tuesday loaf comes from there.
The first supper
Ten people around one table in the flat. Sixty-three of them since and never the same menu twice.
Writing for other people
Recipes and photographs commissioned by magazines and two small food brands.
I am not trying to cook like a restaurant. I am trying to cook like someone who has to do it again on Thursday, after work, with what is already in the cupboard.
Right now
What is actually happening this month
A fennel and white bean thing
Card 215. Three attempts in and still too sweet.
Quince, before the tree gives up
My aunt says two more weekends at most.
A book about salt cod
Borrowed in April, not returned, no plans to.
A menu for the wine bar
Eleven dishes, all of them at four in the afternoon.
Rewritten on the first Sunday of every month
Away from the stove
The table, the market, the walk home
On paper
Where I learned it, and what I have written
Elio Ferrante
Home cook, recipe writer and photographer · Trieste
I cook one thing properly at a time in a small flat, write down exactly what happened, and photograph it in the one good hour of light this kitchen gets. Two hundred and fourteen cards so far. I also survey ships two days a week, which pays for the butter.
- [email protected]
- Trieste, Italy
Write down what went wrong. In a year that is the only part of the card you will still need.