Italian gush fest

THE FOOD CLUB

Chef Tuomas Heikkenen of Travertino, the Italian restaurant at The Oberoi New Delhi thinks that Italian food is the finest cuisine in the world.

He rates it streets ahead of his own Finnish cuisine. Here, in his own words, are five reasons why.

Its freshness. I've bought a packet of vegetables at the supermarket, not even at a speciality store, and boiled them to make a soup. It was as soul-satisfying and flavourful as anything that a Michelin-starred chef could conjure up. In fact, outside Italy, to make food taste as good, chefs have to resort to flavouring agents. Every town and village that I have visited in Italy has a market in the city square where endless discussion precedes the simplest purchase. To an outsider, all the produce looks equally fresh, but the Italian housewife has an eagle's eye.

When I started cooking, it was at the kitchen of Giorgio Locatelli in his London restaurant, Locanda Locatelli. Though it was straight restaurant food, there was a lot of emphasis on freshness and simplicity. Then, I began seeing the Italian girl who is now my wife, and I was exposed to home cooking. It is a totally different world. Try as I might, I cannot and will never be able to replicate the flavours that my mother-in-law conjures up so easily.

struggle to bottle tomatoes at the height of their season and I grow typically Italian vegetables at the Oberoi Farm, but she's light years ahead of me anyway.

The sense of history. I am amazed that reprints of antique recipe books are available even in the smallest village. The average Joe knows far more about Italian cuisine, its foreign influences and evolution through the ages than the citizen of any other country. What I admire the most is that in spite of being so proud of their traditions, they are the first to experiment with their cuisine.

I love the fact that the Italians have their holy cows: parma ham for instance, which is known the world over, but which, in actual fact, is not as spectacular as some of the hams that are made in tiny farms all over the country. It's the same with many other ingredients too "" they are more famous overseas than they are in Italy. On the other hand, Italians are not apt to go in for names just because they are famous: they have to taste better than the competition too.

It is not easy to master the finer points of the cuisine, unless you are born into it. It's a minefield trying to master the nuances of a dish, because somebody else in the next village invariably cooks it differently. Pairings of two ingredients on the same plate, thankfully have well-recognised rules. But the high point of the cuisine, for me, is its seasonality.

love the immediacy of cooking black cabbage for only a few weeks in the year, or using fresh mushrooms only a couple of times before the season changes.

marryamhreshii@yahoo.co.in