Sorting books in preparation for our imminent move (across a courtyard), I found a notebook I’d kept during my third year in Rome. It’s a shiny, red A4 pad full of food notes, much of it a sort of diary, in the style – I thought – of Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries, the last food book I read before not-packing and moving to Italy. There are also lists of Roman recipes, Italian words and phrases with circles around them, and stuff stuck in.
One of the stuck-in things is a triangular packet of salt from a ferry, another a column that Rowley Leigh wrote for the Financial Times, When in Rome, all about Roman bitter greens. Being a newspaper column, there is no doubt about its age: 24 May 2008. A note in familiar writing reminds me that it was my mum who ripped it out and sent it to me. I can imagine the scene. It is breakfast, Dad is drinking tea and eating toast with so much butter and marmalade that a blob falls off, while Mum is reading the paper with occasional commentary. Suddenly Mum exclaims “Martin, look! Rowley (first-name terms) is in Testaccio (which is where I was living, therefore we could be proprietorial) and eating cicoria.”
Source : theguardian
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