It’s 9.25 in the morning, it’s pouring with rain and my girlfriend and I have just arrived at RSJ – in Waterloo – for lunch. No, we are not punctual bordering on clinically insane: we’re a bit early because we are not just here to eat, we are also here to help. Every month, forty or so guests flock to this thirty-year old restaurant for the Sunday Italian lunch, and every month a handful take up the option to spend a morning in the kitchen with the vivacious whirlwind that is Ursula Ferrigno – learning how to make the very courses they’ll be enjoying upstairs later on.
In my case I have been signed up as an inspired birthday present. Ursula is an old friend of mine who I haven’t seen for years, so I get to surprise her just by walking through the door. Eight years ago, when I was working for her publisher, we toured the North of England promoting her then-latest book, Bringing Italy Home, showing curious fans how to cook proper Italian food. It’s great to see her again and I’m excited at the prospect of picking up some of her enormous expertise: back then, I was too busy making sure books were sold and rooms booked to absorb any specific knowledge, beyond the fact that her speciality figs with chocolate have a taste good enough to remember for at least a decade.
Coffee is served and Ursula tells the five of us who are ‘helping’ what we can expect. Between us, we’ll be making Italian bread, fresh pasta, a salad called The Woman in White and swordfish stuffed with pine nuts, cinnamon, fennel, breadcrumbs and anchovies. She apologises for the repetition we’ll experience in creating these foods, but explains that it’s only by repeating tasks that a chef arrives at perfection.
I get the bread job. After dissolving a thumbnail-sized chunk of fresh yeast in water and mixing it in with some flour (plus a pinch of salt), I soon have a pair of hands covered in yeasty, drying goo and a bizarre, chaotic mess on the work surface in front of me. Whereas Ursula’s kneading technique – she described it as “like having an elastic band attached to your hand” – looked simple and elegant, mine looks awkward and a bit weird. Then I start to get the hang of it and at almost exactly the same time – as if a switch has been flipped – the dough starts to behave itself and actually look like dough. I feel a bit smug. Then my arm starts to hurt and I am told I have ten minutes of kneading left.
The morning as a whole is educational and fun: I also make real breadcrumbs using a combination of a colander and a machine whose name escapes me except that it sounds almost exactly like ‘Robocop’, and I become adept in the fiddly art of rolling stuffing into erratically shaped pieces of swordfish, without letting the pine nuts fall out (it’s really hard). When the dough has sat somewhere warm for a while, we turn it into small discs called foccacino, which form part of The Woman in White along with chopped fennel, cucumber and celery and a generous helping of the nicest buffalo mozzarella I think I have ever tasted. Elsewhere, long strips of tagliatelle are prepared and cut by hand using an ingenious method that reminds me of origami.
The meal itself is delicious and enormous enough to rule out any notion of going to eat haggis for Burns Night. Ursula appears intermittently to talk to the rapt audience about the courses, their provenance and preparation – and at one point we are all asked to stand for a large round of applause. Did I mention that it was an inspired birthday present?
RSJ blogged about our morning and lunch too and their post is here. And you can read details of future lunches with Ursula at rsj.uk.com/events.htm, Also, in case you were interested, Ursula has tried many, many flours in her time and so far has found none that she prefers when breadmaking to Waitrose’s Canadian flour. And the buffalo mozzarella comes from Italian food importers Machiavelli.
By M. Cosworth
Italian Recipe Calendar