Monday,
May 15,
Italy has Most Women Michelin Chefs in
Europe, Result of Trattoria Tradition
The ANNOTICO Report
As the MICHELIN guide is published by a French company, many international food critics have denounced the rating system as inherently biased toward French Cuisine. They also noted that over half of the restaurants that received two or more stars served French Cuisine.
It's One to Three
star system, of only highly rated Chefs/Restaurants, might be described as Thee
Stars , "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey", Two stars,
"excellent cooking, worth a detour", and One Star, "a
very good restaurant in its category".
Michelin
awarded the coveted Michelin three-star award to 50
Chef/Restaurants in the World in 2005.
Of the FIVE 3 Stars awarded in
A totaling of the One, Two, and Three Star Michelin awards shows again a great inclination to
Reuters
By
Jo Winterbottom
Mon May 15, 2006
CANNETO
SULL'OGLIO, Italy (Reuters) - Star chef Nadia Santini
laughs as she describes the bicycle pile-ups outside the fishing
shed here 80 years ago when laborers crowded in for lunch cooked by her
husband's grandmother Teresa.
"The first
to arrive would put his bike against the wall, then
the others would add theirs, until there was a pile. The problem came when
people started leaving -- the first pulled his bike out from underneath and
they all fell," she said.
Santini is one of three female
chefs of a total of five cooks in Italy who have won the coveted Michelin
three-star award. Italy has 226 Michelin-starred chefs and 60 are women -- the
highest number in any European country.
She won the award
at the Dal Pescatore
restaurant, which she runs with her husband Antonio, here in the lush
countryside around an hour from Verona, in Italy's Northeast.
The restaurant is
built around the original fisherman's hut, from which it takes its name, where Teresa
cooked fish caught by her husband in the river nearby. Laborers from the
surrounding fields came to eat.
"Nonna Teresa taught me how to cook tench,
carp, the most humble fish but with wonderful recipes, very simple but
marvelous," Santini says.
The front door of
Dal Pescatore still opens
directly onto a little lane, just as it did 80 years ago.
These roots in
Italy's tradition of small trattorias, which were
originally simple extensions of cooking in the home, are used by leading chefs
to explain why so many of the country's top cooks are women.
KEEPING ALIVE THE
TASTES
"The woman
was in the kitchen and the man was in the salon," said Annie Feolde, the first woman in Europe outside France to win
three stars from Michelin.
"In my case,
it worked even better because my husband is a wine expert," Feolde, who cooks at the Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence, told Reuters during a Michelin
event earlier this year to mark 50 years of its famous restaurant guide in
Italy.
Nadia Santini sees this tradition as something women in
particular are adept at passing from generation to generation.
"We women
know how to value highly those who have died but who have trodden the path
before us. We manage to keep alive not just the culture, but tastes, smells, to
move other people emotionally," she said.
Dal Pescatore's
kitchen has three generations of Santinis at work --
Giovanni, who has just finished a college degree in food technology, Nadia and
"Nonna Bruna,"
mother of Antonio.
It is a bright
room with huge windows on two sides overlooking a garden. A central work area
of gleaming steel with hanging pans reflects the workspaces along the walls.
The atmosphere of
a large, family kitchen makes you want to stick a finger in to taste the
chutneys, or grasp and knead the creamy dough laid out ready for transformation
into walnut bread or rosemary grissini.
EEL WITH A TWIST
Nadia Santini still cooks carp, tench
and eel -- but updates them for modern tastes.
Eel is smoked and
served in a coin-sized portion with sliced ginger in sushi-style alongside a
terrine of salmon as one of about seven starters.
Dal Pescatore
now has been expanded and the dining room alone has seating for about 35 people
in large armchair settings. It has a reception area with divans for digesting
and a backdrop of books and vintage bottles.
The menus are of
equally large proportions, measuring some 16 by 12 inches and each year
carrying a unique painting on the cover. This year, they depict a field of
bright sunflowers reflecting the restaurant's walls and tablecloths.
The color
resonates in Nadia's pasta -- which comes to the table one shade lighter than
the egg yolks used to make it.
Inside little
parcels of tortelli is orange pumpkin flavored with amaretti almond and chutney -- a speciality
of the region and one of Dal Pescatore's
year-round dishes.
Eel features
again among the main courses, alongside turbot and for meat lovers, lamb, beef,
duck and pigeon.
The desserts,
which Giovanni prepares after he has worked on the starters with Nonna Bruna, include cooked
fruits of the forest and an apple tart with vanilla ice cream, or a twin set of
strawberry and pear sorbet served in china flutes.
"For
something to be perfect for us women, it can't just be beautiful to the eyes,
but (also) good to smell, tasty, satisfying for the stomach and also
stimulating for the brain," Nadia says. "It has to have these five
qualities and maybe cooking has a sixth, which is happiness."
http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle
.aspx?type=inDepthNews&storyID=2006-05
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