How cookbook authors Elizabeth David, Marcella Hazan gave chef Joe Trivelli stage fright

Joe Trivelli, a chef at The River Café, in London, had performance anxiety when it came to writing a cookbook. It’s not that he didn’t know his subject. Born to an English mother and Italian father, he had been going on holiday to Italy since the age of two, and learning how to cook from his grand­mother and extended family before going to work at The River Café in 2001. But many excellent cookbook authors had written about Italian cuisine, and he wondered what he could add.

“I am reverential of the cookery classics, the likes of Elizabeth David, Marcella Hazan and Patience Gray, but this reverence translated into stage fright,” he writes in the introduction to The Modern Italian Cook (2018). “It preoccupied me how I could be relevant, useful and ultimately standout in a saturated cookery-book market.

“And then I found clarity. The cooking that I do at home, today, has become a crystallisation of what I make at work, every day, and what I have eaten, and look forward to eating, whenever I return to Italy. It’s food that I want to serve back to the people who inspired it, whether colleagues, or my aunts, uncles and cousins. I would have even risked presenting some of the best dishes to Nonna – well into her nineties when she died, she was finally proud of what she taught me.”

Trivelli’s take on the cuisine is, as he writes in the book, “prototypical Italian cooking, updated. It reflects how people shop and cook now, but it is a book that I would willingly show to my more traditional, home-making aunties […]

“This is a book that has respect for, and under­stand­ing of, the DNA of Italian cooking but is not a slave to its prescriptions. It comes from a solid grounding, professional and personal, in The Rules […] I use fish and meat as much for season­ing these days, enjoying larger cuts too but irregu­larly.