Review: “Bocca Cookbook” by Jacob Kenedy

I’ve only been to Italy once. I was Interrailing with my friend Nicola; we were students on a shoe-string budget. We boarded an overnight train to Rome with Parisian baguettes strapped to our rucksacks, determined to eke out of our meagre budget entry fees to all of Rome’s major attractions. For actual sustenance we mostly cooked pasta in our hostel kitchen; we balked at the price of coffees and spent out treat money on extravagant late-night gelato. I dream of this gelato still, but it wasn’t much of an introduction to the scope of Italian or even Roman food.

So most of what I have gleaned about Italian cooking comes from Masterchef. Whenever the contestants are made to cook in Italy (or in the kitchens of Italian restaurants), the chef divulges the secret elusive spirit of Italian food: simple, fresh ingredients cooked with passion and love. Passion! It’s all very well saying this – but just how do you tear a basil leaf with passion, as opposed to any other way of tearing a basil leaf? How do you stir love into tomato sauce, rather than just prodding it with a wooden spoon?

Jacob Kenedy is the chef-owner of popular Soho restaurant Bocca di Lupo. His cookbook is a riotous journey around the regions of Italy, loudly celebrating this Italian passion and zeal for all things food. This is a book about enjoying life. It is riotous, bolshy, and unashamedly greedy. He makes no pretences at “authenticity” (not being Italian himself) – and yet captures its spirit perfectly. There are quirky introductions and curious recipes; some entries are more instructions on how to eat something, or how to buy it. Everywhere we are encouraged to employ our senses, our cook’s intuition. A recipe for Jam tart notes that “perfection is not refinement, but the perfect expression of the cook’s heart”.

Bocca is not full of recipes I intend to recreate – and yet I have devoured every one, and it has left me hungry (like the wolf). I have learned in great detail the art of the sausage – did you know you have to knead the meat? I have considered marching down to the butcher and demanding “the head and feet of a pig” to make a soprassata; I have thought about whether my cupboard under the stairs is the right temperature for curing; I have vicariously met the challenge of the “extremely spicy ‘nduja salame, which is 30% chilli by weight “. And that was just the sausage chapter. Later, I lingered over a recipe for sanguinaccio, a pudding made with chocolate and pig’s blood (a dessert that “tends to meet expectations”, both for those to whom it “sounds weird and wonderful” and also “those who find the idea weird and repugnant. If you are of the latter persuasion, do not be tempted to try it.”).

The photography is beautiful – unfussy and informative, including windows to the country which make you ache to be there. A field of frost-bejewelled cabbages on a misty dawn made my nose tingle with the scent of a late autumn morning. It is peppered with photographs of Kenedy himself, usually stuffing something into his mouth. A cook after my own heart. I think I know now what the Masterchef contestants have missed (but those round Italian mamas have clearly not), which can’t really come across on the TV. To experience the real spirit of Italian food, it’s not just the cooking, but the eating itself which must be infused with joy and passion.

Bocca Cookbook is published by Bloomsbury, RRP £30