Cooking up a storm

“Trust me, I’ve been there,” says Zoe Williams

The main thing I remember from my first gastronomic holiday was a powerful sense of wonderment that this incredibly posh woman had let me into her palazzo. You have to picture the scene: she was an English lady of a certain age, who some years before had married an Italian prince. Her cooking was phenomenal: she’d learnt how to do Italian food in tandem with learning how to be married, decades before, and she seemed to approach it with incredible romance, but also a certain plucky boarding school rigour. She would hold up a courgette flower in one hand, a bowl of batter in the other, and basically shout at us in a posh voice until we managed to handle our materials in an acceptable way.

The courses were held at the top of her spectacular building, pretty much opposite the Spanish Steps. So we’d all troop out to the market together in the morning, buy ludicrous items – toenails of exotic hog – deep fry them, cook a load of other stuff, lunch enormously on the fruits (and vegetables… well, mainly meats) of our labours, and then go back to a hotel for a snooze. Everyone else on the course was American, for some reason, and quite full of themselves. A typical exchange would see a Texan mother-daughter pair learn garlic prawns, feast on these tiny bombs of flavour – delicious enough to make you convert to Rome – agree that they were nice enough, but pipe up at the end: “Of course, in Texas, the seafood is much better because it’s so much bigger!”

Obviously I don’t want to sound rich, heaven forbid, but I couldn’t believe how cheap it was – about as much as a slightly fancy beach holiday, say in Corfu. The English equivalent would be if you were allowed to live in a stately home with an aristocrat and be their best friend, while they told you everything they knew about the whole world, including pig breeding. I mean, I’m not saying it would be fun, I’m just saying they would charge about a million pounds.

The consequence of the whole thing is that I now can’t go on another holiday like this, because I just know I’ll be disappointed. For one thing, they are often in France; I’m afraid it irks me, the way the French still think us Brits eat out of tins, slurping like unruly dogs. I’ve been to the odd teaching lunch in vineyards, and they always show you something so bleeding obvious you feel like you’ve been insulted to your face (“this is called a chicken breast, and we fry it. Oh! You have seen chicken before? Well, that is very good…”). I’ve been spoiled for the whole wonderful gastro-experience, in other words, by an Italian who was just too good. I wish I’d started in Switzerland.