Watching Massimo Bottura cook at home is a confidence-builder for amateurs – but a melancholy reminder of the restaurant meals we’re missing
The last time I watched Massimo Bottura on Instagram, life in his kitchen was, as ever, a little chaotic. Bottura’s wife, Lara, glamorous in white jeans, told a rambling anecdote at the top of her voice. His son, Charlie, somehow ended up with whipped cream on his cheek. His daughter, Alexa, could as usual be heard hurriedly translating her father’s running thoughts from Italian to English. As for the Michelin-starred chef himself, he was in particularly fine voice. “Ragazzi! Ragazzi!” he shouted, trying (and failing) to get everyone’s attention. Italy’s lockdown having finally been eased some days before, however, the mood was also valedictory. Freedom – and work – now beckoned once again: perhaps this would be one of the last times the Botturas would entertain us at home. “This is a real leftovers meal,” Alexa explained, as her dad made an elaborate pile of some dry-looking chocolate breakfast pancakes, a few slices of banana, and a large dollop of preserved cherries.
Gazing at this toppling confection, I wondered vaguely if he was taking the piss. But, no. At the stove, more serious work was under way. “Look!” instructed Alexa. “This is a pasta that thinks it is a risotto.” In a pan into which he had crushed some plum tomatoes, Bottura tipped a bag of tiny macaroni – the kind you might usually add to soup. He then added a ladle of broth made from the liquid in which he’d cooked (separately) both some mussels and some pork belly, and stirred. Things, it must be said, did not look terribly promising. In the mix, we could see two pale cloves of garlic, bobbing like white sharks in a blood red sea, and a small, floating tree in the form of a huge bouquet garni. He stirred some more. He added some more broth. And on and on. Finally, he threw in the mussels and pork, a few lumps of cold butter (“to bring down the temperature and to make it creamy!”), and a sprinkling of orange zest, grated from a fruit that was roughly the size of Jupiter, and which had been sent to him by a kind friend in Sicily. Pronto. The pasta was now ready for the table.
If there’s joy in all this cooking, there’s melancholy in it, too. It reminds us powerfully of what we miss
Related: Massimo Bottura and his global movement to feed the hungry
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