He is an author, food columnist and, above all, a cook. In his story Pasta foamthe Italian Tommaso Melilli recounts his very personal quest for true Italian cuisine and the people who shape it day by day. The Press met the young chef, passing through town as part of the outside section of the Salon du livre de Montréal.
It is particularly chilly in Montreal on this Monday morning. Nothing to scare Tommaso Melilli, who is visiting Quebec (and North America) for the first time, he who is a native of Cremona, in northern Italy, where it can be quite cold in winter.
At 18, he fled “this prison made up of fields of megot — maize — in which [il s]’prop[t] always felt locked up “to land in Paris, he says in his book Pasta foamwhose paperback edition of the French translation was published this year by Folio.
In this culinary self-fiction story, Melilli tells how, after a few years of studying literature at a university in the Paris suburbs, he became, somewhat by chance, a cook. And above all how, after a decade spent in the City of Light, he wanted to discover his roots and, by extension, Italian cuisine.
“The idea of returning was not necessarily considered on my part and it did not come from a special love or nostalgia for my country. It was more of a challenge, and there was also an element of identity that I suffered from in France: after 10 years there, I was still the Italian who made pasta. »
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Tommaso Melilli
“Tradition speaks of the present”
“What if the good old days were now?” asks Melilli during her journey. Meanwhile, he surrenders, trattoria in osteriafrom remote villages in the mountains or in the countryside via Turin, Milan or Rome, spending a few days each time in the kitchen in establishments where what he calls “new Italian cuisine” is born and lives every day.
This cuisine is today defined, he believes, by two main axes: we make more room for plants (“meat as an accompaniment”) and we work with all the foods we eat”, in particular offal , which figure prominently in the dishes and recipes he presents throughout his story.
And it is thanks to a new generation of cooks who have emigrated and then returned to their native country that this cuisine is now “culturally possible”, he judges: “A bit like in my personal history, there is a detour abroad in this movement of new contemporary Italian cuisine, which would not have been possible without a generation of chefs who went to London, Copenhagen, New York and returned. »
The reader meets fascinating characters, all very real, while the narrator gives him access to a world often hidden from view.
We talk a lot about cooking everywhere, in the media, but being behind the scenes allowed me to tell things differently, from the inside. In the interview, the leaders throw their record and tell the things they have learned to say to everyone. But after an hour they forgot I was there and we were just in real life.
Tommaso Melilli
The chef’s story is punctuated by reflections on how cuisine expresses itself through this holy trinity of territory, tradition and innovation. “We talk a lot about cuisine and local culinary tradition in Italy, but I think that when we talk about tradition, we never talk about the past, we talk about the present. This tradition in which we are very interested in Italy speaks of things that we have lost and that we are trying to rebuild, ”he remarks.
“The foam evokes something immaterial, which is around… And here, in my book, I speak of the immaterial, not the material”, indicates Tommaso Melilli.
What makes a restaurant, beyond what you eat there, is also at the heart of his thinking. “What interests me is how, with three words on a menu or two starters, you can change the energy of a space, of a neighborhood. In fact, no large democratic city would have enough means to guarantee safety in the streets at night if there were no restaurants open! Restaurants have a social function; we come to pay a sum in exchange for a service, a welcome and, in the best of cases, an affective intelligence that does good. »
Pasta foam
Tommaso Melilli
Folio
256 pages
As part of the outside section of the Montreal Book Fair (Salon dans la ville), Tommaso Melilli will be at the Italian Cultural Institute on November 16 at 6 p.m. for an interview hosted by Ariane Cipriani. A signing session will also take place at the Librairie Gourmande in the Jean-Talon market on November 19 at 11 a.m.
Corrigendum
The original version of this article has been modified; the time of the interview with Tommaso Melilli at the Italian Cultural Institute on November 16 is at 6 p.m. and not at 7 p.m. as initially indicated. Our apologies.