Relations with Buckinghamshire & Italy.
By: Jack Faulkner
Tags: Wilderness Festival, Linslade, Buckinghamshire, Lucca, Italy

Relations with Buckinghamshire & Italy.

I envisage my anxiety like a puck of fat in a ubend. Stopping a flow of water making the machine inoperable. In this instance, my mind is blocked and everything becomes muddled. Just being here, in Italy on a week’s holiday is chipping away at my anxiety. I’m trying to not think about the kitchen in London; or the pandemic, or the government. I was last in Lucca ten years ago. Outside Puccini's house, I called my father and told him this. I knew what I was doing I knew he’d envy me. “You cunt” he said. Always a poet. It’s still early on Monday, two out of three chefs I work with would likely be hungover. The kitchen doesn’t open on Mondays and Sundays are long shift, it’s very easy to stop for a drink. Ellika will be heading to work. Tomorrow she goes to Sweden. I miss her company, I think about my life in London. Working in a kitchen again. Living with my girlfriend. My cooking job stopped and started. Three years ago, I was single and hadn’t cooked for the paying public in two years. I took a week’s work at the Wilderness festival in Oxfordshire. A week’s work totaling 120 hours, Cooking banquets for 400 people. Twice a day, for three days. Menus by Tommi Miers, Yotam Ottolenghi, and Nuno Mendes. Dropping names of London Chefs is a currency I cannot spend here. The relevance is maybe food. My mind drifted to a Labour party rally in Milton Keynes I passed. I was living at my mother’s My father had died, My brother’s health was fragile and left London to help. In Tuscany now, a bell was ringing in the distance. The Labour party were distant, London kitchens were distant. I was more inclined to think about Lorenzo the magnificent except a refuse collection truck rolled by kicking up dust. Lorenzo was dead long ago, there was a poster for the current politician on a billboard nearby. Unfortunately, I had only traveled to Italy of now, I wasn’t in the renaissance era. You see the point though, Holidays are Holidays, no Twitter, no waiting for the last table to order no fridges full of Mis En Place. Just Swimming pools and very good peaches. The fat of my anxiety was dissolving.

My father never came to Italy. Although in a way attributed to growing up In Linslade, he knew it, or elements of the country. I don’t mean this as Linslande’s canal is reminiscent of Venice or some such. In the 40s, my Grandfather Leonard and his friends drove the fascists from Italy and went home with a newly found fondness for Gelato and opera. Furthermore, the towns near where my family is from. Places like Luton, Linslade/Leighton Buzzard, and Aylesbury have a good representation of the Italian diaspora. Almost hidden now. Gandolfini, Cippaleli, and Coelli were names called at in my form at school. Mortadella was bought from Mamma’s in Aylesbury and my mother used to drive to Buckingham to go to Lido Romeo for her haircuts. Italians came to make red London Bricks at Calvert Brickworks. The redbricked suburbs of London were in part built by Italians. In this sense, we have enclaves of Italian diaspora just as the Welsh do and Scots do. Less well known than the Italians in New York but they’re there, and the signs are there. Hence Joe Calzaghe the boxer, Angela Hartnett the chef from that country. Nardini’s ice cream in places like Greenock and England’s talismanic rugby player Lawrence Dallaglio. My Grandfather explored Italy with his friends in Khaki, and in this way added to the Italian Linslade connection. I never met the man, he died before I was born, but when I was in front of the Puccini statue in Lucca, I like to think of Puccini's music drifting from his shop, down the grand union canal. I like to think of my father eating Coppa bought from someone’s nonna in Aylesbury. Which why I felt right at home eating cecina in Lucca. Or picking Sangiovese grapes in the hills of Emilia Romagna and my stress-inducing life as a chef. A job I have left and gone back to. Holidays remind me that food is important. it is something we share, with composers of operas and our ancestors we never meet. As such, I had a new lease of life and went back to a kitchen.

That is in one way how found me in a tent plating food next to Yotam Ottolenghi. A roundabout sort of tale. Much of being a chef, isn’t worthy of photographs. Much of it is actually taking pucks off congealed fat from pipes of rationale ovens, or cleaning planchers, or pulling grain from the stomachs of small birds. Cooking for a living is a Sisyphus task, with bouts of wondrous food at sublime events. Endlessly doing the same thing time after time after time. Though Sisyphus had no end result cooks do. Jonny Wilkinson the rugby player that crafted England’s world cup in 2003 with a drop goal in extra time, by practicing incessantly. One hundred kicks with his left foot one hundred with his right foot. After practice. After everyone else had gone. Aside from Rugby, I don’t follow sport much, but I do love to watch compilations of goals. In Ken Loach’s film looking for Eric. Eric Cantona is asked “favourite moment ever”. Was it this goal, or was it another? Cantona says it was a pass, not a goal. “You have to trust your teammates” he says. Now Cantona played for France and Manchester United. I’m unsure comparisons are really a good route to go down. Who is the Jonny Wilkinson or Eric Cantona of cookery? Come on, let us not be silly. That however is reasonable. Knowing who is the right temperament to be in a big job like Wilderness. It need not be a selection of Cantona's maybe it’ll be a rabble of people in aprons who are able to work long hours and wake up the following day and do it again. I know what Cantona meant. Not because of my time with my collar popped with Old Trafford singing my name, but because when I was looking for a Maurice because my apples were caramelising too fast my friend passed one for me. We do this thing day after day after day. We do while trusting our co-workers. We place our trust in surly people who sleep too infrequently and wear aprons. After two years out of kitchens, I wasn’t sure id ever want to go back, but I sure as I’m writing this now, did. My brother was no longer unwell, I was (thankfully) redundant as a carer. Also, I was stony broke. I knew I needed to do something, and anything requires money. Reluctantly perhaps I remembered what it is I do for money. No, not dancing. I checked various groups advertising for positions as summer was coming. I thought id work at events as a hired hand. Temping, Or as I prefer, being a Mercenary. A hired spoon. A lone gun for hire, a moron willing to work 100 hour weeks. Also, I didn’t really have another choice. I made some phonecalls and placed some speculative adverts in Facebook cooking groups. Then one Monday, I was in a kitchen in a railway arch with assorted others. Deliveries arrived after us. To illustrate this, think about food relief at emergencies. Half of Brazil’s pineapples arrived for Thomasina Mier’s salsa. All of the Pomegranates of the Levant’s harvest came in by crate For Ottolenghi and the pasty department were in deep consultation about what seems like to me, very good Ice cream. I now realise, it was not acceptable. But that’s where the standards were. White Milk Ice Cream had to be Dulux emulsion. We had been sent, off white. A touch to Farrow and Ball jersey cream. From Monday to Thursday twenty or more we stood at benches and repeated tasks for hours after hours after hours. Then Thursday some of us, went to Oxfordshire. To cook the food, finish the food, and plate the food. What in god’s green earth had I gotten myself into. Cooking again. The dining tent was row upon row of tressel tables being decorated, There were hay bales and flowers. The shelves of the bar were being filled with glassware. Final touches were being made and staff in matching t-shirts were being addressed. A fraught business. Each day, 400 for lunch, and the same for dinner, and 6 chefs and one name with his or her protéges who’d come in wearing their branded apron and tattoo combination. Incessant activity, Grilling grapes for burrata, cutting sourdough, piping cultured butter, heating through soft tacos, and loading them into warm boxes, Mixing baba ghanouch, seasoning salads, finishing with nasturtium leaves. Balling Dulux white milk ice cream onto cubes of smoked cucumber jelly. It’s a blur and a frenzy. I remember thinking, I’m never doing this again. (A phrase I say at least once at every event, to date I’ve worked at 6 such events). My job has taken me to horse racing events in Italy where I worked up the despotic Chef Nasser. The personal chef to a friendly dictator from the UAE. I’ve worked in Buckingham Palace, Canapes for Lawyers. Blowtorching Italian meringue in the George III kitchen next to the young chef making soup for someone he couldn’t say who. (My guess is Prince Phillip but ive nothing much to go on). I’ve worked in some amazing places, I’ve cooked in Neasden.

To say This is what I do now or did pre covid times. Three years as a freelancer. Or Mercenary which is the term I prefer. Cooking food for thronging masses of well to do headdress wearing festival goers, or Sheiks watching endurance horse racing, or Lawyers and Princess Anne. Going away for a few days in in a van full of equipment and food and gumption, coming back pale faced and running on fumes. Three years of freelancing went like nothing, although sometimes when the deliveries were arriving like helicopter delivered food relief.

This is work, this is what freelance chefs, do.

Days later, I wake up in London. I’ve moved into my friend’s spare room. I’ve invited a woman over for Saltimbocca and Gelato, This being what I love to cook and eat, the food I know from the Italian parts of Buckinghamshire. There is stress but unlike Sisyphus, my day's end, and new days start. It’s a blessing to have been involved in big events with some very significant chefs. When the day is done, the best is to relax, maybe like my grandfather and father did, with a little of the best around you. In their case and music from that man in Lucca and it was food from the Italian deli, that’s subjective. If you must work hard, make sure you are rewarded. Don’t let grease congeal in your pipes, metaphorically or otherwise.

Puccini. In Lucca.