Food&Kitchen: writer and musician Antonio Bocchi answers our questions (part I)

2017-04-10 Antonio Bocchi is a physician of a particular kind, for he combines the practice of the medical profession with a career as a writer and musician.
After making a number of films shown in independent film festivals in the nineties, he became the leader of an electronic rock band, Lux Anodyca, in 2007 and has made four albums.
The publishing house Salani published his first novel in 2011, a mystery entitled “Blues in nero” about the adventures of inspector Bruno Lomax, a lover of good wine and good music. His second book, “Trilogia delle donne perdute”, in the same genre and featuring the same character, was published by Delos Books last year.
What is your first thought when you go into the kitchen, Antonio?
“What a wonderful place, the home kitchen! It can produce stupendous things, colourful dishes (because colour is essential in the kitchen) that taste delicious and nourish the soul as well as the body. On the other hand, restaurant kitchens always make me feel sad; they look like blast furnaces, where the cooks work frantically to fill their orders. I would never want to work in one of these food factories, and I certainly don’t envy the cooks who do, not even the most famous ones. I see the kitchen as an intimate place, where we can give in to our gastronomic dreams, depending on our technical abilities and our sensibility.”
What dish best represents your life, and why?
”Cappuccino! Not, of course, the one you can have at a coffee shop, but a gastronomic creation of mine that has nothing sweet about it. It is a fondue of goat’s cheese (like the milk in cappuccino) with cream of foie gras (the coffee) and a sprinkle of nutmeg (the cocoa some people, like my wife, always sprinkle over their cappuccino). For vegetarians, I can (reluctantly) replace the cream of foie gras with cream of lentil. This is my favourite gastronomic creation, like a cover version, to borrow a term from music, of an everyday beverage that people drink almost automatically when they have breakfast at a coffee shop, without thinking how difficult it is to make, how hard it is to get just the right blend of the two main ingredients and the right consistency of the foam.”
Why do you like this dish so much?
“I like this dish (which I have recently been serving with a savoury croissant, filled with melted cheese and chunks of ham) because it represents and sums up my idea of creative cooking, in which combinations of flavours go hand in hand with use of particularly interesting dishes. This sort of cappuccino cannot be served in an ordinary cup, but only in a special cup that completes and adds to the final impression. I use cups from a set dating from the 1930s that my mother left me. Cups with a vaguely futuristic look, which I’m afraid to break every time I use them (and I use them only for cappuccino), because if I did, this dish would be dead: no other cup is adequate to contain this gastronomic preparation.”
What wine gets your heart beating?
“Barolo, enclosing all the austerity and severity of Piedmont, sublimed by outstanding Italian creativity. It’s not one of those easy wines that everyone likes, it doesn’t wink at you the way some Tuscan wines do, but remains divinely composed with its inimitable fragrances. In the summer, of course, I prefer champagne, a fresh, revitalising nectar, setting aside Franciacorta.”

Mariagrazia Villa