All the ingredients for a great day
Want to create fabulous homemade Italian dishes? Then you may like to spend a few hours with Giuliana Cortese at her cookery school in Cuddington. Alison Isherwood of the Thame Food Festival reports.
You love Italian food. You love cooking Italian food at home. But you would like to venture beyond pastas and pizzas. Me too. So that’s why I signed up for a day course at CiCi CoCo.
CiCi CoCo is a home cooking kitchen run by Giuliana Cortese. Giuliana first came to the UK to work with fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. While in London, she would recreate her mother’s lasagne recipe and bring it into the design studio. Earning her the nickname of ‘Lasagna’.
Later Giuliana, who grew up in Friuli, her mother a northern Italian and her father a southern Italian, decided to make her passion for great Italian cooking a career in itself. In 2010 she set up CiCi CoCo in her own kitchen in Cuddington on the Buckinghamshire-Oxfordshire border. Her aim was to introduce people to the joys of fantastic artisan Italian dishes. “Although the philosophy and style of the kitchen is Italian,” she explains, “we used local products and ingredients.”
The CiCi CoCo kitchen soon won not just customers but awards as well. In 2011, it was given a Great Taste Award for its Lasagna Alla Bolognese, and another three – for its speciality Lasagna, Caponata and Heritage spelt and Rivet Wheat fresh pasta – in 2012. It was also voted best independent producer in the Muddy Stiletto Awards in 2013.
