Frankie Dettori’s Italian Family Cookbook. Frankie Dettori

bottle of wine. When the food is ready everyone sits down together and I get a nice warm feeling in my bones, being surrounded by those I love.

      As they say in Italy, ‘ La cosa più importante e mangiar in famiglia, così si capisce tutto di tutto’, which roughly translated means, ‘the most important thing in life is to eat together as family: only then can you comprehend what’s really going on the lives of the people closest to you’. I have a funny feeling that these wise words will prove invaluable when my kids are teenagers.”

      Frankie Dettari

      Marco

      “The greatest culinary influence in my life came from having an Italian mother who was a natural-born cook. Her family lived just outside Genoa where I used to spend my summer holidays as a little boy. My earliest food memories are of my mother picking me up from the school gates at midday to go home for lunch. I must have been about five years old. It was only ever the two of us and I’m not sure why my elder brother didn’t join us and instead stayed on for school dinners. Maybe she still regarded me as ‘the baby’ – or perhaps she had already spotted my interest in food. When we ate we’d talk and giggle our way through lunch. I think the reason this had such a lasting impression on me is that those simple meals were always filled with happiness.

      Mum cooked simple food intelligently and with great deal of attention to detail. She always used seasonal produce. In winter she’d make hearty soups with root vegetables, pulses and a little rice or pasta with a sprinkling of Parmigiano. In summer we’d have delicate broths studded with podded peas and lots fresh, soft herbs or perhaps a vegetable rice salad or simple spaghetti ‘al burro’ (which remains to this day my favourite pasta). She steered clear of fussy food and heavy sauces. Sometimes lunch would be just a very ripe tomato with a little salt, olive oil and, perhaps, some bread or a piece of cheese. But even a simple snack like this was made with love and a great deal of care and thus still lingers in my memory. Her food philosophy was to buy the best quality that you can afford and to let the flavours speak for themselves.

      I believe my mother’s inherent understanding and appreciation of food is a major component in the DNA of most, if not all Italian women. They seem to posses an uncanny knowledge and love for cooking and its ability to nurture. Italians always adhere to the principle that a great meal is not about expensive ingredients. On the contrary, some of the best food in Italy stems from ‘la cucina povera’, ‘the kitchen of the poor’, which understands the importance of allowing Mother Nature to do her job as supplier of our groceries, meat and fish. All that is left for the cook to do is to present her produce in the purest and simplest way.

      My mother died when I was six, leaving my father, a chef, to look after three young boys traumatised by their loss and in need of stability and love. My old man wasn’t an outwardly affectionate father but he was always very correct and dependable. He demonstrated his love for us in the way he knew best, through food.

      We had very little spare money and fortunately, with hindsight, we were too poor to buy the tinned produce that was so fashionable at the time. Dad had always cooked a little at home, but his forte had been full English breakfasts at weekends. Now that he was stuck with all the cooking he expected all of us to muck in. We were dispatched to pick apples, forage for rhubarb and collect blackberries. As soon as we were old enough to learn how, he also sent us out to shoot rabbits and hares, and to fish for eels, trout or anything else we could land. Nothing went to waste, everything got eaten. We hunted to feed the family, not for leisure and it ignited a passion for hunting and fishing that remains with me to this day. It is my belief that before you can be a great cook you have to understand the providence of food and respect Mother Nature and her bounty.

      Today, the most important thing in my life is my kids. Nothing comes before my family. Nothing. In my three Michelin star days I cooked with my ego and not with my heart in order to gain and keep those oh-so-precious stars. I was rarely at home with my kids. They would come to see me between services at my restaurant in the Hyde Park Hotel for about half an hour every day, which wasn’t very satisfactory for any of us. In fact, my children are the reason I took the momentous decision to give back my stars. It was the only way I could spend a lot more time with them. My little ones mean the whole world to me – certainly more than three Michelin stars ever could.

      I would like this book to get families back round the dinner table and eating good food. Don’t just buy the book, have a quick flick through, then stick it back on the shelf with all your other glossy celebrity-endorsed cookbooks. This is not what Frankie and I are trying to achieve. Use it, note the recipes that Frankie and I loved as kids, which in turn are loved in equal measure by our own children, and try them out on your kids. Educating your children on the joy of good food and eating well is as important a duty for parents as teaching them good manners and how to love each other.

      If this book ends up covered in flour and sticky finger prints and with the odd note in the margin, then and only then will you have realized its true value.”

      Marco Pierre White

      FRANKIE’S BAR AND GRILL

      Frankie

      “Sometimes in life we find ourselves in the right place at the right time doing stuff we didn’t imagine we would ever get involved in. The first time I ever met Marco was when I popped into Drones, one of his restaurants in London, for a quick bite before heading home. He was also there having dinner and came over to join us for a glass of wine. The conversation soon turned to food and restaurants.

      London is positively teeming with restaurants, there is no doubt about that. Every possible permutation and nationality of cuisine known to mankind is widely available, yet I’d always found it hard to find good family-friendly restaurants which are ‘happy meal’ or kiddie menu-free zones. I suddenly found myself in a heated conversation with Marco. Why aren’t there more restaurants that cater for families? Why don’t the ones that exist serve real food that all the family will love? I don’t serve my kids frozen chicken nuggets at home, so why would I go to a restaurant to pay for the privilege of doing so? And why can’t family restaurants be stylish enough to keep the grown-ups happy but also informal enough so we can relax there with all the kids? What I wanted was a bit of family glamour! Who would have thought that my passionate outcry would be instrumental in bringing a touch of Italian family values and lifestyle to a series of restaurants?

      As a jockey I have to be extremely disciplined about what I eat. They say that men think about sex once every seven minutes. Well, not this man! It’s food I can’t stop thinking about. And as I can’t eat what I want when I’m racing, my next favourite thing is to talk food. Doing just that with a charismatic, incredibly knowledgeable, three-starred Michelin chef was, for me, pure paradise. Marco and I spent the next couple of hours coming up with a wish list of what our perfect family restaurant would offer, from the décor and the general feel of the place to which of our favourite family recipes we’d make sure were on the menu. It was a fantastic evening.

      I left Marco at Drones around 11pm, having enjoyed some of the best carpaccio I had ever eaten along with a glass of my favourite Italian red wine, Sassicaia. (It was just the one glass, but it meant I had to run an extra fifteen minutes in a ski suit the next morning to burn it off. I kid you not!)

      Marco called me the next day. He had, literally overnight, come up with a blueprint for a family restaurant called Frankie’s (how flattering is that?) and asked me to go into business with him. The concept that he had come up with was pure genius and I didn’t hesitate to say ‘I do’. Thus the unlikely marriage of Frankie Dettori, little Italian jockey and (whenever possible) bon viveur, and Marco Pierre White, Michelin-starred chef and infamous raconteur, came to be.

      The incredible thing about Marco is that once he has the bones of a great idea he is capable of turning it into a reality in double-quick time. And so it was that Frankie’s was born three months later in Knightsbridge, London, with everything I had been looking for in a family restaurant