An actor of rare sensibility and true culinary lover who, for him, was like a "family chapel"
Before the kitchen broke, overbearing, in the black box we have in the living room, Ugo Tognazzi it was the symbol of the actor who loved to go to the stove, who wanted to show everyone that he knew how to do it. This is why, when he was invited on TV to promote a film, every excuse was good to cook, to offer the public something that had never seen before. Yes, because in his house in Velletri, in that kingdom where the refrigerator occupied a whole wall and the sausages and the quarters of beef hung from the steel hooks fixed to the ceiling, Tognazzi experimented. The kitchen for him was art exactly like the cinema: you had to wait for inspiration, that brilliant idea that would have allowed you to light the table with something new, appetizing, exotic. "I have the vice of the stove, I'm sick of spaghettite," he said talking about himself the actor who acted as a hobby "but he ate for a living".
"The scent of a good sauce would be used as aftershave," he explained again, remembering how important it was for him to judge the guests, the guests who were guinea pigs.
Cavie because Tognazzi did not cook simple things – spaghetti with sauce, roast veal and grilled fish – like ordinary mortals. His mission was to amaze and, judging by the stories of his sons Ricky, Gianmarco and Maria Sole, it seemed to have succeeded. Once he prepared the whale pizzaiola, "a terrible stuff," remembers his daughter, another kiwi kiwi. On Monday the fuxia butterflies with cooked beets and on Tuesdays the orecchiette with pomomascarpone. On Wednesdays the strawberry Bavarian and on Thursday the carpaccio "in its own way", with hazelnut oil, raspberry vinegar and truffle paste, a delicacy.
That table, for him, became a stage and those guests seated all around became the audience to entertain: "In this relationship of love with the kitchen I have neither mediations nor prescriptions: I am the creator of the scene and its executor , the demiurge that transforms the inert words of a recipe into a tasty and colorful reality , Tognazzi insisted describing the crackling of the ceiling like a melodious sound, which awakened in him distant memories, just like Proust with objects. "The boiled hen, for example, makes me go back to my grandmother, to the Sundays in Cremona, to the mustard. And the fresh raspberries remind me of distant and rare holidays in the mountains with my parents . Because, after all, between knowing when to take out the roast from the oven because it is cooked and to take a bow after having recited at the Puccini in Milan is not, then, all this great difference.
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