An Italian Family Feast to Remember!

My love of food started early in life. And my appreciation of feasting, which developed into a love of supper clubs, started on a hillside in rural Tuscany back in 1995!

I went on a very awkward Italian exchange trip as a 13-year-old. Awkward because my exchange partner (let's call her Sabrina, as that was her name) had been learning English for 8 years - me, Italian for one. She was 3 years older than me (which is huge when you're 13/16), she was a whole lot cooler than me (hard to believe I know!!) and didn't really want me tagging along…

Baby Jo, much older than 13 years old - but looking about 12!

However, there was one MASSIVE saving grace. Her mum was a professional chef!

Every time that I was invited into the family kitchen to help or observe, and every single mealtime, was brilliant. One day we all headed out across the Montepulciano hillsides in the family car (I had zero idea of what was going on obviously - I understood almost nothing) and arrived at an amazing sprawling, hilltop villa. 

We then spent the next 8 hours or so cooking and eating with all of Sabrina's extended family. There was a lot of joking and laughing and chatting, none of which I understood. It was very noisy and about as "Italian" as a 13-year old Londoner could imagine. But most importantly, there was food. There was olive oily bruschetta toasted over massive wood fired griddle pans, rubbed with raw garlic and simply topped with slices of tomato and basil. There were loads of other things to eat that day but those bruschetta have stayed with me ever since as an example of culinary perfection.

But the reason I'm telling you all this was because this was the ultimate food sharing experience. Clichéd as it might be, my Italian family feasting day was simply amazing. Cooking together, eating together, amazing produce - a multi-course feast spanning many hours and many generations.

Of course, we now live in a world with depressing statistics about the decline of actual cooking in the home, and the decline of the family meal (even just a close family meal, let alone the extended family extravaganza I was lucky enough to attend in Italy). Yes, people still have dinner parties, people go out to restaurants, but it's just not quite the same.

For me, the supper club is the modern world equivalent of those joyous family food-based gatherings that I think we should all value so highly. And the great thing is that you don't need to live close to 30 members of your family to experience it... Just come and join the “Laurelbank farm family" for the day.

I think those family feast aspirations influence the style of food we cook. We could never cook minimalist, highly paired-back, fancy food. Yes, our produce is the highest quality and from our organic farm where possible, and yes, everything should be absolutely delicious, bold, vibrant, subtle and brilliant, but it also has to be plentiful, fun - informal in style and ultimately a celebration of food. So perhaps a supper club is not a unique social eating experience. It's just a reinvention of the very first one.

Summer Solstice Supper Club at the farm