‘We called her the vegetable whisperer’: Rachel Roddy on the cook who inspired her
Carla Tomasi, who died in Rome in late August aged 70, was a teacher to many, and also to me. We met by chance in 2012. I’d seen a tweet from a friend mentioning that she was collecting pickles from a certain Carla Tomasi near Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome. I thought I would like to know this Carla and her pickles, so I wrote her an email saying as much. I received a reply immediately, which included several questions and an invitation to lunch at her house.
The green automatic gate didn’t work; you had to call her, wait, then, after a while, she would come down and lead you up the drive beside the largely edible, exploding garden to the white wicker chairs on the veranda. We ate focaccia and pickles, borlotti bean soup, baked fish and rosemary potatoes, and three flavours of ice-cream.
After that first lunch, we became friends and she would become my teacher, inspiring dozens of recipes in this column and my books – no one has influenced me more. She had started to mention teaching again, and wanting to come into Rome, and this coincided with our mutual friend Alice Adams opening a studio. Our first collaboration was a bake sale for which Carla made 20 Jane Grigson Christmas cakes. The second was a Middle Eastern dinner, and Carla made piles of pitta according to the recipe in the Honey & Co book she kept on her “favourites shelf”, along with work by Dan Lepard, Anna Del Conte, Paula Wolfert and of course Jane Grigson.
Later, Carla, Alice and I came together for lunches we called “market to table”. Carla would pick whatever was ready from her garden and pack it in her pink trolley, while a group of us went to Testaccio market to pick up everything else, then we would all meet and turn the lot into an epic lunch. The structure was always the same: fried things, focaccia, fresh pasta, baked fish or braised meat, and pudding. Also, three sorts of vegetables, which was the part Carla enjoyed the most, and why we called her the “vegetable whisperer”, a joke that would become her hashtag. Carla was also a natural student, just as interested in how everyone else did things, too. Even with dishes she had made for decades, if someone had a way that improved it, she would gather it up like a snowball rolling down a slope.
Carla was born in Rome in May 1954, which was then the midst of huge urban growth, with new housing filling the outskirts of the city and the metro redefining it. The family moved from the centre to a house with a garden not far from Ostia. Her grandmothers, from Le Marche and Sardinia respectively, were good cooks, as was her vegetable-growing dad. All three shaped Carla. However, it was her mother’s terrible and careless daily cooking that drove her into the kitchen. Aged 10, Carla asked if she could do the shopping and use the oven. She discovered that she loved to cook. That never changed: she loved to cook.
At 18, in 1972, she “escaped” to London where, to begin with, she worked as an au pair, and which also provided her with an opportunity to explore the English baking she’d read about in books. Certain that she wanted to be in a restaurant kitchen in London, Carla enrolled in a diploma from Leith’s School of Food and Wine under tutor Maxine Clark, who remembers Carla as serious, determined and slightly terrifying. She graduated with distinction in July 1982.
Carla’s first job lasted only two months and resulted in her being banned from entering the premises for two years by Antonio Carluccio (she told this story defiantly). Then came Frith’s restaurant, on the Soho street of the same name, where she would remain, first as chef and then as chef-owner, until it closed in 1990. For Peter Gordon, a young cook just arrived from New Zealand, starting at Firth’s felt like entering another world: “Part fantasy, part dictatorship,” with what seemed like “bizarre systems, but hugely loyal customers to Carla and her cooking”.
She then headed the Italian, Moroccan, British-Chinese, Welsh brigade at the pioneering gastropub the Peasant in Clerkenwell, where Carla was notorious for asking anyone who came through the kitchen door, “What does your mother cook?” If she liked the answer, she’d put it on the menu, which is hilarious in light of what we know about Carla’s own mother.
Everything changed in the late 1990s, when she returned to the house she grew up in and ripped up the paving stones in front of the house to create a garden of vegetables, fruit trees, flowers and herbs, which was adopted by a colony of cats who arranged themselves in sunny spots. But the kitchen was her place, and she moved around it so well; her fingers like dancers, dimpling focaccia or pulling pasta from the rollers, and they captivated in lessons. As she smoothed the pasta, her steady stream of knowledge and advice filled the room, and we all tried to catch some.
Maybe her most generous teaching was during the pandemic. Carla was one of the first to open up her computer to host hours of free cooking lessons and tips: as an egalitarian who hated food snobbery, she saw her practical teaching as an antidote to that, and was compelled to share. Carla confided that she found coming out of the pandemic even harder than being in it, but that didn’t stop her tending her garden or finishing the long project of converting her living room into a teaching kitchen, which meant 12 could participate in a lesson, then – once a cloth was in place – sit down for lunch. She gave a dozen or so lessons in her new kitchen, and planned many more.
Throughout her life, she sent thousands of recipes and lessons out into the world, and they are now part of thousands of lives, destined to be acted out repeatedly. Years from now, someone will eat a focaccia that has been shaped with a particular dabbing-stretching movement, because years before someone watched Carla do it exactly that way, admired her fingers, and wondered about her stamp-sized wrist tattoo. Someone who maybe heard her say” “If it keeps springing back, it needs further relaxing, so leave it to rest for a while” – which is, of course, sage advice for focaccia, but could just as easily be advice for life.
Carla Tomasi, 9 May 1954-22 August 2024
