ALAN Ayckbourn, the playwright knight of Scarborough, has a recipe for the good life, not to be found in his darkly humorous dramas.
"Have a job you love, a home you're happy in, a town you like living in and a first-rate restaurant just around the corner," he writes in his foreword to Italian restaurateur Giorgio Alessio's new cookery book, White Truffle Yorkshire Pudding.
Giorgio runs that restaurant around the corner, Lanterna Ristorante in Queen Street, 32 years a Scarborough institution swimming against the tide of the sea-front fish and chip palaces.
As the title White Truffle Yorkshire Pudding would indicate, chef, owner and now self-financed publisher Giorgio is marrying "the best of Piedmont and Yorkshire" in his dishes, wherein Northern Italian sauce meets East Coast sourcing. Pasta con lumachine di mare is pasta with winkles in any language, stufato di pesce di Scarborough, alias Scarborough fish stew, complements fish from the sea off God's own country with a "large bunch of Italian flat leaf parsley", and tripe sounds so much more appetising when translated to Trippa, Italian style. Tony Bartholomew's photos are the icing on the torta.
Reassuringly, Yorkshire Pudding on Page 10 needs no translation, but Giorgio counsels cooks to use a deep muffin tin, rather than the traditional Yorkshire version, and he has a tip to make yours rise plumper than Jordan's. "The secret is in the teaspoon of cold water," he says.
White Truffle Yorkshire Pudding must be the most propitious union of Yorkshire and Italy since Leeds United sold Gentle Giant John Charles to Juventus.
White Truffle Yorkshire Pudding, Giorgio Alessio, published in softback by La Trifula Publishing, £12.95. Available from 01723 363616, www.lanterna-ristorante.co.uk, Waterstone's, Scarborough, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough.
Updated: 16:13 Friday, April 29, 2005
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