Susanna Gelmetti – A spirit for adventure

 

The Early Years

Susanna was born and educated in Milan where she studied Italian Literature before taking up a position in the London office of La Repubblica, one of Italy’s most respected newspapers, that at the time had links with The Independent.

It was during her time at La Repubblica’s London office that Susanna began writing about Italian food. It had been her passion from a very early age when, under the tutelage of her Venetian Grandmother, she would cook dishes in the family kitchen to present at family dinners.

At La Repubblica she began publishing occasional recipes but soon this lead to her involvement at the Accademia Italiana, then at Rutland Gate. Attached to the Accademia was a small restaurant open only for lunch. Soon Susanna was drawing on her knowledge of Italian food in order to create innovative menus and honing her cooking skills. It was to be the beginning of a road of exploration that was eventually to lead to Dress Italian.

These were the 1980s, when interest in Italian food was on an upward spiral. Susanna’s next venture, which was to occupy her professional life for the next 12 years, captured the spirit of the times perfectly. Italian Cookery Weeks (ICW), offering one- week cookery courses in various Italian locations, was born. 

Italian Cookery Weeks

There was a pioneering spirit about the new venture in those very early days of the Cookery School. In a pre-budget airline world, charter flights were the order of the day with early morning flights out and late night flights back to the UK. The first school was situated near the ancient white washed hilltop town of Ostuni (‘the white city’) in Puglia, in the heel of Italy.

Still today regarded as ‘off the beaten track’, a trip to Puglia in those days was considered adventurous terrain suitable only for the keen spirited. The cookery school had been set up in a stunningly evocative 16^th century Masseria – the name given to any fortified farmhouse in Puglia, built by the landed aristocracy to defend their lands against marauding Saracens. As the lands were sold off the Masseria and its soft stone encircling tuffo walls had reached a point of decay that resembled a cinematic pastiche half way between a set for a spaghetti western and a scene from the Alamo - after the walls had been pounded by Mexican guns into pulp.

The wild charm of the Masseria more than made up for the periodic absence of running water on days when irrigating the fields took precedence over offering the guests showering facilities. Nobody seemed to care. This was pioneering stuff of which legends are made. Over the following years the school moved to Umbria, the Amalfi Coast, and eventually to central Venice with daily visits to the Rialto Fish to fuel Susanna’s enthusiasm even further.

Finding a currently out of print copy of Susanna’s ‘Italian Country Cooking’ will give you a taste of the daily menu in the Puglian cookery school. Here you will find dishes that express Italian food traditions that, to this day have not yet been fully explored in the UK.  – ‘Agrodolce’ to name but one.

With the advent of budget airlines and cheap city to city weekends the time came to move on. Cookery Schools had multiplied and the pioneering spirit that had epitomised ICW with incursions into the local fabric met by puzzled and often wary expressions from the locals had by now spawned an avalanche of other schools creating a now predictable routine of food demonstrations, visits to local food markets, the obligatory nod to local cultural highlights and of course to wine fuelled visits to nearby vineyards.

Cookery Schools had become routine, but the wave of interest in Italian food had spilled over – tsunami style – into each major multiple. Anxiety levels rose as each competed with the other to offer a bottomless demand for ever more specialist Italian products to demonstrate both their mastery of the ‘genre’ and therefore superiority over their rivals. ‘What’s out there?’ ‘Get it now’ were the mantras of the day. Every specialist shop, motorway supermarkets and duty free counter from Milan to Siracusa was strip searched in the mad headlong rush until there was nothing ‘out there’ readymade to be lifted and placed on UK supermarket shelves left. Sainsbury’s was the undisputed king, leading from the front in putting products on shelf that they believed in and then building a following. It had considerable successes. Many of these products are now stock Italian larder necessities. Balsamic Vinegar of Modena to name but one.

Bocca Della Verita 

Never one to do things by halves, Bocca Della Verita (or ‘Bocca’, as Dress Italian was then called) came up with one of the best sellers in Sainsbury's Special Selection in 1997. This was a glazed handmade terracotta pot filled with a truly delicious Puglian ‘Fior D’olio’ (meaning that the water and oil was non centrifugally separated) extra virgin olive oil. Like many of Dress Italian’s first generation of products they were sourced from those same local suppliers who had supplied the Cookery Schools with product. It was a little miracle in that while being made totally by hand, the jar did not leak when filled.

Visits to the terracotta pot manufacturer were nevertheless heart-stopping events. From a purely touristic point of view the scene that greeted you couldn’t have been more engaging; a series of dusty open ended workshops housing a collective cottage industry of local people with the skill to hand make jug after jug that nevertheless almost always met the critical neck dimensions of the neck to enable it to be filled and ‘corked’ without subsequent loss of oil. Occupying a corner site in the central courtyard was a ‘Tourist shop’ filled with all sorts of terracotta objects from tastefully simple to nightmarishly baroque. Occasionally a swarm of tourists would descend and feed off the less expensive trinkets that happened to have the advantage of fitting into their luggage for the eventual trip back home.

Then there was the management. This consisted of a fluid mixture of combustible personalities loosely belonging to one family none of whom had much grasp of the finer aspects of commerce. “You sell a lot of our pots. The price goes up”. “You give me the business and no longer to my sister/ brother in law, the price goes down”. This process resulted in a continuous flux of negotiations in ever decreasing circles.

What was a constant throughout the family feuds & warring factions was a thorough disregard for ‘patent, ‘copyright’ or simply the principle “If Bocca designed the pattern on the pot then it's not supposed to be offered to other customers”. Truth be told, it would have been impossible to find another cottage industry with the same collective skills for creating near perfect shaped pots every time and then daubing our pattern onto the outside of an as yet unglazed jug with such fluid accuracy.

“The End” came when Susanna’s patience ran out while taking a leisurely walk through a covered shopping centre in an old Italian immigrant community in Queens, NY. There, displayed on a shelf with utter abandon was an exact replica of the ‘Bocca’ pot, except for the accompanying tag carrying another company’s name. The producer hadn’t even bothered to fully eradicate the word ‘Made exclusively for Bocca della Verita Ltd’ on the underside of the pot. 

Dress Italian

One idea DID stick; the name: Dress Italian. ‘Bocca della Verita’ was dropped and returned to its original place in history as the (probable) Roman sewer cover (there is even a theory that it fitted into the round hole at the top of the Pantheon) now cemented into the wall of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome and famous for a scene in the film ‘Roman Holiday’ with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.

The Times article of 2002 shows a picture of a confident Susanna in her home kitchen, tearing a strip off the poor quality of branded Italian made tomato sauces. Italian brands should represent the best of Italy and not masquerade as the best even though they are in truth regarded as larder fillers to be used ‘only in case of an emergency’. The time had come to right this wrong. Onwards! It was an ambitious idea at the time. Buried in the objective was the inference that Italians themselves would acknowledge that a readymade sauce could ever be regarded as good as homemade. It was a war with two fronts.

The quest undertaken, Susanna soon found herself back in southern Italy.

A tour of the important sauce manufacturers up north soon lead to a problem of ‘translation’; Susanna wanted to talk about soffritto and ‘crushed’. The northern companies only understood volumes (in millions of jars) and at what price are you prepared to pay. The idea of producing a tomato sauce industrially that followed homemade techniques was quaint if not misguided and frankly laughable they insinuated.  ‘If you want creiche’ then go to a small southern Italian artisan producer who can make as you like’ Creiche? What’s a kindergarden got to do with the price of rice in china? Crash? As in ‘waiting to happen’? Oh you mean ‘crushed’, as in tomatoes ? Gotcha!. 

That was then. Today, thanks to an almost superhuman effort from Susanna Dress Italian tomato sauces are made ‘up north’ by a manufacturer that not only uses tomatoes they themselves seed, grow and harvest within a 30 kilometre radius around the factory, but yes, they also firstly make a fresh soffritto with every new production batch. And yes, it does taste like ‘homemade’. The evidence is anecdotal, but it’s what Italians themselves tell us.

Maybe running cookery schools on Planet Puglia was more demonstrably ground braking; maybe just the idea of a Moroccan Ginger and Parsley Pesto was more overtly ‘foodie’ but showing off her abundant food skills has never been Susanna’s priority. Creating readymade products that can be considered as true to Italian cooking culture is, as well as making them ‘everyday affordable’.

This represents just the beginning of the Dress Italian adventure. The basics are in place in the form of tomato and pesto sauces. The following 18 months will see a rapid expansion of new products that will, Susanna thinks, have a real and positive impact on the consumers’ choice when choosing to eat Italian.

The spirit of adventure is about to reach a new stage.

Peter Parmigiani

Peter Parmigiani is Susanna’s husband. Peter himself has strong roots in Italian food. His great grandfather opened ‘Parmigiani Comestibili’ in Clerkenwell, London in c.1890. There followed G. Parmigiani Figlio Ltd (GPF) in three Soho locations from 1909. By the 1980s GPF was helping Sainsbury’s source and develop a wide assortment of innovative Italian products – cured meats, frozen pizza, chilled desserts, Balsamic Vinegar, in-store Bakery Ciabatta and many more. He has been Managing Director of The Cirio Company and Consultant to both Geest (now Bakovar) and Tesco on their pre ‘finest’ range, ‘Taste of Italy’. 

For Peter , Dress Italian represents a project that draws upon his extensive experience of working within the UK multiple food sector at the new product development end, and the many contacts built up within the Italian food industry.

He lives in central London with Susanna and their super cute daughter Claudia.

Giovanni Gelmetti

Giovanni has always maintained a keen interest in the progress and development of Dress Italian since its creation, while working in both finance and property development in Milan.

He has a dual role as Director of New Business Development, encompassing both travelling extensively to build contacts for the future development of Dress Italian worldwide, as well as guiding the company on its own development and structure.