Book of the Month: Food of Love (Anthony Capella)

I remember reading somewhere that the film rights of Anthony Capella’s 2004 bestseller, The Food of Love, were bought by the Warner Brothers. I do not know whether the film was ever made.  This is not surprising. Capella’s debut novel has all the ingredients that are de rigueur for a feel good Hollywood flick which will fetch tidy earnings at the Box Office. For a start, the novel is based in Rome and other scenic parts of Italy. There is a romantic triangle involving two friends and a young woman. You probably do not need me to tell you what unfolds: the young woman falls for the wrong guy to begin with, thinking him to be a chef of great promise. His interest in her, on the other hand, lies strictly south of the border. Driven by the desire to explore the inside of her underclothes (and stick her photograph on the inside of his cupboard to join the multitudes evincing his past conquests), he plays along, enlisting help from his friend who, conveniently, is a chef of great promise—and we are talking Micheline standards here—and, equally conveniently, so that the plot gets nicely rolling, falls in love with the young woman himself. However, being a man of honour etcetera, he does not reveal his heart’s secret to the other two. After the obligatory misunderstandings, heartaches, travels through picturesque parts of Italy, and a lot of sex, it all ends well. That is as may be, you might say, but why should the Americans audience be interested in an Italian Mills and Boon romance? Because the young woman in the novel is American.

Laura Patterson is an American student, spending a year on Scholarship in Rome, studying art history. She is twenty-two and is ripe as a mango to be plucked and devoured. After all you can spend only so much time studying frescoes by Cavallini, however fine they are. Unfortunately, the poor girl is not having any luck; all of her Italian blind dates are hornier than rabbits on Viagra, and no sooner than the statutory dinner is over, instead of going on a stroll under the moonlit night and whisper sweet nothings into her ears, they want to examine her uvula with their tongue, and stop short of getting her into bed only because they are still living with their mothers. Laura has had enough of the Italian men and is giving serious consideration to going back to dating Americans when, following the advice of her Italian friend, she decides to go out on dates only with those men who can cook, the decision being based on the premise that a cook would be dextrous with his hands. Cue to enter the first male protagonist, Tommaso Massi, who is a waiter in a Micheline Star restaurant called Templi, owned and run by a humourless Scandinavian by the name of Alain Dufrais, who seems to have missed his true vocation, which would be—judging by the way he treats his kitchen staff (that includes Bruno, Tommasso’s best friend and the second male protagonist of this story) and the customers (who are frogmarched out of the restaurant if their voices rise a decibel above the approved threshold)—the dictatorship of a little African country. Tammasso has spotted Laura while she is speaking on the phone to her friend (getting tips in dating); and has decided on the spot, in the grand tradition of virile Italian men, to get her into bed. Tammasso meets Laura fortuitously—the first of many expeditious serendipitous moments that propel the story forward— in a food shop within a week and— it is a measure of Laura’s naivety or Tammasso’s ingenuity—manages to give her the impression that he can cook. Except that he can’t. Therefore, when Laura, who has noted him down—in front of the hanging carcasses of hares in the food shop—, as a character from a Michelangelo drawing, and is further impressed that he did not instinctively try to grab her breasts (which is what the poor girl has come to expect from the Italian men between the ages of six to death), calls him—he has given her mobile number, you see—to get guidance on how to cook the hare (which should have rightfully belonged to Alain Dufrais’s kitchen) Tammasso has foisted on her, he has no option but to seek urgent help from his best friend Bruno. Bruno loves cooking; he is passionate about cooking; he is as committed to cooking as KFC are to chickens. He is a quiet and barely articulate man—his confidence has never recovered from the taunting he received from the other boys at his school about his big nose— except when it comes to cooking, when he can hold forth a scholarly discourse that can only be understood with the provision of study notes. Bruno agrees to help his friend in his mission to enter Laura’s underwear. All he has to do is cook mouth-watering recipes, which Tammasso can pass off as his own. Bruno sticks to his side of the bargain and helps out his friend in a number of hackneyed and barely comic situations revolving around the theme of Tammasso having to cook his recipes ‘live’ either in his own flat or in the house of Laura’s Italian friend, which involves smuggling Bruno in and out of the family’s kitchen without anyone noticing. It should come as no surprise that very soon Laura’s photograph joins the many others in Tammasso’s cupboard. By this time Bruno has discovered that he has fallen in love with Laura, but cannot bring himself to tell this to his friend, partly because of the awkwardness it would create, but also because, you suspect, he is incapable of stringing more than three sentences when the subject is not how to make a perfect ‘Tozzetti’. Tammasso curiously, and in contrast to his time-tested practice—which has served him well in his impressive career as a seducer of unsuspecting women—of dumping Laura and moving on to his next conquest, is still carrying on with her. Could it be because some of Bruno’s recipes have had the effect of pushing Laura’s libido way beyond the Richter scale, and Tammasso’s Italian ego is wounded, as he struggles to satisfy her? Laura tries to set Bruno up with her roommate, Judith, another American, but it does not work out; Bruno is not interested; also, Judith’s dress sense which suggests that she is colour-blind, and her tendency to laugh like a hyena on acid scares him. Meanwhile, Drufais is becoming more tyrannical and dictatorial than Robert Mugabway, and begins to pick on Bruno, favouring a Frenchman instead, who uses every dirty trick in the book to destroy Bruno’s recipes, which, as we have learnt, are mouth-wateringly delicious.  Bruno and Tammasso leave Templi and, with the help of Laura’s friend’s father—he too has become a fan of Tammaso’s cooking, his libido surging up more than the FTSE 100 during the Bull market after tasting the delights of his three course meal, except that it was Bruno who cooked it—take on a run-down restaurant, the only plus point of which is a raven haired, full-breasted waitress called Marie, whose hipsters look as though they are not commodious enough for her curvaceous derrière. Since Tammasso inexplicably decides to continue seeing Laura, they have to carry on with the charade, which, frankly speaking, is getting a tad tiresome by this stage. The restaurant, Il Cucko, needless to say, becomes hugely popular. Realising that the story, at this stage, is in danger of becoming more schmaltzy and sugary than a sticky toffee pudding, Capella introduces a dramatic element (and about time too). Bruno kisses Laura; Laura catches Tammasso in flagrante delicto with another woman and dumps him; Laura also tells Tammasso that Bruno kissed her, probably to prove that both he and his friend are a couple of perverts, and begins seeing her history professor, an American called Kim Fellowes, who is so stuck up he actually speaks in Italian all the time; Tammasso and Bruno have a blazing row; Bruno leaves Rome, driving aimlessly to North, through a succession of hills and valleys, stopping only to exercise his mandibles over T-bone steaks cooked alla brace near Tuscany, or to smack his lips over minestrone con pesto (with basil and farinata), the staple street-food of Genoa, or to taste soupy risotto from roadside osterias. The gastronomic delights regrettably fail to sooth the pain of his loss, till he comes to a small hamlet called Le Marche where his van serendipitously breaks down. Here, Bruno first samples the delights of a stuffed whole suckling pig and, in due course, of the equally well stuffed daughter of the woman who agrees to have him as a paying guest, till his van is mended, which, as can only be expected in these remote hills of Italy, takes several weeks. These weeks are nevertheless long enough to convince Benedetta, the inn-keeper’s daughter, that Bruno might shag her brainless, but his heart belongs to an American, to whom, she is aghast to hear, he has never declared his love; into the bargain the American girl thinks he is a pervert. Another serendipitous incidence: Laura with her new beau turns up in Le Marche, where, over a meal, the stuck up professor makes an ass of himself after he gets an allergic reaction to a mushroom, the name of which is roughly translated into English as ‘shaggy inkcaps’. As the professor is threatening to call his lawyers (in English or Italian is not clarified), Bruno steps out of the kitchen, and heroically and gallantly takes the blame, and urges the professor to sue him and not the semi-literate villagers. After Laura and the professor have left the village, Benedetta, having had enough of Bruno, gives him the heave-ho as gently as possible, telling him that he has to tell Laura how he feels about her. So off Bruno goes in his rickety van and returns to Rome. Where he finds that his erstwhile friend Tommasso is shacked up with the curvaceous Marie, and has transformed ‘Il Cucko’ into a successful pizzeria; and he cannot find Laura’s whereabouts. Bruno goes back to work in the ‘Templi’, his tail, for all practical purposes, lodged firmly between his legs, feeling rather sorry for himself. However, in a twist redolent of a Hollywood movie—but wait! This novel might still be be made into a Hollywood film—involving yet more coincidences—coincidences are coming, now, so thick and fast, you are beginning to wonder whether they do not come in pairs—that is too tedious to explain, Tammasso, who, unbeknown to Bruno, really cares about him, smuggles himself as a waiter into ‘Templi’; Laura and the stuck-up professor end up dining, with an entourage of hangers on, in ‘Templi’ where the professor again makes an ass of himself by proposing to Laura in front of everyone and is politely but firmly rejected; Bruno ends up preparing the dream meal for Laura and, for a change, owning up to it; and Alain Drufais ends up with his French disciple in a cupboard where the two discover the joys of homosexual sex. As the novel ends, Laura is back in America; Bruno is still in Italy, but ready to embark on his maiden voyage across the ocean, waiting only for Laura to arrange the visa for him; and the two of them are exchanging e-mails with each other about—you have guessed it!—more Italian food recipes.

Anthony Capella is an aficionado of Italian food—he has devoted the best years of his life chomping his way through Italian food—and his exceptional knowledge of regional Italian food shows throughout the novel (Capella used to write for Sunday Times on Italian food and recommended restaurants in Naples and Rome). There is a hint of magic realism, too, around food and Capella effortlessly lifts it to the realm of fairy tale when he describes the invigorating effect of Bruno’s dishes on the libidos of those who eat it. Not a page goes by without Capella, via his gourmandising protagonist, waxing eloquent about some or the other Italian dish you have never heard of. He is kind enough in many cases to supply recipes, too, the only hitch being you are unlikely to get the ingredients that go on to make these foudroyant dishes in your local Tesco. If your knowledge of Italian food starts with American Hot Pepperoni Pizza and ends with Tiramisu, you are in for a surprise. If you are a carnivore, you are in for a treat: there isn’t a body part of various herbivorous animals—from eyeballs to urinary bladder to the outer membrane of transverse colon—that, if Capella is to be believed—can’t be baked, fried or casseroled. To Capella’s credit, for the most part, the gastronomic tuition blends well with the plot; it is only on a few occasions that you feel that Capella is getting carried away with his culinary enthusiasm and ephorizes: thus, when Bruno travels out of Rome and drives Northwards, supposedly heartbroken, what the reader remembers most of this journey which ends in the warm and ample bosom of Benedetta, is not his heartache, but the exotic dishes he has cooked or eaten along the way. The last few pages of the novel comprise nothing but recipes of even more colourful Italian dishes—from fried zucchini flowers to peppers stuffed with rabbit.

For a debut novel, The Food of Love, a reworking of a Cyrano de Bergerac story—Capella obliquely acknowledges the debt he owes to the seventeenth century French dramatist by giving Bruno a big schnozzle—, is written with a great deal of self-assurance. At times it feels almost as though the novel was written for the cinema (it is little wonder that its rights were sold so quickly), reading it is like watching a movie, which is as much down to the formulaic constructive format of the story as to the author’s deft touch in writing. The novel overwhelms you with its rummage of melodrama, humour (a tad on the cruder side at times), emotions, and sensuality—a heady mixture of food, spices, and romance. 

The Food of Love is a joyous, exuberant celebration of Italian food. You can savour it in bite-sized pieces or gobble it down in one hungry sitting; you are sure to enjoy it. I hope the Warner Brothers bring out the movie; I would love to watch it.