Lucy Dearlove: This is Lecker.
I'm Lucy Dearlove.
This month I'm releasing a very small series about contemporary
personal and memoir writing within the loose parameters of
food. In the previous episode with Rebecca Johnson and Angela
Hui, Rebecca talked about the limitations of categorizing
writing as 'food writing'. For - among many reasons - it can feel
diminutive. The book I'm talking about in this episode, I think,
is a great example of why genre categorisation of any kind - but
particularly within personal writing - can be at best
limiting and at worst pointless
Thea Lenarduzzi: Elderly women...women generally
food...migrants...weeds...these are all things that have
generally been overlooked or not considered worthy of scrutiny.
You know, how many books are there about great men who did
great things and how many other about a grandmother who no one's
ever heard of?
Lucy Dearlove: This is Thea Lenarduzzi, whose book
Dandelions came out last month. Dandelions is not really a food
book - if we're going to lean into the categorisation - but
food is a central theme within it. The book follows the history
of Thea's family and their movement and migration between
England and Italy over the past decades and generations. At the
heart is Thea's nonna Dirce with her stories weaving the fabric
of Thea's childhood and family life. The dandelions of the
title appear throughout the book as a recurring motif, most
frequently on the table at family meals. We first meet
Dirce on the first page of the book, picking dandelion leaves
at the side of the road in 1950s Manchester and stuffing them
into a bag to take home and cook and eat. Thea describes those
around looking askance at her, wondering what on earth she's
doing with those weeds.
So much of personal writing in food focuses on heritage and
family - and understandably so. But down no doubt to the very
white middle class status quo, there can be a tendency towards
simplification: of dishes or even a narrative, a family's
history. What Dandelions does so effectively is capture how much
of people's lives rests in the spaces in between; resisting
categorisation and definition, and even slipping between fact
and fiction. But in a way that remains always true and always
significant. Even in the so called mundanity of everyday
life.
To begin, I asked Thea - having in mind this heritage of her
family's movement between England and Italy - to talk
about her own relationship with food and with cooking.
Thea Lenarduzzi: I suppose if I tell you about the first thing
that I ever learned to cook, it sort of sums up my life. So
under supervision, I was probably about 10. And it was a
tomato sauce for pasta. But ironically, seeing as I was born
and raised living at the time in Italy, I followed a recipe
in...it was in one of my mom's old English cookbooks from like
the 1970s. So that kind of weird Italian English hybrid started
started pretty early on and I'd love to say that it was a
cookbook you know, that was by someone fully vetted or you
know, respected like the silver spoon or Elizabeth David but I
mean, I think it was probably one that came through with, like
the Reader's Digest or something. My my Liverpudlian,
Nana, her mum, my mum's mum would have probably given her
when she set off for university. I mean, I know it can't have
been that bad because I don't think it included anything like
garlic paste or garlic powder. But yeah, probably wasn't the
most legitimate pasta sauce you've ever heard of.
Lucy Dearlove: And was there any sort of interaction between
those two older generations of your family? So I guess like
like your nonna and then and then your mum's mum, your
grandma on that side? Did they ever sort of encounter each
other in terms of cooking or food?
Thea Lenarduzzi: Well, I suppose what they had in common, I mean,
when I think about it, when I think about my, my kind of food
passions, they probably are both on both sides centered around my
grandmother, so that split you know, split down the middle
exactly along the lines of my heritage almost. On the one
hand, there is the kind of simple rusticity I suppose of my
nonna's cooking in Italy, where everything was homemade and you
know, tended to take ages usually from homegrown roots as
well and they'd be like gnocchi with a ragu or polenta with some
kind of slow cooked beast, you know, often dropped off by a
friend from the mountains and you know, it would have been
boar or deer or goat or something and courgettes and
carrots which she'd grown herself and she'd soften them
for ages over a low heat and then there'd be some wild grass
or other which was always wilted and in a plate of its own. And
then on the other hand, there was my English side, my English,
Nana's cooking, which I mean by the time I was I was born and
old enough to know what was going on it was quite heavily
influenced by Marks and Spencers you know, it was a lot of
convenience and you know, little luxuries. So there'd be you
know, fun things like dolly mixtures and prawn cocktails not
together. Obviously. That would have been just weird. But um,
yeah, I guess my favourite...the similarity between the two
grandmas was that my favorite kind of cooking of my English
grandma was also a kind of simple, simple style. It was
probably stuff that was slightly adapted from war food, I guess,
you know, she'd it was very frugal, so she'd maybe melt some
really mild cheddar in a shallow oven dish with milk. And then
you just soak ans scoop bread around in this sloppy, stringy
mess. It's called Pobs. I mean, anyone from the North will
probably know what Pobs is. And there's a sweet version as well.
But ours was always the cheesy milky version...or baked potato
with, with corned beef, you know, and loads of butter. Just
I mean, my Nana was obsessed with butter, I think she sort of
spent the rest of her life making up for wartime rationing
by just...she would stockpile it. And that sort of rubbed off
on me to be honest, I'm, I'm also quite obsessed with butter.
But in both cases, both grandmas, I never ever saw a
recipe. And so I don't cook from recipes, either. So many of the
dishes that my nonna especially would make. I mean, my, my
English grandma wouldn't dream of, of picking weeds from the
side of the road. But my Italian grandma... so much of the
cooking that she did, so many of the ingredients that she used
were, if not grown herself than just grown wild, so there'd be
[...], which is...it's also called sclopit, because of the
noise that that...it's Bladder Campion. And they have these
little bell flowers. And if you put it on your hand, and then
you whack it down with your other hand, it makes it kind of
a popping noise. So that's why it's called Sclopit in in
Friulano, but these these are wild grasses and nettles and,
and things like that, that nonna would always use and that's
really hard to kind of work into a recipe because it relies
on...you can't just say you know, pop down to the shop and
buy X, Y and Z... it's sort of...wait for them to be in
season or find your little foraging spot, go and gather and
you can't really measure or predict those sorts of things, I
think
Lucy Dearlove: And that's obviously something that's very
present in your book Dandelions, like we open with a scene of
dandelions being picked by the side of the road as you're
talking about... what was the significance of kind of that
plant that made you want to include it throughout the book
and kind of centre it around that?
Thea Lenarduzzi: I think I couldn't have done it any other
way really, I think...I mean, food in general is such an
integral part of of the fabric of a family's life, even if it's
not a foodie family in inverted commas, you know, even if
it's...even if you're having chips and, and, and beans or
whatever, that's still a part of the fabric of your life and
those dishes are on that table for multiple reasons. But
certainly in my family's life, dandelions or whatever wilted
wild grass you want to think about, was involved. And
dandelions...it's just the kind of the eternal presence of it.
It's, it's a dish that features almost every dinner time because
they're so abundant, and we all love them. And they sort of say
something about our family and specifically about my Nonna. So
I think when I started writing Dandelions, I knew that I wanted
- and this, this might sound kind of pretentious - but I
wanted to capture something of the essence of Nonna and the
dish of dandelions that accompanies every dinner we
have, it's almost the most obvious way of doing that,
because the mere thing of it, it kind of opens out in a number of
directions at once. It's a, it's a really rich dish, not just
nutritionally but in terms of what it says about her and about
us. So first is the story about how she used to collect it when
she was living in Manchester, in the 1950s and 60s, she just
emigrated there for the second time. And you know, what it says
about her character and the life she was living at that time, a
life on the margins of society, I guess, as an Italian
immigrant, then there's what it tells us about where she came
from, about the culture that she had grown up, in the culture
that knew how to how to use these ingredients how to how to
forage for, for one thing or another that was that tended to
be shunned by the more - again in inverted commas - developed
society that she had moved into in England. So it kind of...the
dish emphasises her foreignness and her desire to, to carry on
in the customs that she grew up with, you know, not in some
grand sense, more subconscious than that, you know, her
stomach, her stomach needed these greens. It was the most
natural thing in the world to her, she sees them a great free
food...I'll pick it I'll take it and for dinner, you know, she
maintains to this day that dandelions are a cure for all
all ills. And then for me as a writer, dandelions sort of sort
of offers itself up as a ready made motif, you know, like a
ready meal if you, if you'd like, but it's just like, laden
with with like significance you know? So I started thinking
about dandelions more broadly. What are they? What's their life
cycle? How do they work? How do they pollinate? How do they, you
know, what, what's their lifecycle? I'd never thought
about it and you know, what do they mean? And what have they
meant in different times in different places to different
people? And, you know, this is a dish that can either bring us
together as it does in my family, but it also sets us
apart it shows up the divisions between people and cultures on
the one hand, who who look at dandelions and recognize that
they're a deeply nutritious free food. So not nasty, it's... to
gather them and take them home for the family. And the people
on the other side who who look at her like she's she's a
nutter. You know, she, what's she doing ferreting around in,
in the mud? Has she lost something? Has she lost her
mind? You know, I doubt any of the people in Manchester would
have looked at her and thought, Oh, right, yeah, she's, she's
gathering....gathering dandelions. And yeah, I mean, I
was sort of reminded of it a few years ago, I was walking on
Hackney Marshes with a friend and, and we were just walking
around, and people were playing fetch with their dogs and all
the usual stuff. And then we saw...it was just a group of, of
Indian women. And they were they had plastic bags, and they were
stooping and gathering, stooping and gathering and I was like,
Oh, I wonder what they're gathering. I wonder if it's
dandelions. So we went over and we said, you know, what are you,
what are you gathering? And they said, Oh, it's mustard seed. You
know, it's delicious. Take it...sorry mustard grass, it's
delicious. Take it. And they gave us like a big bunch each
and said, you know, go home, wilt it down with a knob of
butter and some salt. And so we did. And it was delicious. And
it was just that one moment, you know, the gathering, the
knowledge, the exchange, and it's just bursting with story.
So yeah, that's it. That's why dandelions, that's what
happened.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, it is so interesting, because they're so
abundant here. But we just don't have that kind of history or
connection to them. Like, I genuinely didn't know you could
eat them pretty much until I read the book, I was like, Huh,
okay. Makes a lot of sense. Because they were bitter, you
know. They're a bitter weed. Yeah. But it just never occurred
to me. And yeah, but it seems it seems so strange. I think
especially given the kind of current context of like, how, I
guess like aspirational, gathering food in that way is in
some ways, that there's just the, you know, that the response
to when when Dirce was gathering them, like it was so different.
I don't know, I don't quite know how to articulate it, this
Thea Lenarduzzi: No, totally, I mean, foraging became this
progression.
incredibly kind of chichi, middle class thing to do in
recent years, which, obviously, my nonna and my family are just
completely confused by. But it's yeah, it's like it's gone full
circle in the same way that you know, peasant food always has
done...it sort of started in the most humble origins. And then,
you know, the fact that polenta is served in the finest
restaurants now...again, my family's like, what? Really?
Wow, okay. I mean, I love polenta. But you would never
have seen it in a fancy restaurant until relatively
recently. And that's right. It's a quite it's quite strange turn
of events, I suppose.
Lucy Dearlove: I think sometimes there's a kind of portrayal as
migration as this very, like one way, permanent process, like
it's very linear. And in in Dandelions, there's this kind of
like back and forth between England and in Italy. I guess
I'm just interested to know your thoughts around like that
portrayal of migration, and then how you were writing about your
own family? I mean, obviously, you could only write about it in
the way that it happens. And that and that is the way that it
was. But would you agree with that? Do you think that is how
migration tends to be portrayed? Or is it a bit more complicated
than that?
Thea Lenarduzzi: You mean, that it's pNortrayed in terms of
clinging, you know, clinging to its foods, and its cultures,
rather than assimilating?
Lucy Dearlove: No, more so that when we talk about migration,
it's that people move from one country to another. And, you
know, obviously, they choose to kind of...it's natural that they
would keep customs and cultures from their country of origin.
But there's, I feel like there's less conversation about people
then going back to their home country. I mean, this could be I
could be barking up completely the wrong tree here. But it was
something that really struck me during the book that there is
this like, kind of movement throughout the book that isn't
just like, we're going to a new country. And that's, like,
that's our new life, if that makes sense.
Thea Lenarduzzi: Well, I think the thing was, I think the thing
with how migration worked in my family and continues to work in
my family is that everything is both... it's not one or the
other. It's both and everything in between. So so my Nonna...For
example, she if you ask my Nonna as my....so my husband once
asked her...we'd...me and my husband had been in Tuscany and
then...we'd been there for like five or six weeks. Then we went
up to my Nonna from there. My Nonna's in the Friuli, which is
in north east, very close to the Slovenian border. And so we were
both kind of pumped full of the joys of Tuscany like oh my gosh,
isn't it beautiful? And you go to the Friuli, the Friuli is
beautiful, but it's a very different landscape, it's flat.
And it's not, you know, it's not a must on the on the tourist
circuit, I think it should be, but not very many people visit
there who aren't from there or live near it. And so yeah, we
were pumped full of Tuscany. And my husband just talking to my
Nonna said, so Dirce, if you could live anywhere in Italy,
where would you live? And Nonna, without missing a beat, just
goes Manchester. So as though Manchester is like a little
enclave of Italy, or a continuation of Italy. And I
think in a way it was for her because when she, when she lived
there, she was in the Italian community mostly. But also, I
think it says something about how a lot of the times
migration, it collapses, the boundaries, it collapses the
borders, so that you don't really necessarily distinguish
with where you came and where you now are, where you came from
and where you not now are or vice versa. It's not about going
this way, or that way. It's about sort of existing across
the place, across the places. And I think my, in my nonna's
mind, and for me as well, you sort of your life sort of is
split, but it's not that you stop living one, when you leave
that country, I've not stopped living in Italy, just because I
don't live there. If that makes any sense. I'm still I'm still
living a life that's sort of ticking over over there. And
then when I go back to Italy, as I will be in a few weeks time,
I'll just pick up where I left off with that. Yeah, you know,
certain stuff will feel slightly out of place. And I'll, you
know, maybe take me a while to sort of switch back into
certain, certain rhythms or modes. But yeah, I think I think
that's, I think that might be what you're kind of putting your
finger on when you when you say about it's not backwards and
forwards. It's not one or the other. You're both?
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Something else that
is really apparent in the book is the kind of blurring of like
fact and a fiction that we create around our own lives. And
you're very transparent about that. I think, maybe sometimes,
like when you're talking about your own family history, there
is a temptation to present it as fact. But I think the
acknowledgement that you give kind of throughout the book of
like, I know that some of this is embellished or like not true,
or it's different to what she told me last time or like it was
that...Did you know that was always going to be how you were
writing it?
Thea Lenarduzzi: It had to be you know, it all came very
naturally, organically I guess just because you know, I'm very
much my nonna's granddaughter, I've grown up on her stories and
they chop and change from telling to telling, and you
know, so I guess you know, like to keep that food theme going,
you always have to have a hefty pinch of salt at hand when
you're listening to anything that comes out of Nonna's mouth,
you know, I guess I've always appreciated as a result how
mercurial memory can be. How you know, in one telling, this is my
cousin and then the next it's, it's my brother or you know,
just chops and changes all the time. And, you know, memories
do... they shift and they shift depending on on mood and, and
context in any number of elements. But I think even when
they're not strictly true, you know, they're not an exact
reflection of what happened if there could ever be such a
thing, you know, that they may be truer as a result, you know,
they're true in a deeper sense of the word. So like, reality
and truth aren't the same thing. It's a bit like, you know,
Werner Herzog has this idea about ecstatic truth he calls it
and it's, it's sort of when reality isn't true enough. He
said something like...facts, create norms. And truth creates
light or truth creates illumination. And it's that
sometimes you need to draw on the toolkit of fiction, to
create that illumination. We all do this all the time. You know,
that's how that's what happens when we remember things when we
tell ourselves, what happened. And when we tell that to other
people as well, is that like, there's this, he said, there's
like a deeper strata of truth. And it can only be reached
through fabrication, and imagination and stylization. And
so then you accept that...if you accept that to be true, which I
do. The next question then has to be why, like, why is the
story being told this way? What purpose does it serve the teller
or the listener? Because after all, memory, like memory is
story, memory is a fiction in the oldest order. That's how we
understand our past our present, and we prepare for the future.
And so when you're talking about family stories, or like when
you're talking about in a family, in a broader sense,
wondering about a nation's stories, because a nation is
basically a dysfunctional family, you know, it's not just
about the individual, we all have a deeply vested interest, I
think in in these matters in asking those questions and
asking, you know, what kind of truth is this? You know, is it
reality or is it something else, you know, how do those two
things line up or not as the case may be? And what does it
tell us?
Lucy Dearlove: I think maybe my favourite example of that in the
book is when you talk about learning to make gnocchi with
your sister, and then you're nonna like later can pletely
denies the story that she told you about how she learnt it. And
yeah, completely different story about that she'd learned it in a
restaurant she hadn't learnt it from from her mother was it at
all? Yeah,
Thea Lenarduzzi: exactly. She said she didn't learn it from
her mother. Because I mean, the relationship between Nonna and
her mother Novella was difficult to put it mildly. And yeah, we,
we know, what we think we know is that she learned it from her
Nonna Novella. And again, it would have been in a not in a
reading a recipe sort of way it would have been observing and
observing. And then when we when we asked her about it when we
just mentioned it in passing, like, oh, because of course you
learned to do it this way because of your mom, she, as you
said, completely blocked it. She was like absolutely not No, I
learned it, I learned it in a restaurant that I worked in when
I first moved back to Italy in the 70s. And it was actually
because my Nonna uses her index finger to put the grooves in the
gnocchi the little kind of pools where, where the sauce will,
will go in and sit once you've cooked them, so they each one
has the imprint of her index finger in it, which I think is
just lovely. But I said, well, that's kind of you know,
sometimes it can get a bit messy because you can catch it with
your nail. And then you can tear the pasta, which you don't want
to do if you just press a bit too hard. So how come you don't
use your knuckle like, like your mum did? And her face, you know,
sort of set against me, you know, she was like, Oh, my, you
know, my Nan, my, my, my mum didn't do that. She didn't do
that. She didn't teach me and it was just a weird moment. I was
like, okay, that's how you want to tell this story today. So
I'll respect that. But I've made a little note in my notebook.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, yeah. And that is really hard to navigate
with someone that you love. And you know very well and and
because also like, yeah, like you're saying, like, it
doesn't...just because it's not the truth that you heard
earlier, doesn't mean it's not real.
Thea Lenarduzzi: Yeah, exactly. Well, doesn't mean that it's not
full of truth and the truth of that of that particular instance
is that really conveys the truth of the difficulty of the
relationship between Dirce and her mother Novella.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, yeah, totally. I think something else
that I really wanted to ask you about was what you think about
the kind of...and you write about this a little bit in the
book...the idea of the the Nonna as like this, you talk about it
as a byword for timeless purity, which I thought encapsulated so
much about like, even in this country where I feel like the
approach to Italian food is sometimes like, basic at best.
There is this kind of sense of like, you know, stuff like Pasta
Grannies and things like that. Like there's this real like,
Okay, this is where we learn like real true cooking from...
How do you feel about that perception of a Nonna?
Thea Lenarduzzi: Well, I mean, that so much of that is about
almost like the marketization of women, of Nonne. You know, if
you buy if you pick up a packet of biscuits, and it says, this
is Nonna'ss recipe, you're like, Ah, we're in safe hands, great.
You know, there's nothing tainted here. It's all pure and
wholesome. That's, that's marketing. But it's all kind of
preying on this, this archetype. You know, it's a character of a
Nonna. You can almost see her almost as like a, like a Dolmii
puppet, you know, Dolmio, which is, I think, made in Holland.
But no, so she's like this benevolent old woman who exists
to feed the family, to selflessly provide and then
presumably, sit there silently dishing it out, while the men
talk about important things, you know, in my experience, an
aspect of that is true, yes, it takes hours for Nonna to make
her delicious food, you know, for one meal, which will often
not be commented on by anyone, because it's always... it's just
always there. We take it for granted to a great degree, and
also her husband, my Nonno, my granddad, he did make very clear
his discontent if lunch was not on the table at noon on the dot.
But I suppose what I wanted to do was to pick that archetype
apart, you know, to, to also give her back the power that she
has in that, you know, when she makes her tiramisu or her
gnocchi, it's, it's a triumph. She isn't passive. She's alive,
you know, she's choosing to impress us. She's reminding us,
she's choosing to remind us of her indispensability. And that's
also why she doesn't ever give us the full recipe, you know,
she always leaves something out, so no one can replace her. And
you know, the cooking, it's all part of her scene setting and
the table is her space, even if she's silent, which generally
she isn't. She's totally in charge. You know, she's the
director of the film of our family. And these days, she
tends to leave quite soon after we've all eaten, sometimes
before we finish because she gets tired. She hardly eats any
more herself, you know, she's nearly 97, she's gonna be 97 In
a few weeks time and, and when when she gets up to go, the
whole thing sags. The centre drops out, we all feel weird,
but I think it's that thing of elderly women, women generally,
food, migrants, weeds. These are all things that have generally
been overlooked or not considered worthy of scrutiny.
You know, how many books are there about great men who did
great things and how many are there about a grandmother who no
one's ever heard of...is that because there's nothing of
interest in that woman's life, you know about her experiences
and her thoughts and her feelings? I don't, I mean I
don't think so. I don't think...I don't think anyone
could argue that really. So, yeah, I just I guess I wanted to
give her back her dimensions. And part of that was about
considering all of her stories, considering her food in the
round, you know, not just to talk about how, how delicious
these dishes are, which they definitely are, but to think
about why she cooks, the things she does, why she cooks them how
she does, what they tell us about her, and the life that
she's lived and the people and the places that she's known, why
they matter, why all of her stories matter, what they link
to, why do we need to keep telling them? Why do we need to
carry them with us?
Lucy Dearlove: I feel like I've really noticed more recently,
being interested in kind of like domesticity and like the space
of the kitchen, within people's homes over history, how little
has actually been written about that over time, and just
that...you're so right like that overlooking of women's space,
migrants' space like that kind of Yeah, it's yeah, it's so
true. And it's almost like the...people talk about everyday
life as like, like...mundane is often a word that comes up. But
like, there's actually...even the sort of things that happen
in the book, like people going to work, people moving house,
like people...there's so much significance in all of it.
Thea Lenarduzzi: Yeah, there's so much living in the living,
that we don't, that we don't that we don't consider. And I
think when I think about my nonna's kitchen in Italy, I
think it's quite interesting thinking about domestic spaces
because she has her little tiny, tiny little galley kitchen,
which has not changed at all since she had... since they
built that house in the 19, late 1960s and finished in 1971. It's
exactly the same...the oranges, the browns, the sunflowers, but
she's got that little galley kitchen and then there's a kind
of a half wall and a big faux satin orange curtain covered in
really busy flowers. And then you're into the living room
where there's a sofa, a TV, the cupboard with so much so much
chaos is barely contained. And then you've got a stove with
four or five rings on it a wood burning stove that she's feeding
all day you work through the summer, yeah. All through the
day, all through the seasons, whether it's summer or anything,
it's always on. And I think that's what she's done.
Actually. She's She broke up that space. She's not confined
in the kitchen while everyone else is in the living space.
She's in and out, the curtain is never ever closed. It's always
half open at least Yeah, she's collapsed that boundary in the
same way as she collapsed the boundary between Italy and
England. She moves freely. And you know, we may sit still but
she is always backwards and forwards, spooning something out
here, stirring something over there, clattering around. You
can't confine her. She won't be, she won't be hidden away in a
domestic space. Thank you very much. She's, she's in front of
the curtain. She's on stage all the time, where she belongs,
quite frankly. And she knows that.
Lucy Dearlove: So just one final thing to end and if you know,
fair enough, if you want to not give it away, but I was
wondering if you would share how you would prepare and cook
dandelions.
Thea Lenarduzzi: I mean, it's it's very boring. It's very,
very simple. But I think that's that's the key to some of the
best food....you just absolutely gather them wherever you gather
them depending on where you gather and gather them wash them
particularly well. And you boil them or steam them you could
steam them but yeah, boil them or steam them for 15,20 minutes
in salty water, drain them but not too much. You don't want
them to be dry. You want to keep a lot of that moisture. Then put
them back into the pan, so keep the pan warm with a little oil,
little olive oil, which my nonna always likes to remind me when
she was in England used to have to buy it in the pharmacy. And
it was probably horrible stuff. But serve it with Yeah, with
that oil warm and then squeeze a bit of lemon on the end of salt.
I guess you could add a knob of butter if you were my English
Nana, not that she would have eaten dandelions. But there you
go. That's really that's really it. You can also actually can
also parboil the roots, because you know, when you pull up a
dandelion, if you pull the whole thing out, you pull it sometimes
it's half a metre long, the white roots that comes up and
it's really gnarled so you can parboil the roots, chop them up
and preserve them in vinegar. And they're they're really rich
source of of all sorts of goodnesses
Lucy Dearlove: what and what's the texture of them?
Thea Lenarduzzi: Depending on how much you boil them and you
don't want to boil them too much they've got a nice bite to them.
Yeah, they've got a little bit of a crunch a bit like You know
Giardinera, which is yeah pickled carrots and celery and
bits of cauliflower that similar sort of a bit al dente you want
them to be and then yeah, preserve them in vinegar and and
then you just have them you know, as a side with cheese, or
I mean anything, anything goes with cheese, but Yeah, that's it
just have them have them in a jar on your table when you're
having anything really. You could start the day with then
that'd be a bit weird, but
Lucy Dearlove: I'm not sure I have the stomach for pickles.
First thing. We'll probably do I know maybe I need to up my game.
Well, I'm definitely going to cook these dandelions. Maybe I'm
maybe not going to collect them like on the side of the A2.
Thea Lenarduzzi: No, no, maybe don't do that
Lucy Dearlove: Maybe they'd be like in a nice park somewhere.
Thea Lenarduzzi: Yeah, exactly. Send me a picture I'd like to
I'd love to see them
Lucy Dearlove: Thanks so much to Thea Lenarduzzi For this really
generous interview that I actually found really moving
both to record and to listen back to. There's so much living
in the living. It's true. Let's remember it. Dandelions is out
now published by Fitzcarraldo and available in all good
bookshops. I really urge you to get a copy and read it. It's
just a beautiful book. It's incredibly moving. And it made
me think about kind of the stories that we tell within
families in a completely different way. But it's also
just really funny and lively. And Thea is a fantastic writer.
I love it so much. Get a copy. You can support Lecker on
Patreon for three pounds a month and get access to a bonus
episode every month. As I mentioned, the previous episode,
this month's is going to include some extra bits from each
episode released this month, specifically around recipes and
their role within personal writing. There's going to be
kind of a whole other separate episode around that. And it's
going to be really good. If I do say so myself. Subscribe if
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able to continue to make the podcast music is by bluedot
sessions. Thanks to Ben McDonald, who is Lecker's
Resident illustrator. You can see his work on the Lecker
Instagram and Twitter at like a podcast. There is one more
episodes come this month around this theme that I've been kind
of tracing through different books and conversations about
how writers approach telling personal stories through food.
Make sure you're subscribed on your podcast platform of choice
and you can listen as soon as they're released. Thanks for
listening. I will be back in your feed very soon.