Paul Smith, Jamie Oliver And Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, Part II

In which the Naked Chef runs the rule over Cosa Nostro cooking...

• Still more additional material from the exhaustive Goodfellas piece I wrote for Hotdog magazine way back when. This time, Jamie Oliver’s take on Italian cuisine!

Foodfella!
Jamie Oliver, the nation’s top ‘mockney sparrer’ chef, mixes Goodfellas Italian cooking tips wiv some of his own - blinder!
The Italians are a romantic people in a romantic country. When it comes to their cooking, it’s more about family life and enjoying food than putting on a show. Instead of ‘julienne of’ or ‘glazed with’, it’s ‘ripped up’, ‘squashed or ‘bashed about’.

Italian cooking has a completely different set of words and its much more about a real taste. Taste, to Italians, is all important. And they manage to have a good laugh at the same time. There are loads of good Italian restaurants in Britain that have latched on to this idea, and so can you too using these recipes…

Garlic Cloves And Razor Blades
The thing about garlic is that there is no ‘right’ way to cook it, despite what Henry Hill says in Goodfellas. A clove of garlic is like a potato, you know where you have a thin chip like a French fry or a big fat chip or a sliced potato? They all taste different because they’ve been sliced to different thicknesses - that’s just cooking.

If you go to Southern Italy, they slice garlic thickly; in Northern Italy, they slice it thinly. Everyone thinks there’s is the ‘best’ way but it really depends on the dish and how heavily you want to flavour it. So fat, thin, squashed, mashed - it’s all down to personal taste