“With joyful inventiveness,” is how food historian Gillian Riley describes the way Vincenzo Corrado wrote about food. She also notes his “fresh flow of ideas”, “subversive and endearingly individual way”, and his ability to “convey a complex recipe in three or four lines”. I admire these same qualities in Riley’s own lively and scholarly writing, and especially in her masterful The Oxford Companion to Italian Food, which is where I met The Gallant Cook.
Born in 1738, in Oria in Puglia (then part of the Kingdom of Naples), little is known about Corrado’s childhood except that it was humble, and that, after his parents’ death, he possibly went into the service of an aristocrat. At 17, he entered a Celestine monastery that allowed him an excellent education and, later, to travel all over the Italian peninsula with senior clergy, feeding his curiosity about food and collecting recipes as they went. Monastic life also took Corrado to Naples, which at the time was the densely-populated centre of the Spanish-ruled kingdom and, for the wealthy, the pleasure capital of Europe.
