COOK LIKE AN ITALIAN WITH SILVIA COLLOCA
Series return
Thursday, 8pm, SBS Food
Whether she’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans or a peasant dress, her chocolate tresses cascading beneath a floral bandana as she kneads Sicilian brioche or stirs an Abruzzo soup, actress, opera singer and food presenter Silvia Colloca can’t help but embody the domestic goddess ideal. Her fourth television series is returning for a second season – filmed in her home kitchen, her three children with husband actor Richard Roxburgh hovering for a lick of the spoon – and it is a joyous and practical guide to treasured dishes from across Italy.
“You don’t have to be an Italian to cook like one. You can shop and stock your pantry like one, you can think about food like one, and then you can cook like one. I don’t think it’s really about the food. It’s about the moment it creates. I hope that people can select a few recipes from this season to become their personal favourites that they do over and over again.”
While Roxburgh never appears on his wife’s cooking shows (“We try to keep our professional lives separate”), this season includes bittersweet Zoom appearances by her parents and brother in Italy.
“This time last year all the Italians were singing from the balconies and having coffee with the neighbours. It’s not happening this time around. They’re just so exhausted.”
Traditional dishes such as chicken diavolo, a spicy roast spatchcock that can be “put straight on the table for everyone to demolish”; zupetta di pesce; risotto; calzone; and breakfast focaccia are lovingly prepared, with nifty Nonna tips thrown in. There’s an episode devoted to cooking with children (“it’s a bit messy but it encourages a good relationship with food”); and one for the gluten intolerant: “There are Italian recipes that just so happen to be gluten free.”
Cook Like an Italian is a long way from Colloca’s second, and perhaps her most unintentionally well-known series, made for the ABC in 2016, five years after she migrated to Australia after meeting Roxburgh on the set of vampire movie, Van Helsing. Infused with celebrities and filmed on location in a glistening North Sydney beachfront apartment, Silvia’s Italian Table was lambasted by online critic Helen Razer as “fatuous property porn” and a misuse of taxpayer’s money. To that unfortunate chapter, Colloca assumes Mariah Carey’s infamous “I don’t know her” response.
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