Blog Appétit: From My Dining Table

Ahh, Venice. How beautiful your canals, stone archways and Gothic architecture, and your local culinary delicacies! Even more so through the eyes of Skye McAlpine, who captures – in stirring words and evocative images – the glamour and charming worn edges of the Italian city. English-born McAlpine and her family moved to Venice on a whim when she was six-years-old and never looked back. After university in Oxford, where she met her husband, they returned to the city, where they now live with their two-year-old boy. A Latin poetry scholar, McAlpine discovered food blogging during writer’s block and, much like her adopted hometown, it was happenstance meant to be. True to McAlpine’s lyrical leanings, From My Dining Table reads a lot like a love letter to the city, tracing its vivid past and revelling in every present moment. Food, of course, is at the heart of it all, with recipes for age-old Venetian dishes, from a Ladies’ Day orange blossom ‘mimosa’ cake to a chocolate and chestnut cake scented with rosemary, and rustic Italian sweets, such as honey and almond semifreddo and cocoa-dusted meringues. We’d love to be a guest at your dining table, Skye.

“I taught myself to cook by endlessly reading cookbooks – going over the recipes again and again, devouring the pages in bed late at night, as if reading a novel I couldn’t put down. Slowly over time, I became confident in the kitchen. I learned to sauté and to grill, to soften onions and how to cook a risotto just so (very slowly and stirring constantly).

“But before I learned any of that, before I learned how to cook, I learned how to bake. I found a very special satisfaction that came with watching flour, butter and sugar turn into fine pastry, and a deep comfort in the smell of a cake lightly browning in the oven. Baking, you see - even more than cooking - makes me happy.

“Italy isn’t renowned for its desserts, in the way that France, say, is best known for its fine patisserie or America for its pies, doughnuts and decadent buttercream icing.

I started my blog to… Overcome writer’s block. I was working on the beginnings of a book on Latin love poetry (I was studying ancient literature at the time) and I was struggling to find my voice. A friend suggested that I write about something that came naturally, something I didn’t have to think about too hard, as an exercise – just a few pages, until I found my rhythm. So I started writing about food and Venice, jotting down recipes and anecdotes from last night’s dinner. Turns out she was right; I found my voice and never looked back. Other projects fell by the wayside and From My Dining Table was born.

The must-cook recipe on my website is… Flourless chocolate cake with whipped rosemary cream. It’s incredibly rich… but I have yet to meet a guest at my table who can resist a second helping.

My current food obsession is… White peaches poached in amaretto liqueur. It’s summer right now here in Venice and there are piles of beautiful peaches for sale at the market. I have taken to poaching them in a liqueur syrup, then chilling them in the fridge and eating them with a big dollop of gelato.

Eating… That aforementioned flourless chocolate cake takes me back to when I was a child. My mother used to bake it for my birthday every year and layer it with buttercream and smarties.

I learnt to cook from… Obsessively reading cookbooks. And from my Aunty Wendy – she can cook pretty much anything to nigh on perfection. She used to let me play around in her kitchen, making a mess and doing whatever I wanted to do. She showed me that cooking could be fun and, through a lot of trial and error, I became more confident.

The best thing about Venice is… There are no cars – it makes the city wonderfully peaceful. It’s the first thing that I notice when I’ve been away, how lovely and quiet it is. It also makes it very safe. Our son, Aeneas, who is now nearly three-years-old, can run around as much as he likes and I don’t worry about the roads.

Friends always ask me to cook… My crispy roast duck legs. In the winter I roast them with potatoes and a little fresh thyme (they go all crispy and golden as they cook in the fat), and in the summer I cook them with figs that I marinate in red wine for a day or so beforehand.

The one thing I can’t cook is… Asian food. It’s one of my favourite things to eat in restaurants, but when I come to try and make it at home I feel completely lost. I don’t even know where to start. I would love to learn.

I always have… A couple of jars of really good quality tinned tuna in my pantry; parsley and cherry tomatoes in my fridge; and chopped onion in my freezer. That way if all else fails, I can toss together a really good tuna salad at the last minute.

My most sauce-splattered cookbook is… Probably Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess. I love to bake and it’s full of so many good, old-fashioned recipes. It’s kind of like a baking bible of sorts. I also have piles of old Venetian cookbooks; they’re mostly in dialect and don’t have any pictures, but they’re full of classic recipes that I make time and time again.

The most difficult food to shoot/style and make look tasty is… Deep-fried zucchini flowers. They’re one of my favourite things to eat, but whenever it comes to taking a picture of them, they always just look brown and not half as appealing as they taste.

Beyond my own blog, some of my favourites reads are… Farmette for lighthearted tales of life in rural Ireland; My Cottage Kitchen for beautiful scenes from what must be the prettiest corner of England; The Dailys for when I want to be transported to the Australian outback – it makes me wish that I lived on the other side of the world; Local Milk for wonderfully evocative narrative; and London Bakes to satisfy my cravings for cakes, biscuits and other beautiful home baked goods.

Top picks from From My Dining Table

1. Flourless chocolate, chestnut and rosemary cake

2. Honey, almond & ginger semifreddo with a hint of thyme

3. Orange blossom ‘mimosa’ cake

4. Cocoa-dusted meringues

Blog Appétit Editor Yasmin Newman