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Biography
Rachel was born in Southampton in 1972. Having studied at the Drama Center London she worked as an actress until, quite suddenly, moving to Rome in 2005. She lives next to a market and above a bread shop in a quarter of Rome called Testaccio, which is shaped like a wedge of cheese. Fitting for a woman who now spends her time writing about cheese and the other things she cooks in her Roman kitchen. As well as writing her blog and working on her first book, Rachel has written for the Guardian and the Spectator.
FIVE QUARTERS was published by Saltyard Books in 2015 and won the André Simon award for food writing. It was also shortlisted for the First Book Award at the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2016.
An A-Z of Pasta: Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes
This is a story of pasta. In it, Guardian columnist and award-winning food writer Rachel Roddy condenses everything she has learned about Italy’s favourite food in a practical, easy-to-use and mouth-watering collection of over 120 essential pasta and sauce recipes.
Short essays weave together the history, culture and the everyday life of pasta shapes from the tip to the toe of Italy. There is pasta made with water, and pasta with egg; shapes made by hand and those rolled by machine; the long and the short; the rolled and the stretched; the twisted and the stuffed; the fresh and the dried. An A-Z of Pasta suggests how to match pasta shapes with sauces, and how to serve them. The recipes range from the familiar – pesto, ragu and carbonara – to the unfamiliar (but thrilling): ziti with onion and beef, scialatielli with sea bass and lemon; capelli d’angelo with leeks and saffron.
This is a mouthwatering guide to pasta from one of the best food writers of our time.
Publications
Publications
Food can embody our personal history as well as wider cultural histories. But what are the stories we tell ourselves about the kitchen, and how do we first come to it? How do the cookbooks we read shape us? Can cooking be a tool for connection in the kitchen and outside of it?
In these essays thirteen writers consider the subjects of cooking and eating and how they shape our lives, and the possibilities and limitations the kitchen poses. Rachel Roddy traces an alternative personal history through the cookers in her life; Rebecca May Johnson considers the radical potential of finger food; Ruby Tandoh discovers other definitions of sweetness through the work of writer Doreen Fernandez; Yemisí Aríbisálà remembers a love affair in which food failed as a language; and Julia Turshen considers food’s ties to community.
A collection to savour and inspire, In the Kitchen brings together thirteen contemporary writers whose work brilliantly explores food, capturing their reflections on their experiences in the kitchen and beyond.
For the last twelve years, food-writer, cook and photographer Rachel Roddy has immersed herself in the culture of Roman cooking, but it was the flavours of the south that she and her Sicilian partner, Vincenzo, often craved.
Eventually the chance arose to spend more time at his old family house in south-east Sicily, where Rachel embraced the country’s traditional recipes and the stories behind them. In Two Kitchens she celebrates the food and flavours of Rome and Sicily and shares over 120 of these simple, everyday dishes from her two distant but connected kitchens.
From tomato and salted ricotta salad, caponata and baked Sicilian pasta to lemon crumble, honeyed peaches and almond and chocolate cake, they are the authentic Italian recipes that you will want to cook again and again until you’ve made them your own.
Rachel’s first book, Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, won the Andre Simon Food Book Award and the Guild of Food Writers’ First Book Award in 2015.
‘Rachel Roddy describing how to boil potatoes would inspire me. I want to live under her kitchen table. There are very, very few who possess such a supremely uncluttered culinary voice as hers, just now.’ – Simon Hopkinson’
‘Of course I thought Rome was glorious, but I didn’t want to stay. A month, three at most, then I’d take a train back to Sicily to finish the clockwise journey I’d interrupted, before moving even further southwards…’ Instead, captivated by the exhilarating life of Testaccio, the wedge-shaped quarter of Rome that centres round the old slaughterhouse and the bustling food market, Rachel decided to rent a flat and live there. Thus began an Italian adventure that’s turned into a brand new life. Five Quarters charts a year in Rachel’s small kitchen, shopping, cooking, eating and writing, capturing a uniquely domestic picture of life in this vibrant, charismatic city.
