Writing About Life with Thea Lenarduzzi
The writer and editor Thea Lenarduzzi talks about her book Dandelions; a family history of migration, cooking, living.
So much of personal writing in food focuses on heritage and family - and rightly so! But - down, no doubt to the very white, middle class status quo - there can be a tendency towards simplification - of dishes, or even a narrative, a family’s history. What Dandelions does so well is capture how much of people’s lives rests in the spaces between, resisting categorisation and definition, and even slipping between fact and fiction, but in a way that remains always true and always significant, even in the so-called mundanity of everyday life.
Dandelions is out now, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
This is the second of three episodes this month about contemporary personal food writing and memoir. The first can be found here.
Ben McDonald creates original illustrations for Lecker - find them on the Lecker Twitter and Instagram.
If you’re in a position to, please considering supporting Lecker. Buy merch here and become a Patron at patreon.com/leckerpodcast. This month's exclusive episode will include more from this conversation with Thea!
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Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript below!
Lucy Dearlove 00:01
This is Lecker. I'm Lucy Dearlove. This month I'm releasing a very small series about contemporary personal and memoir writing within the loose parameters of food. In the previous episode with Rebecca Johnson and Angela Hui, Rebecca talked about the limitations of categorizing writing as 'food writing'. For - among many reasons - it can feel diminutive. The book I'm talking about in this episode, I think, is a great example of why genre categorisation of any kind - but particularly within personal writing - can be at best limiting and at worst pointless
Thea Lenarduzzi 00:40
Elderly women...women generally food...migrants...weeds...these are all things that have generally been overlooked or not considered worthy of scrutiny. You know, how many books are there about great men who did great things and how many other about a grandmother who no one's ever heard of?
Lucy Dearlove 01:03
This is Thea Lenarduzzi, whose book Dandelions came out last month. Dandelions is not really a food book - if we're going to lean into the categorisation - but food is a central theme within it. The book follows the history of Thea's family and their movement and migration between England and Italy over the past decades and generations. At the heart is Thea's nonna Dirce with her stories weaving the fabric of Thea's childhood and family life. The dandelions of the title appear throughout the book as a recurring motif, most frequently on the table at family meals. We first meet Dirce on the first page of the book, picking dandelion leaves at the side of the road in 1950s Manchester and stuffing them into a bag to take home and cook and eat. Thea describes those around looking askance at her, wondering what on earth she's doing with those weeds. So much of personal writing in food focuses on heritage and family - and understandably so. But down no doubt to the very white middle class status quo, there can be a tendency towards simplification: of dishes or even a narrative, a family's history. What Dandelions does so effectively is capture how much of people's lives rests in the spaces in between; resisting categorisation and definition, and even slipping between fact and fiction. But in a way that remains always true and always significant. Even in the so called mundanity of everyday life. To begin, I asked Thea - having in mind this heritage of her family's movement between England and Italy - to talk about her own relationship with food and with cooking.
Thea Lenarduzzi 03:07
I suppose if I tell you about the first thing that I ever learned to cook, it sort of sums up my life. So under supervision, I was probably about 10. And it was a tomato sauce for pasta. But ironically, seeing as I was born and raised living at the time in Italy, I followed a recipe in...it was in one of my mom's old English cookbooks from like the 1970s. So that kind of weird Italian English hybrid started started pretty early on and I'd love to say that it was a cookbook you know, that was by someone fully vetted or you know, respected like the silver spoon or Elizabeth David but I mean, I think it was probably one that came through with, like the Reader's Digest or something. My my Liverpudlian, Nana, her mum, my mum's mum would have probably given her when she set off for university. I mean, I know it can't have been that bad because I don't think it included anything like garlic paste or garlic powder. But yeah, probably wasn't the most legitimate pasta sauce you've ever heard of.
Lucy Dearlove 04:07
And was there any sort of interaction between those two older generations of your family? So I guess like like your nonna and then and then your mum's mum, your grandma on that side? Did they ever sort of encounter each other in terms of cooking or food?
Thea Lenarduzzi 04:20
Well, I suppose what they had in common, I mean, when I think about it, when I think about my, my kind of food passions, they probably are both on both sides centered around my grandmother, so that split you know, split down the middle exactly along the lines of my heritage almost. On the one hand, there is the kind of simple rusticity I suppose of my nonna's cooking in Italy, where everything was homemade and you know, tended to take ages usually from homegrown roots as well and they'd be like gnocchi with a ragu or polenta with some kind of slow cooked beast, you know, often dropped off by a friend from the mountains and you know, it would have been boar or deer or goat or something and courgettes and carrots which she'd grown herself and she'd soften them for ages over a low heat and then there'd be some wild grass or other which was always wilted and in a plate of its own. And then on the other hand, there was my English side, my English, Nana's cooking, which I mean by the time I was I was born and old enough to know what was going on it was quite heavily influenced by Marks and Spencers you know, it was a lot of convenience and you know, little luxuries. So there'd be you know, fun things like dolly mixtures and prawn cocktails not together. Obviously. That would have been just weird. But um, yeah, I guess my favourite...the similarity between the two grandmas was that my favorite kind of cooking of my English grandma was also a kind of simple, simple style. It was probably stuff that was slightly adapted from war food, I guess, you know, she'd it was very frugal, so she'd maybe melt some really mild cheddar in a shallow oven dish with milk. And then you just soak ans scoop bread around in this sloppy, stringy mess. It's called Pobs. I mean, anyone from the North will probably know what Pobs is. And there's a sweet version as well. But ours was always the cheesy milky version...or baked potato with, with corned beef, you know, and loads of butter. Just I mean, my Nana was obsessed with butter, I think she sort of spent the rest of her life making up for wartime rationing by just...she would stockpile it. And that sort of rubbed off on me to be honest, I'm, I'm also quite obsessed with butter. But in both cases, both grandmas, I never ever saw a recipe. And so I don't cook from recipes, either. So many of the dishes that my nonna especially would make. I mean, my, my English grandma wouldn't dream of, of picking weeds from the side of the road. But my Italian grandma... so much of the cooking that she did, so many of the ingredients that she used were, if not grown herself than just grown wild, so there'd be [...], which is...it's also called sclopit, because of the noise that that...it's Bladder Campion. And they have these little bell flowers. And if you put it on your hand, and then you whack it down with your other hand, it makes it kind of a popping noise. So that's why it's called Sclopit in in Friulano, but these these are wild grasses and nettles and, and things like that, that nonna would always use and that's really hard to kind of work into a recipe because it relies on...you can't just say you know, pop down to the shop and buy X, Y and Z... it's sort of...wait for them to be in season or find your little foraging spot, go and gather and you can't really measure or predict those sorts of things, I think
Lucy Dearlove 07:22
And that's obviously something that's very present in your book Dandelions, like we open with a scene of dandelions being picked by the side of the road as you're talking about... what was the significance of kind of that plant that made you want to include it throughout the book and kind of centre it around that?
Thea Lenarduzzi 07:40
I think I couldn't have done it any other way really, I think...I mean, food in general is such an integral part of of the fabric of a family's life, even if it's not a foodie family in inverted commas, you know, even if it's...even if you're having chips and, and, and beans or whatever, that's still a part of the fabric of your life and those dishes are on that table for multiple reasons. But certainly in my family's life, dandelions or whatever wilted wild grass you want to think about, was involved. And dandelions...it's just the kind of the eternal presence of it. It's, it's a dish that features almost every dinner time because they're so abundant, and we all love them. And they sort of say something about our family and specifically about my Nonna. So I think when I started writing Dandelions, I knew that I wanted - and this, this might sound kind of pretentious - but I wanted to capture something of the essence of Nonna and the dish of dandelions that accompanies every dinner we have, it's almost the most obvious way of doing that, because the mere thing of it, it kind of opens out in a number of directions at once. It's a, it's a really rich dish, not just nutritionally but in terms of what it says about her and about us. So first is the story about how she used to collect it when she was living in Manchester, in the 1950s and 60s, she just emigrated there for the second time. And you know, what it says about her character and the life she was living at that time, a life on the margins of society, I guess, as an Italian immigrant, then there's what it tells us about where she came from, about the culture that she had grown up, in the culture that knew how to how to use these ingredients how to how to forage for, for one thing or another that was that tended to be shunned by the more - again in inverted commas - developed society that she had moved into in England. So it kind of...the dish emphasises her foreignness and her desire to, to carry on in the customs that she grew up with, you know, not in some grand sense, more subconscious than that, you know, her stomach, her stomach needed these greens. It was the most natural thing in the world to her, she sees them a great free food...I'll pick it I'll take it and for dinner, you know, she maintains to this day that dandelions are a cure for all all ills. And then for me as a writer, dandelions sort of sort of offers itself up as a ready made motif, you know, like a ready meal if you, if you'd like, but it's just like, laden with with like significance you know? So I started thinking about dandelions more broadly. What are they? What's their life cycle? How do they work? How do they pollinate? How do they, you know, what, what's their lifecycle? I'd never thought about it and you know, what do they mean? And what have they meant in different times in different places to different people? And, you know, this is a dish that can either bring us together as it does in my family, but it also sets us apart it shows up the divisions between people and cultures on the one hand, who who look at dandelions and recognize that they're a deeply nutritious free food. So not nasty, it's... to gather them and take them home for the family. And the people on the other side who who look at her like she's she's a nutter. You know, she, what's she doing ferreting around in, in the mud? Has she lost something? Has she lost her mind? You know, I doubt any of the people in Manchester would have looked at her and thought, Oh, right, yeah, she's, she's gathering....gathering dandelions. And yeah, I mean, I was sort of reminded of it a few years ago, I was walking on Hackney Marshes with a friend and, and we were just walking around, and people were playing fetch with their dogs and all the usual stuff. And then we saw...it was just a group of, of Indian women. And they were they had plastic bags, and they were stooping and gathering, stooping and gathering and I was like, Oh, I wonder what they're gathering. I wonder if it's dandelions. So we went over and we said, you know, what are you, what are you gathering? And they said, Oh, it's mustard seed. You know, it's delicious. Take it...sorry mustard grass, it's delicious. Take it. And they gave us like a big bunch each and said, you know, go home, wilt it down with a knob of butter and some salt. And so we did. And it was delicious. And it was just that one moment, you know, the gathering, the knowledge, the exchange, and it's just bursting with story. So yeah, that's it. That's why dandelions, that's what happened.
Lucy Dearlove 11:45
Yeah, it is so interesting, because they're so abundant here. But we just don't have that kind of history or connection to them. Like, I genuinely didn't know you could eat them pretty much until I read the book, I was like, Huh, okay. Makes a lot of sense. Because they were bitter, you know. They're a bitter weed. Yeah. But it just never occurred to me. And yeah, but it seems it seems so strange. I think especially given the kind of current context of like, how, I guess like aspirational, gathering food in that way is in some ways, that there's just the, you know, that the response to when when Dirce was gathering them, like it was so different. I don't know, I don't quite know how to articulate it, this progression.
Thea Lenarduzzi 12:27
No, totally, I mean, foraging became this incredibly kind of chichi, middle class thing to do in recent years, which, obviously, my nonna and my family are just completely confused by. But it's yeah, it's like it's gone full circle in the same way that you know, peasant food always has done...it sort of started in the most humble origins. And then, you know, the fact that polenta is served in the finest restaurants now...again, my family's like, what? Really? Wow, okay. I mean, I love polenta. But you would never have seen it in a fancy restaurant until relatively recently. And that's right. It's a quite it's quite strange turn of events, I suppose.
Lucy Dearlove 13:06
I think sometimes there's a kind of portrayal as migration as this very, like one way, permanent process, like it's very linear. And in in Dandelions, there's this kind of like back and forth between England and in Italy. I guess I'm just interested to know your thoughts around like that portrayal of migration, and then how you were writing about your own family? I mean, obviously, you could only write about it in the way that it happens. And that and that is the way that it was. But would you agree with that? Do you think that is how migration tends to be portrayed? Or is it a bit more complicated than that?
Thea Lenarduzzi 13:38
You mean, that it's pNortrayed in terms of clinging, you know, clinging to its foods, and its cultures, rather than assimilating?
Lucy Dearlove 13:45
No, more so that when we talk about migration, it's that people move from one country to another. And, you know, obviously, they choose to kind of...it's natural that they would keep customs and cultures from their country of origin. But there's, I feel like there's less conversation about people then going back to their home country. I mean, this could be I could be barking up completely the wrong tree here. But it was something that really struck me during the book that there is this like, kind of movement throughout the book that isn't just like, we're going to a new country. And that's, like, that's our new life, if that makes sense.
Thea Lenarduzzi 14:21
Well, I think the thing was, I think the thing with how migration worked in my family and continues to work in my family is that everything is both... it's not one or the other. It's both and everything in between. So so my Nonna...For example, she if you ask my Nonna as my....so my husband once asked her...we'd...me and my husband had been in Tuscany and then...we'd been there for like five or six weeks. Then we went up to my Nonna from there. My Nonna's in the Friuli, which is in north east, very close to the Slovenian border. And so we were both kind of pumped full of the joys of Tuscany like oh my gosh, isn't it beautiful? And you go to the Friuli, the Friuli is beautiful, but it's a very different landscape, it's flat. And it's not, you know, it's not a must on the on the tourist circuit, I think it should be, but not very many people visit there who aren't from there or live near it. And so yeah, we were pumped full of Tuscany. And my husband just talking to my Nonna said, so Dirce, if you could live anywhere in Italy, where would you live? And Nonna, without missing a beat, just goes Manchester. So as though Manchester is like a little enclave of Italy, or a continuation of Italy. And I think in a way it was for her because when she, when she lived there, she was in the Italian community mostly. But also, I think it says something about how a lot of the times migration, it collapses, the boundaries, it collapses the borders, so that you don't really necessarily distinguish with where you came and where you now are, where you came from and where you not now are or vice versa. It's not about going this way, or that way. It's about sort of existing across the place, across the places. And I think my, in my nonna's mind, and for me as well, you sort of your life sort of is split, but it's not that you stop living one, when you leave that country, I've not stopped living in Italy, just because I don't live there. If that makes any sense. I'm still I'm still living a life that's sort of ticking over over there. And then when I go back to Italy, as I will be in a few weeks time, I'll just pick up where I left off with that. Yeah, you know, certain stuff will feel slightly out of place. And I'll, you know, maybe take me a while to sort of switch back into certain, certain rhythms or modes. But yeah, I think I think that's, I think that might be what you're kind of putting your finger on when you when you say about it's not backwards and forwards. It's not one or the other. You're both?
Lucy Dearlove 16:46
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Something else that is really apparent in the book is the kind of blurring of like fact and a fiction that we create around our own lives. And you're very transparent about that. I think, maybe sometimes, like when you're talking about your own family history, there is a temptation to present it as fact. But I think the acknowledgement that you give kind of throughout the book of like, I know that some of this is embellished or like not true, or it's different to what she told me last time or like it was that...Did you know that was always going to be how you were writing it?
Thea Lenarduzzi 17:21
It had to be you know, it all came very naturally, organically I guess just because you know, I'm very much my nonna's granddaughter, I've grown up on her stories and they chop and change from telling to telling, and you know, so I guess you know, like to keep that food theme going, you always have to have a hefty pinch of salt at hand when you're listening to anything that comes out of Nonna's mouth, you know, I guess I've always appreciated as a result how mercurial memory can be. How you know, in one telling, this is my cousin and then the next it's, it's my brother or you know, just chops and changes all the time. And, you know, memories do... they shift and they shift depending on on mood and, and context in any number of elements. But I think even when they're not strictly true, you know, they're not an exact reflection of what happened if there could ever be such a thing, you know, that they may be truer as a result, you know, they're true in a deeper sense of the word. So like, reality and truth aren't the same thing. It's a bit like, you know, Werner Herzog has this idea about ecstatic truth he calls it and it's, it's sort of when reality isn't true enough. He said something like...facts, create norms. And truth creates light or truth creates illumination. And it's that sometimes you need to draw on the toolkit of fiction, to create that illumination. We all do this all the time. You know, that's how that's what happens when we remember things when we tell ourselves, what happened. And when we tell that to other people as well, is that like, there's this, he said, there's like a deeper strata of truth. And it can only be reached through fabrication, and imagination and stylization. And so then you accept that...if you accept that to be true, which I do. The next question then has to be why, like, why is the story being told this way? What purpose does it serve the teller or the listener? Because after all, memory, like memory is story, memory is a fiction in the oldest order. That's how we understand our past our present, and we prepare for the future. And so when you're talking about family stories, or like when you're talking about in a family, in a broader sense, wondering about a nation's stories, because a nation is basically a dysfunctional family, you know, it's not just about the individual, we all have a deeply vested interest, I think in in these matters in asking those questions and asking, you know, what kind of truth is this? You know, is it reality or is it something else, you know, how do those two things line up or not as the case may be? And what does it tell us?
Lucy Dearlove 19:49
I think maybe my favourite example of that in the book is when you talk about learning to make gnocchi with your sister, and then you're nonna like later can pletely denies the story that she told you about how she learnt it. And yeah, completely different story about that she'd learned it in a restaurant she hadn't learnt it from from her mother was it at all? Yeah,
Thea Lenarduzzi 20:10
exactly. She said she didn't learn it from her mother. Because I mean, the relationship between Nonna and her mother Novella was difficult to put it mildly. And yeah, we, we know, what we think we know is that she learned it from her Nonna Novella. And again, it would have been in a not in a reading a recipe sort of way it would have been observing and observing. And then when we when we asked her about it when we just mentioned it in passing, like, oh, because of course you learned to do it this way because of your mom, she, as you said, completely blocked it. She was like absolutely not No, I learned it, I learned it in a restaurant that I worked in when I first moved back to Italy in the 70s. And it was actually because my Nonna uses her index finger to put the grooves in the gnocchi the little kind of pools where, where the sauce will, will go in and sit once you've cooked them, so they each one has the imprint of her index finger in it, which I think is just lovely. But I said, well, that's kind of you know, sometimes it can get a bit messy because you can catch it with your nail. And then you can tear the pasta, which you don't want to do if you just press a bit too hard. So how come you don't use your knuckle like, like your mum did? And her face, you know, sort of set against me, you know, she was like, Oh, my, you know, my Nan, my, my, my mum didn't do that. She didn't do that. She didn't teach me and it was just a weird moment. I was like, okay, that's how you want to tell this story today. So I'll respect that. But I've made a little note in my notebook.
Lucy Dearlove 21:35
Yeah, yeah. And that is really hard to navigate with someone that you love. And you know very well and and because also like, yeah, like you're saying, like, it doesn't...just because it's not the truth that you heard earlier, doesn't mean it's not real.
Thea Lenarduzzi 21:48
Yeah, exactly. Well, doesn't mean that it's not full of truth and the truth of that of that particular instance is that really conveys the truth of the difficulty of the relationship between Dirce and her mother Novella.
Lucy Dearlove 21:58
Yeah, yeah, totally. I think something else that I really wanted to ask you about was what you think about the kind of...and you write about this a little bit in the book...the idea of the the Nonna as like this, you talk about it as a byword for timeless purity, which I thought encapsulated so much about like, even in this country where I feel like the approach to Italian food is sometimes like, basic at best. There is this kind of sense of like, you know, stuff like Pasta Grannies and things like that. Like there's this real like, Okay, this is where we learn like real true cooking from... How do you feel about that perception of a Nonna?
Thea Lenarduzzi 22:35
Well, I mean, that so much of that is about almost like the marketization of women, of Nonne. You know, if you buy if you pick up a packet of biscuits, and it says, this is Nonna'ss recipe, you're like, Ah, we're in safe hands, great. You know, there's nothing tainted here. It's all pure and wholesome. That's, that's marketing. But it's all kind of preying on this, this archetype. You know, it's a character of a Nonna. You can almost see her almost as like a, like a Dolmii puppet, you know, Dolmio, which is, I think, made in Holland. But no, so she's like this benevolent old woman who exists to feed the family, to selflessly provide and then presumably, sit there silently dishing it out, while the men talk about important things, you know, in my experience, an aspect of that is true, yes, it takes hours for Nonna to make her delicious food, you know, for one meal, which will often not be commented on by anyone, because it's always... it's just always there. We take it for granted to a great degree, and also her husband, my Nonno, my granddad, he did make very clear his discontent if lunch was not on the table at noon on the dot. But I suppose what I wanted to do was to pick that archetype apart, you know, to, to also give her back the power that she has in that, you know, when she makes her tiramisu or her gnocchi, it's, it's a triumph. She isn't passive. She's alive, you know, she's choosing to impress us. She's reminding us, she's choosing to remind us of her indispensability. And that's also why she doesn't ever give us the full recipe, you know, she always leaves something out, so no one can replace her. And you know, the cooking, it's all part of her scene setting and the table is her space, even if she's silent, which generally she isn't. She's totally in charge. You know, she's the director of the film of our family. And these days, she tends to leave quite soon after we've all eaten, sometimes before we finish because she gets tired. She hardly eats any more herself, you know, she's nearly 97, she's gonna be 97 In a few weeks time and, and when when she gets up to go, the whole thing sags. The centre drops out, we all feel weird, but I think it's that thing of elderly women, women generally, food, migrants, weeds. These are all things that have generally been overlooked or not considered worthy of scrutiny. You know, how many books are there about great men who did great things and how many are there about a grandmother who no one's ever heard of...is that because there's nothing of interest in that woman's life, you know about her experiences and her thoughts and her feelings? I don't, I mean I don't think so. I don't think...I don't think anyone could argue that really. So, yeah, I just I guess I wanted to give her back her dimensions. And part of that was about considering all of her stories, considering her food in the round, you know, not just to talk about how, how delicious these dishes are, which they definitely are, but to think about why she cooks, the things she does, why she cooks them how she does, what they tell us about her, and the life that she's lived and the people and the places that she's known, why they matter, why all of her stories matter, what they link to, why do we need to keep telling them? Why do we need to carry them with us?
Lucy Dearlove 25:47
I feel like I've really noticed more recently, being interested in kind of like domesticity and like the space of the kitchen, within people's homes over history, how little has actually been written about that over time, and just that...you're so right like that overlooking of women's space, migrants' space like that kind of Yeah, it's yeah, it's so true. And it's almost like the...people talk about everyday life as like, like...mundane is often a word that comes up. But like, there's actually...even the sort of things that happen in the book, like people going to work, people moving house, like people...there's so much significance in all of it.
Thea Lenarduzzi 26:24
Yeah, there's so much living in the living, that we don't, that we don't that we don't consider. And I think when I think about my nonna's kitchen in Italy, I think it's quite interesting thinking about domestic spaces because she has her little tiny, tiny little galley kitchen, which has not changed at all since she had... since they built that house in the 19, late 1960s and finished in 1971. It's exactly the same...the oranges, the browns, the sunflowers, but she's got that little galley kitchen and then there's a kind of a half wall and a big faux satin orange curtain covered in really busy flowers. And then you're into the living room where there's a sofa, a TV, the cupboard with so much so much chaos is barely contained. And then you've got a stove with four or five rings on it a wood burning stove that she's feeding all day you work through the summer, yeah. All through the day, all through the seasons, whether it's summer or anything, it's always on. And I think that's what she's done. Actually. She's She broke up that space. She's not confined in the kitchen while everyone else is in the living space. She's in and out, the curtain is never ever closed. It's always half open at least Yeah, she's collapsed that boundary in the same way as she collapsed the boundary between Italy and England. She moves freely. And you know, we may sit still but she is always backwards and forwards, spooning something out here, stirring something over there, clattering around. You can't confine her. She won't be, she won't be hidden away in a domestic space. Thank you very much. She's, she's in front of the curtain. She's on stage all the time, where she belongs, quite frankly. And she knows that.
Lucy Dearlove 28:08
So just one final thing to end and if you know, fair enough, if you want to not give it away, but I was wondering if you would share how you would prepare and cook dandelions.
Thea Lenarduzzi 28:19
I mean, it's it's very boring. It's very, very simple. But I think that's that's the key to some of the best food....you just absolutely gather them wherever you gather them depending on where you gather and gather them wash them particularly well. And you boil them or steam them you could steam them but yeah, boil them or steam them for 15,20 minutes in salty water, drain them but not too much. You don't want them to be dry. You want to keep a lot of that moisture. Then put them back into the pan, so keep the pan warm with a little oil, little olive oil, which my nonna always likes to remind me when she was in England used to have to buy it in the pharmacy. And it was probably horrible stuff. But serve it with Yeah, with that oil warm and then squeeze a bit of lemon on the end of salt. I guess you could add a knob of butter if you were my English Nana, not that she would have eaten dandelions. But there you go. That's really that's really it. You can also actually can also parboil the roots, because you know, when you pull up a dandelion, if you pull the whole thing out, you pull it sometimes it's half a metre long, the white roots that comes up and it's really gnarled so you can parboil the roots, chop them up and preserve them in vinegar. And they're they're really rich source of of all sorts of goodnesses
Lucy Dearlove 29:34
what and what's the texture of them?
Thea Lenarduzzi 29:36
Depending on how much you boil them and you don't want to boil them too much they've got a nice bite to them. Yeah, they've got a little bit of a crunch a bit like You know Giardinera, which is yeah pickled carrots and celery and bits of cauliflower that similar sort of a bit al dente you want them to be and then yeah, preserve them in vinegar and and then you just have them you know, as a side with cheese, or I mean anything, anything goes with cheese, but Yeah, that's it just have them have them in a jar on your table when you're having anything really. You could start the day with then that'd be a bit weird, but
Lucy Dearlove 30:12
I'm not sure I have the stomach for pickles. First thing. We'll probably do I know maybe I need to up my game. Well, I'm definitely going to cook these dandelions. Maybe I'm maybe not going to collect them like on the side of the A2.
Thea Lenarduzzi 30:24
No, no, maybe don't do that
Lucy Dearlove 30:26
Maybe they'd be like in a nice park somewhere.
Thea Lenarduzzi 30:28
Yeah, exactly. Send me a picture I'd like to I'd love to see them
Lucy Dearlove 30:38
Thanks so much to Thea Lenarduzzi For this really generous interview that I actually found really moving both to record and to listen back to. There's so much living in the living. It's true. Let's remember it. Dandelions is out now published by Fitzcarraldo and available in all good bookshops. I really urge you to get a copy and read it. It's just a beautiful book. It's incredibly moving. And it made me think about kind of the stories that we tell within families in a completely different way. But it's also just really funny and lively. And Thea is a fantastic writer. I love it so much. Get a copy. You can support Lecker on Patreon for three pounds a month and get access to a bonus episode every month. As I mentioned, the previous episode, this month's is going to include some extra bits from each episode released this month, specifically around recipes and their role within personal writing. There's going to be kind of a whole other separate episode around that. And it's going to be really good. If I do say so myself. Subscribe if you'd like to hear it. Lecker is entirely listener funded. So patrons subscriptions are just really important in me being able to continue to make the podcast music is by bluedot sessions. Thanks to Ben McDonald, who is Lecker's Resident illustrator. You can see his work on the Lecker Instagram and Twitter at like a podcast. There is one more episodes come this month around this theme that I've been kind of tracing through different books and conversations about how writers approach telling personal stories through food. Make sure you're subscribed on your podcast platform of choice and you can listen as soon as they're released. Thanks for listening. I will be back in your feed very soon.