Eleonora Matarrese - once upon a time, today
Eleonora is known in Italy as la cuoca selvatica, the wild cook. The name holds more mysticism and truth than one imagines.
Amidst dozens of Instagram accounts of foragers and plant experts, I started to follow earlier this year, one stood out: Eleonora’s La Cuoca Selvatica. During our interview, it became apparent that I was once again put in front of a woman whose ways come from the past… Eleonora is devoted to knowledge and sharing what can be shared with those who have ears to hear. She is a scientist connected to the Spirit of the Earth, who guides her going.
Here’s a woman who doesn’t wait for permission to launch her endeavours, for she is her best opportunity. Let this sink in. Even after appearing on the leading Italian cook-shows, even after publishing a book with one of the biggest Italian publishers, even after a big following on Instagram: Eleonora runs things in her own way, and often by herself.
T: I admit I researched a bit about you before hopping on this call, as all I’d seen of you was what you posted on Instagram… And immediately I found out you speak Norwegian and Swedish (but also English, French, Spanish, German)! Whaaat? Why? And what’s the link with plants?
E: Where do I begin? As I anticipated, I got my Bachelor's in languages because I’ve always been good at it. Think of this, my mom was speaking to me in English when I was 2 years old, and part of my family is in the UK anyway… so languages in a way always came very easy to me. Whereas Scandinavia is another story, and I discovered it later, to be honest, the reason why. Nonna Ena - the mom of my father - who taught me to recognise the herbs, and who also taught me to cook, had a father - my great-grandpa - who was a chef working in the North of Germany, on the Northern sea. This pour parler but also to make you understand when I was a little girl, in our tavern downstairs we used to have a white wooden storage bench with a striped red and white pillow - Oh so beautiful! - that I loved so dearly and that nowadays we commonly find at IKEA. Well, I wondered for a long time why we were the only ones to have such a thing. My nonna used to tell me that my dad was born on that bench. The bench was just a symbol, it came from Hamburg when my grandfather came back to Puglia bringing with him lots of things. So I grew up with the tales of the Snow Queen and all that world. Then when I grew up, the world was changing, my nonna didn’t find herself fit in the modern world and every now and then would mutter ‘Ah life’s better in the North.’ Because she was a well-travelled woman and could compare based on her experience - by the way, this in a time when women of the South did not travel a lot. She’s been to the Louvre and the Prado Museum, to name two. I, as a South Italian young woman, had the myth of North Italy - where I later moved to the Lombardia region, feeling quite a culture shock because it wasn’t at all how I had imagined it.
It’s in Scandinavia that I found what my nonna meant: a more liveable life, a reliability, a respect for nature and the other. Moreover, I love the German-ic world so after a year of agrarian studies at Uni I switched to languages. It was also a period of my life, the time when you get your high school diploma and don’t know what your path is, that even though I was studying languages I couldn’t envision an exciting future for myself - am I going to translate for the rest of my life? That’s when a girl in my course pointed me to a lesson being taught at that moment, saying I might enjoy it. I opened the door and three people were attending… which meant that it was either impossibly hard or I made a mistake. I sat at one of the tables and my life changed ever since. It was a lecture on Germanic philology, the origin of words and Germanic dialects, and I said to myself I must learn Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, all! Anyway, they’re all mutually intelligible, you learn one and the others will come naturally.
T: How did you get back to plants?
E: In reality, I never moved away from plants. They were always there. I mean… I think it was meant to be, I believe very much in destiny… Besides, I’ve always eaten foraged food, and my family always grew a garden - to say, I ate my very first industrial snack at uni and felt super sick, not that we were poor but the women in my family cooked everything we ate. During my course in Germanic philology, the main theme of the exam was a book titled Ichot a Burde translated as ‘I Know a Maiden’ - it’s a book written in Middle English, precisely a poem written for this young lady… which is a lapidary, and in itself a surreal thing, imagine a writing a poem for a maiden in a manuscript about precious stones in the Middle Ages and that poem gets to arrive to us… And this poem also tells us about her garden and the plants she sees. I had a lightbulb moment: I began learning the names of the plants in Middle English, discovering the existence of manuscripts kept at the British Museum written in the first Anglo-Saxon dialects and are plant recipes - never translated into Italian, Oh well I guess I must. And so I did, for pleasure, translate several manuscripts.
I want to be honest though, it came to a point where I had to pay the bills, so I got a job in fashion. I worked for several companies and during one fashion week I had a pivotal moment, while at the hairdresser getting myself presentable I spotted a magazine with an article about the so-called Nordic Cuisine manifesto. The article introduced the New Nordic Food Manifesto - I was ecstatic until I read something in the likes of ‘because in Denmark we forage wild herbs’ and my enthusiasm deflated as my rational mind raised questions such as ‘but how does Denmark’s climate allow you to do that all year round?’ I was perplexed. After all, we are supposed to do something this beautiful, as in Italy, because we can collect all year round and have a lot to say on an anthropological level. Well… a week later, I fired myself. And opened a restaurant.
What a folly!! I had no entrepreneurial blueprint as nobody in my family had ever had a business of their own, except my grandpa-chef. I opened this restaurant not knowing a thing about how to run a restaurant, when I saw the professional machines I thought to myself I’d never make it. But it worked out well. It was 15 years ago!
T: Where’s the restaurant?
E: It’s not your typical restaurant. It’s called Nomadic Cuisine, it’s very tailor-made. The client calls me and will never say ‘I want to book a table’ because I ask him first ‘What’s your favourite season?’ … from the moment I know what her/his favourite season is, say the choice falls in Autumn I begin to think of an 18-course tasting menu that will comprise mushrooms and that which grows below the surface to be experienced in a mountain chalet because we must be surrounded by the foliage. If they prefer Spring, the menu will most definitely be based on flowers and sprout shoots, and we’ll start sitting on the grass picking our antipasto. My restaurant is an experience, not a canonical restaurant.
T: This should have at least one Michelin star!! I don’t see why not, you are both the chef and the host with nature as a partner.
E: It’s tough work, and still not very appreciated. We still have a long way to go, I’d like people to learn to eat.
T: Do you think it’s a matter of food education or it’s about educating people about the wild?
E: No, not about the wild. I had recently a meeting with Slow Food Education, I’m one of the Slow Food Alliance chefs, and we had a big talk regarding education in schools. What emerged is that firstly you need to educate the teachers, then you educate the students - kids in this case - but what’s also needed is educating the families. Regardless of the wild, it’s a matter of making them understand why junk food is bad, that it’s not necessary to eat meat every day - not that one must become vegan but it’s a matter of ethics and care for our bodies and the planet. To love even ourselves more, and love our habitat much more cuz we got just one.
At the beginning of my restaurant, Pikniq, it was November, and the wife of a doctor came to me for an aubergine parmigiana - nothing wrong with that, only come back in Summer when the aubergines will be ripe. She didn’t understand, for she saw them available at the supermarket all winter! This is one type of education to be done: seasonality. Another thing to educate people about is the environment, there’s a plant we walk on every day, and when I show it to people during my courses they all recognise it as it’s everywhere… so this plant tastes of porcini mushrooms, which makes it an excellent substitute for those people with mushroom allergy, and it replaces eggs because it excretes mucilage. Not to mention its medicinal properties: out of all the plants it’s the one that contains the most vitamin K. It was the beginning of March, I collected fresh inflorescences which tasted strongly of porcini, I prepared a dish and put those on top… I made portions and gave them as a takeaway. A woman comes back after 15 minutes, irritated she asks me what in the world I give her, she opens the lid and sees worms. It wasn’t worms, of course, it was the inflorescences of the piantaggine lanceolata, Plantago lanceolata, ribwort plantain.
T: Your work went mainstream. How do you feel about that?
E: Good because we need to talk about it. Let’s say the approach changed because, in the past years, foraging became a trend so as you put it in Italian ne parlano cani e porci, every Tom, Dick and Harry talk about it. Social Media complicates things further - it’s true that during the pandemic I launched some webinars, it was because I was asked to and I made sure to include in these webinars only those species that are very easy to recognise and that don’t pose potential health risks. I imposed such ethics and reliability on myself so that it would be accessible to people who wanted to learn. On the other hand, all those people who approach this topic and self-proclaim themselves experts because they can recognise some species, or just read a book, they do it in a very superficial way. It’s unsafe and unprofessional to quickly say ‘Of course you can eat that herb’, even worse when they identify a herb based on a picture someone sends them - I know professors of botany who, even after their long experience in the field, wouldn’t dare to identify a plant from a photo because they feel the responsibility of other people’s health.
I detached from all that because that’s a mainstream I don’t like. I focused my attention on tangible documentation: if you want to learn to identify plants, you come with me to the fields because you need to use all 5 senses. On the other hand, there’s ethnobotany, which is the study of millennia of knowledge that cannot be reduced to a simple “but of course it is” on socials. But this is me, I love to study and discover.
I get picked on by friends << You lived 10 lives >> and it’s true in a way, I’ve done so many different things, yet this one is the only one I’ve carried on without getting bored. We know only 2% of the plants, there’s a 98% all to discover.
T: I get it. My favourite subject in uni was ethnobotany, but even though I was later admitted to the Master in Ethnobotany in Canterbury… I didn’t follow through because it wasn’t my destiny. I was interested in recording the knowledge, before it got lost forever, and the lives of people living in communion with nature - in total reliance on nature! - minus the scientific part. I find it too boring to read scientific reports, and I’ve always wondered why all these ethnobotanists don’t write books making ethnobotany accessible. Which, you know, is exactly what Kapka Kassabova did - although is is no ethnobotanist - with her book Elixir, a marvellous book that’s an ethnobotanical “treaty” written poetically.
E: You know the beautiful thing she did? I’m reading it now, thanks for the recommendation. I don’t know how she did it but she made it Pop. You read it and think ‘Wait a minute, she’s giving me information of immense value, you feel the weight of history and yet she puts them on paper so effortlessly that it feels like you’ve known them forever.’ That’s beautiful.
T: Her book isn’t even in the nature writing section, it’s in the travel section of bookshops. I’d love to see more of these kinds of books.
E: I agree, though I do read the boring scientific reports on academia and research gate to understand the why of certain things I may know about plants.
T: Do you think plants are magical?
E: Certainly. Of course. Think of this, do you know the sage family? You might know Lamium also called Dead Nettle, or take snapdragon’s flower with its opening like a lion’s mouth (hence the name bocca di leone in Italian). The lower part of the flower is a landing strip, with two velvety side strips for the bumble bee to glide on. Isn’t this magic? Or take wild orchids, which tend to look like the insects that will pollinate them. That’s magic because we still haven’t understood it. It’s a world we have yet to fully understand.
T: Based on the fact that there’s a lot to learn about the plant world, what’s your opinion on Silicon Valley wanting to substitute nature with their engineered crops?
E: I’ll be generic, making a parallelism. Let’s talk about AI, I’ve always been in favour of new technologies… I don’t say no. But when it comes to clonation, between the modalities of plant diffusion there’s propagation through seed collection, root cutting, grafting, etc. Then there’s the meristematic way, you take the cells from the plant, put them in vitro and go on from there in the lab… and here I already get somehow uncomfortable. When it comes to AI, some things made my life easier - instead of spending time and money travelling from library to library across the world, now I can get most of the information I need whilst sitting comfortably at home. But the imposition, the oligarchy, the decision of the few on the ways of living of all… No. It’s true nature will find a way, but the man needs to be careful because he may do something he’ll regret in the future where there’s no way back.
Do we want to be polemic? Let’s be polemic! The EU relicensed glyphosate for another 10 years! This drives me mad and makes me also feel powerless because it’s just me, a single drop in the ocean. I don’t get it. All for money. It’s all there. It’s also the reason why people keep buying junk food at the supermarket. At the same time, when people learn phytoalimurgia, they collect plants as if they were shopping at the supermarket: taking way more than they should and need. As per usual habit, or worse because it’s all free in nature.
T: Yes nature is abundant, but I feel we relate to it - as to everything else - from a point of view of scarcity: if I don’t take all now, there won’t be any for later.
E: Some scientists say it’s wired in our DNA after millennia lived as foragers, and we might have traces of atavic fear of dying from hunger. I get it, it’s an instinct. However, we have consciousness and intelligence at our disposal to understand that it doesn’t make sense, we’re in 2024 today! I repeat you need to preserve the environment, you must not leave a trace of your passing, the plant and its specific part must be collected at the right time, and most importantly you must leave enough for the next one coming and especially for the animals - keeping in mind that if a plant is there it’s because it interacts with its environment if you uproot it you create a disequilibrium. I think the problem is that consumerism, and also perhaps globalisation, instilled this sort of bulimia into the minds of people.
T: And so, what’s your why?
E: I’ve got more than one. At the immediate moment, what came to my mind was that I had severe health issues. I was told “You probably won’t wake up”, so when I woke up I said, “Holy Cow I’m alive!” I felt in my bones the set phrase you only get one life, thus put at service what I know. That was one motive. The other motive, my strong why, is we have one environment, one planet. This is the only world we got and we oath to take care of it. What will we leave to our children? That’s the question I live by. Another thing that drives me is that… I learned from my nonna, who learned it from her father, who we don’t know who he learned it from but in reverse we are the result of all our ancestors therefore I feel the need to preserve that. Last year I did a speech for Slow Food, there were 5 of us on the theme of wild herbs: a forager from Piedmont, one from Switzerland, a woman from the Amazon, and a university professor who lives in the rural area of Tajikistan. On that occasion, somebody told me I had to stop talking so much about the past and that my cuisine shouldn’t be so much about retrieval and instead focus on innovation. Right. Correct. True. Also because lactofermentation isn’t done the same way it was once done in Babylon, we do it with modern tools. Nonetheless it is something that goes back to Babylon. It’s that link, I feel I’m that ring.
T: My following questions are out of curiosity, what calendar do you follow? And, do you believe in Nature Spirits? (I want to admit here that for some reason I felt embarrassed to ask her these questions, which I’ve asked other guests before, relating to fairies and the forgotten pagan religion of Italy. So I took a large turn and hoped she’d pick on it, by asking her what she celebrates, what’s the celebratory calendar that she follows: if she mentioned the Solstice instead of Christmas I would’ve had my private answer. … To my delight, I got much more!)
E: There is no such thing as a calendar, I mean the calendar is an invention of man to trace time. Whereas the base of my life, my actions, the base of everything for me is observation. Therefore we can speak of an inner calendar, that’s not even inner - it’s a symbiosis. Let me give you a few examples,
the day before, perched on the bough
a robin
announces the following midnight’s freeze,
I know,
the day after I can forage the drupes.
That’s my calendar. It comes from observation. This way of living can be found in other cultures, in England there’s a plant of the Brassicaceae family whose name in English is the Cuckoo flower - why? Because it is said that when this plant flowers, the cuckoo sings its first song emerging from hibernation. This is my religion. At the same time, the calendar even in Italy tells you the longest night of the year is on Saint Lucy’s night. Certainly, that’s the period of the twelve nights and the Solstice, OK … but in reality, with climate changes, how do you keep relying on a calendar set by others? The shortest night of the year is anticipated, it’s around the 3-4 of December.
T: What are the risks of following a calendar so against nature? And so out of the cycle?
E: It’s not me saying it, there’s much scientific research on this, allergies, speech problems, disconnection, uprootedness. We have these new disciplines nowadays - I smile, it’s all marketing - forest bathing, or grounding… COOL! Sure thank goodness, but on the other hand, they invented the wheel! If we live in the city, and work 8 hours a day sitting at a desk, we’re far removed from hugging trees, and unable to walk barefoot on the sand… we’ll need to take benzodiazepines. A different story is if a person lives in his natural habitat, thus listens to the seasons, and notices the appearance of the gems on the trees - no one tells the tree it needs to send up the lymph and produce gems, it does and the same should we. We shall return to feeling part of the flow of life.
Since you mentioned the calendar, another thing comes to my mind: from a certain time onwards, man decides to classify everything. I’m a little polemic due to the monotheist religions, the “war” good versus evil, light and dark, this thing of labelling things when in reality things already had a name. Before, it was all cyclical, it was a continuous flow. Think of the Norns, the Moirai, the Parcae - one holds the thread, one weaves the thread, one breaks the thread… on a spinning wheel. The first representations of the medieval calendars were round: the rotae.
T: Alright, for the grand finale let’s talk about the fae. Do you believe in the little people? Here in the UK, it’s quite normalised…
E: I’m a very rational person, I like science and chemistry. However, I’ve always believed in the existence of subtle energies - some call them faeries. Thought if you talk to me about new age stuff, no. Those we call gnomes, for the Ancient Germans were the four cardinal points, if today the world calls them North, South, West, and East it’s thanks to Norðri, Suðri, Austri and Vestri. They were the four dwarfs who held the vault of heaven. I believe in these superhuman entities. There’s a manuscript in Old English called The Menologium, basically an initial calendar, there’s a handwritten part of the manuscript that the English call the thunder-book and it’s a record of thunders with a description of sound and size because they felt the power of nature. Based on the description of the thunder they interpreted the Divine. It may be strange to say but inside, that’s how I feel. When I went to Iceland the first time with a friend - if I told this to someone working in Milan’s city centre they’d think I’m nuts and would never believe me… And you tell me that in the UK it’s normalised this belief, well in Iceland even more. In Iceland, when they build the roads… at some point they make it curve to go around a rock where, they say, live the Huldufólk or the hidden people. So, I was in Iceland with my friend who deeply believes in these things because it’s in their culture, that day it was incredibly hot and, between myself and I, I said “Please Thor, bring down a storm.” I thought it intentionally and at the same time detached, sceptical somewhat - sceptical he will listen to my plea for Thor would probably have more important things to do. Well, in no time… the world of water came crashing down. As the thunder and lighting were getting stronger, I told my friend “Sigrún, I asked Thor for a storm.” She still remembers to this day, “You communicate with them, how do you do that?” I know it sounds surreal, but that’s the way it is. I perceive these things. There are places in the world where I go and feel things. But I remind you we are in this country, Italia, with many churches and bells, so that topic gets complicated.
LINKS
A few links I’d like to share:
About her magazine i skogen! - the first mag in Italy wholly dedicated to the foraging world
Pikniq, her restaurant
An interview in English for the podcast The Star Ingredient
Eleonora’s website
