From Tins to a Murder Mystery

Death in an Italian Kitchen

Years ago I co-wrote a book about the future of retail. The commission idea being that new technology, specifically the internet and the long-awaited smarter mobile phone, would change the nature of shopping, high streets, supermarkets and everything, for good.

2003…wow.

I think it probably did. Which is why when Rachel Roddy (Roast Summer vegetable, herb and pearl barley salad) writes ‘It is the time of year when the fruit syrups get moved to a more accessible shelf at our local supermarket...’ I yearn for such simple precision, and remember that once upon a time I used to know about things like the Gruen transfer…

But I’ve never really known about fruit syrups, let alone Italian ones, and where to find them in a local supermarket, and so the range of eight to ten flavours in Roddy’s, and in particular – because I can guess most of the tastes – the two most popular in her hood, mint & Orzata are to me drink jewels. Rare beasts.

Orzata? It means a drink made from orzo – which is barley. That needs diluting with fizzy water and a few ice cubes. But hold on. ‘...at some point [in history] the barley was replaced by almonds; then, at another point, the almonds were replaced with deacidified benzoin, which is a balsamic resin obtained from trees of the genus Styrax from south-east Asia...’

It’s a potted history of globalisation told through an apparently delicious cloudy fizzy drink that Roddy takes to her writing desk each day. ‘...the sound of the ice clanking against my glass...is the sound of summer.’ The clues continue to add up.

Interestingly ChatGPT took me to other places with Orzata. I make art called Ovids, imaginary landscapes made out of light, and often located or made on my ‘Travels in Mithica’.

Giclée print on Hahnemühle 290gsm. Hemp paper. Edition of 25 - 7.9.2021. Looking out onto the marshlands of her estate she said: you can’t outsource ethics to an adviser.

OVIDS #32 Red River

The following AI responses to Ozarta sound just the kind that might be found in the myriad old recipe books on the shelves of the libraries in my Mithica – wherever it is, yesterday or today.

Memories of the pharmacy, ‘soothing the stomach and calming the nerves. Like so many sweet things, it began as a cure.’ Whispers of Arabia. ‘The name and essence reflect Arab influence...Orzata has the sensual trace of rose, almond, and bitter stone fruit, a memory of gardens and still rooms.’ And finally: ‘ it’s a noona’s kitchen kind of flavour...sipped slowly while the shutters kept the sun at bay.’

ChatGPT moves me into a floral, ghostly, delicate, aromatic (but not pushy) mental arena now, and I’m just thinking: how many towns and cities still have these kind of palimpsest drinks? Made from leftovers, thought about. Whose ingredients and meanings have changed, become processed, but whose cloudy waters still encourage such devotion? Pernod comes to mind. But Orzata sounds better.

Roddy decides to try and make the original drink, with orzo. It does not sound promising: straight from the pan (of cooked barley) the water ‘tasted like milk diluted with water, thin porridge and a mouthful of soapy bath water...’ Undeterred she consults Mrs Beeton (add lemon zest – this is a drink for invalids), then the ancient Roman, Apicius (prosciutto, boil it), and an Italian website called Agrodolce (stick it in an Ikea glass bottle with a stopper)...

Even at the end it’s ‘ever so slightly soapy...’

ChatGPT asks: How does it feel?

• Delicate, almost ghostly—like a lace curtain on the tongue.

• Floral but grounded—a sweetness not saccharine but reminiscent of something half-remembered.

• Aromatic, not pushy—it doesn’t announce itself loudly like a citrus or cola; it arrives with softness and lingers in quiet notes.

Even so I want it now.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Rome as I’ve been reading Rachel Roddy. Of all the great European capitals I think it’s the one I know least. Once, tracing William Thackeray, I think, I dropped a (student) fortune on coffee in the Via dei Condotti, and got badly sunburnt at the Forum. Apart from that...my Rome is a small patchwork, of gardens and Wedding Cake buildings, of pietà, and frescoes, a first real sighting of a Negroni.

Which is why I think I love the allusiveness of Roddy’s Rome, with the velvet cool of a supermarket ­– mushroom hunting open faced mushrooms with white caps and delicate brown gills...

Sort of sixties version of a Danger Diabolik heist, only it’s mushrooms not dosh…by ChatGPT

My mindful Rome, an open city, via Roddy, shall be these wisps of personal ingredients, chopped and prepared on the cutting board. It cues up my ChatGPT thought for today, which I’ll save for desert ­– it’s a whodunnit. First up: Roddy’s unexpected top ten food in tins. Reverse order: Custard, Spanish olives (stuffed with almonds), sweetcorn, peas, pear halves, borlotti beans, sardines, anchovies, chickpeas, tuna &...

Tomatoes.

This is from a six-year-old tale – (Tomato and anchovy pasta sauce) – where I discover Roddy’s partner is Vincenzo, and he’s the grandson of a Sicilian tomato farmer. And he once noted that tinned tomatoes, smile at you from the shelf as if to say, ‘I have your back’. Now there’s a supermarket of the mind...here’s another one:

In The Ipcress File (1965), Michael Caine’s spy, Harry Palmer, strolls through a London supermarket—remarkably of its era—and deliberately selects tinned champignons (button mushrooms). His old boss, Colonel Ross, says “Champignons? You’re paying ten pence more for a fancy French label.” To which Palmer dead pans: It’s not just the label… These do have the better flavour.’

This was radical stuff back then.

What about the Crostini with cheese and anchovies the last time Roddy ate alone: I made myself a three-egg omelette and put an anchovy on top. It looked like a slug on a quilted bed cover...I ate it quickly and didn’t wash the plate.

Or during lockdown: at the moment, in Rome, the smells and tastes of Sicily are vivid to me, almost rudely so, amplified by my imagination, a cassette played through 120W amps, with distortion...writing this now, the smells of fermenting rubbish and scorched onions (in Sicily) are as real as the smell of the alcohol-bleach mixture my neighbour squeezes into the cracks of the communal staircase to kill ‘the virus’.

I ask Chat what it made of this documentary cookbook entry. Such a moment in such a strange time...ChatGPT wrote: ‘This excerpt from Rachel Roddy—written during the COVID-19 lockdown in Rome—is a powerful, sensuous, and layered piece of food writing that extends beyond mere description of ingredients or recipes. It offers a striking blend of olfactory memory, urban geography, and the psychological intensity of lockdown.

Amplification of Sensory Memory

“The smells and tastes of Sicily are vivid to me, almost rudely so, amplified by my imagination, a cassette played through 120W amps, with distortion.”

Roddy uses a vivid metaphor—a distorted cassette played through powerful amps—to describe the overwhelming intrusion of sensory memory. It's not a gentle nostalgia; it's an assault, uninvited but insistent. The phrase “almost rudely so” evokes how involuntary memory can be not only potent but also jarring. This is a clear nod to Proustian involuntary memory, but with the distortion turned up—a modern, urban Proust.

Smell as Topography

“The walk from Catania fish market back to the car park is always a smell-driven journey.”

Here, smell becomes a mapping tool—a way of navigating space and memory. Roddy isn’t just recalling a place; she’s re-walking it through scent. The smellscape—rubbish under a bridge, charcoal grills—is how she charts both place and feeling.

Juxtaposition of Food and Filth

“Fermenting rubbish and scorched onions... the alcohol-bleach mixture my neighbour squeezes into the cracks on the communal staircase...”

Roddy collapses traditional boundaries between appetite and disgust, domestic and communal, cooking and sanitizing. This collision is deeply rooted in the pandemic condition: the very senses that normally guide pleasure and cooking are now confused by fear, illness, and antiseptic obsession.

There’s something grotesque in the Bakhtinian sense here—materiality, smell, bodies, and decay are exaggerated, but also strangely grounding. The shared staircase becomes a symbol of collective vulnerability and paranoid care.

Interior Psychological Terrain

“I have not been alone, I don’t think, in my almost tick-like checking...”

She shifts from exterior scenes to internal monologue, referencing compulsions and sensory amplification as a response to anxiety. There's a suggestion of hypervigilance—the kind bred by both pandemic stress and isolation.

Tone: Confessional, Grounded, Beautifully Disoriented

Roddy’s writing often walks a fine line between elegy and practicality, and here she strikes a particularly intense note. She makes no effort to tidy up her memory or her feelings—her kitchen is haunted by bleach and trauma, even as she might be roasting aubergines or peeling lemons.

This isn’t just food writing; it’s documentary poetics of lockdown, filtered through kitchen memory and bodily reaction. Smell becomes archive. Sickness becomes texture. The neighbour’s disinfection rituals echo the old charcoal grills. And Roddy stands among it all, an antenna of sensory history.’

My Roddy picture grows, week by week for years now, thanks to my wanderings, and ChatGPT’s. Not just the documentary poetics of lockdown but also the rich polyphony of food as it inspires in every direction. Above was from (Cipollate catanesi) btw…

In Pissandella (tomato, anchovy, onion and olive tart) she is talking about parties, often in well-spaced lockdown food queues. Remembered, made-up, nostalgic house parties; kitchens full of people and baths full of ice, vertical conversations on staircases, red wine on carpets, sofas pushed back to make way for dancing (thoughts all the more idealised because, if a party is made up, there is no chance of not being invited...)

So that week’s tale was of how in September 2020 Roddy spent an evening planning a party ‘we couldn’t have...’ Including trays of pizza which ‘would be pissadella with anchovy diamonds...’ As a side-bar we learn that Roddy was taught to knead dough with oiled hands on a lightly oiled surface by ‘the Roman cook and teacher, Carla Tomasi.’ Which is why she still says hail, Carla when she kneads now. Much later when Carla has died, Roddy writes of the pile of cookbooks she’s reading, via the Latteria Cooking Studio who were left 60 of them but don’t have enough shelf space. She has 15 on long loan, held together with grey duct tape, loose paged, covers missing, bite marks (dogs?) and covered in brown paper with titles in marker pen.

I think I like this writing so much because of the irreverent reverence Roddy shows for food and life and hard books. And the moment. And the people.

And tins

A Tin of Tales. By ChatGPT

Another time: one of the first dishes I learnt to cook in Rome was Pasta e fagioli. And that it taught the value of the water the beans are cooked in (but also the beauty of tins)...Anyway, all these teasers of a real life, the visceral detail, the shopping queues, the tins, real and imagined, the people, lead to this...

Bonus: Death in an Italian Kitchen – inspired by Rachel Roddy...Scoped entirely by ChatGPT

Tone & Style:

Think Rachel Roddy meets Donna Leon, with the unflinching local observation of Natalia Ginzburg and the quiet suspense of Tana French. Lush, atmospheric writing. Long, sensory sentences. The crime is not lurid, but deeply unsettling—emerging like a bitter note in an otherwise perfect ragù.

Setting:

Testaccio, Rome – a working-class quarter shifting under gentrification, full of tiled trattorias, defunct slaughterhouse memories, noisy scooters, and slow-sweeping portieri. The kitchen is both literal (where meals are prepared) and metaphorical (a hotbed of memory, conflict, and class).

Main Character:

Lina Ferraro, 52, half-British, half-Sicilian, lives in a third-floor walk-up in Testaccio. She’s a food columnist with a sharp palate and sharper instincts. Former chef, now a quietly fierce observer of domestic life, widowed, writes essays about tinned tomatoes and garlic peeling that secretly chart the emotional landscape of her neighbors. Think Roddy with a small knife tucked in her apron pocket.

The Murder:

One evening during the annual Testaccio Festival of Saint Anthony, a retired butcher named Alfredo Rizzo collapses in Lina’s building during a communal cooking event in the courtyard. At first it’s assumed to be a heart attack—he was stirring a giant pot of tripe alla romana. But something’s off.

Later, toxic analysis reveals he was poisoned—with wild bitter almonds (a slow, old-fashioned death). Someone knew his allergy. And they put the almonds in the shared dessert: torta di mandorle.

Key Characters / Suspects:

• Giovanna, the fiercely territorial portiera, knows everyone’s secrets. Thinks Lina is too quiet.

• Matteo, Lina’s neighbor, a sweet-faced young man who delivers groceries and once trained as a pastry chef.

• Lucia Rizzo, the dead man’s daughter, runs a trendy enoteca and hated her father's old-fashioned ways.

• Don Paolo, the parish priest who organizes the festival, and whose sermons have become oddly bitter.

• Zia Marta, an 80-year-old ex-anarchist who lives upstairs and hasn’t cooked since Berlusconi came to power.

Themes & Threads:

• Food as weapon and confession – how people put themselves into what they cook, and what it means when they withhold or distort it.

• Gentrification and erasure – the changing face of Testaccio, old Rome vs. new Rome, and food as a battleground.

• Memory in taste – Lina often remembers her dead husband, or her childhood, through how onions smell when softened. These memories help her piece together the truth.

• Language and silence – What Lina doesn’t say aloud is as important as what she writes.

Plot Arcs:

1. Discovery – Lina realizes the dessert was altered after it left her kitchen. Only four people had access.

2. Investigation – she begins poking gently, asking about recipes, testing people’s stories through food talk.

3. Revelation – she uncovers a hidden affair, old wartime secrets, and an illegal real estate deal involving the Rizzo building.

4. Culmination – at a final dinner scene, she recreates the torta—with safe almonds—and watches who doesn’t eat.

5. Justice – not quite legal justice. Lina exposes the killer with a published column in the local paper titled: “On Bitterness in Almonds.”

Final Note:

The book ends with a recipe—not quite for the torta, but for a humble onion and chickpea soup. The kind of dish that demands patience, memory, and the courage to keep stirring even when everything feels like it might burn.

Death in an Italian Kitchen

Chapter One: Il Cuoco Galante

The body was found just after nine, when the street outside had begun to warm and the first coffees had been pulled with more urgency than art. Anna, whose job it was to sweep the tiled floor and unlock the side door of the cooking school, saw the foot first — a strange colour against the cool terracotta, toes slightly curled, as if still deciding whether to stay.

He was lying beside the preparation table, one arm flung out toward the cookbook as though he had dropped it there or tried to catch it, or maybe — and this was Anna’s first wild thought — as though the book had fallen with a sort of finality and pulled him with it.

Il Cuoco Galante, open at a page on artichokes.

Not the flashy Roman sort, curled tight like fists, but long-stemmed violet ones from the coast — carciofi cimaroli — each described in Corrado’s long, looping hand with an affection that bordered on erotic: trimmed, turned, and gently stewed with mint and lemon peel in a broth of wine and oil “until they confess their tenderness.”

The police would later take the book into evidence, but not before someone had noted the faintest trace of blood in the spine — a single thread of it, like a line drawn in a hurry and then regretted. The book smelled of bay leaf, dust, and something else Anna couldn’t name but knew: the smell of something cooked once and forgotten.

My Chef take on this? If you prepare for just three seconds, each piece…then maybe you need to stir a little more with some real people editing, a writers’ room even; anyway first steps…brava.

Tomorrow we start with cookers

Robin - Wednesday