Forty Recipes for the Quarantine

There is one book just released by Bocconi professors that does not contain mathematical formulas, at least not in the normal sense. It is the result of research, but a kind of research that, more than innovation, leverages knowledge handed down from generation to generation. Above all, it is a book whose knowledge aims to help with a concrete gesture. We are talking about the book by the Bocconi Management Department published by Egea on December 10: La nostra quarantena. Le ricette del Dipartimento di management e tecnologia della Bocconi in epoca di lockdown Our Quarantine (Our Quarantine. Recipes of the Bocconi Department of Management and Technology in an era of lockdowns). An operation born almost fortuitously during the online aperitif organized the day after the beginning of the first lockdown, in March 2020. A glass to meet again in spite of social distancing, on a Saturday evening, "and the sudden awareness that many of us were connecting from our kitchens, perhaps while we were preparing dinner using a family recipe", says Severino Salvemini, curator of the work together with Alfonso Gambardella and Paola Cillo.

From there and from the awareness that sociability, and not only of Italians, revolves above all around the kitchen table, we had the idea of ​gathering this collective heritage of family cuisine knowledge in the form of 'Department' recipes and making a book out of it. With the entry into the Executive Committee of Gambardella, current head of the Department, and Cillo, the book took shape. "We launched the proposal to the whole Department and there was immediately great enthusiasm. In a short time we collected 40 recipes from all over Italy and also from abroad ", explains Gambardella. From the potato Gattò to the Apulian focaccia, from the Kumquat cake to the Scottish porridge, the forty recipes of the quarantine are not simply a culinary journey into the private lives of Bocconi professors, since the idea is that the book leads to a concrete gesture of altruism: "The proceeds", in fact, "will go to finance scholarships for students, possibly coming from families whose economic livelihoods have been affected by the Covid emergency," adds Paola Cillo.

The volume opens with the preface by a true professional chef, Cristina Bowerman, starred chef of the Glass Hostaria in Rome and president of the Ambassadors of Taste Association: "The stature of people is measured by the ability to act in different fields with the same ease with which I prepare spaghetti with tomato sauce, writes Bowerman. "They are those who are not afraid to face the new and the unknown. Looking at the pictures, reading the recipes, I see people of great stature who have ventured into the unknown with that touch of irony which is characteristic only of the great. A cookbook written by non-cooks makes the whole thing attractive and concrete."