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56 lines
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56 lines
5.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: About Amelia
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sort: 110
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section-id: site
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keywords: Amelia Fontaine, about, Lyon, Turin, cooking, Italian grandmother, French chef
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description: Amelia Fontaine's story — growing up between Lyon and Turin, learning to cook from her grandmother and father, and why she started writing about food.
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language: en
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---
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# About Amelia
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I grew up between two kitchens.
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My mother's family is Italian, from Turin — the kind of Turin that is proud of its *gianduiotto* and its *bagna càuda* and the way Sunday lunch extends, inevitably, into Sunday afternoon. My grandmother Lucia kept a kitchen that operated more or less continuously: something was always soaking, something was always reducing, something was cooling on a rack. She baked her own bread until she was 82. She made her own pasta until she was 85. I do not know a person who cooked with more authority and less fuss.
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My father is French. He trained as a chef in Lyon — the city that produced Paul Bocuse, Fernand Point, and the *mères lyonnaises*, the women who defined what French bourgeois cooking could be. He worked in professional kitchens for twelve years before deciding that he wanted a different life. He left the restaurant world, married my mother, and for as long as I can remember he cooked dinner every night as if he were still making something worth caring about.
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Between the two of them, I received an education in food that took me years to understand the value of.
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## Growing Up in Two Cuisines
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In Italy, we cooked by season and by tradition. Lucia had dishes she made in autumn and dishes she made in spring, and the idea of making a pumpkin gnocchi in June would have struck her as slightly eccentric. Food was not meant to transcend its season; it was meant to celebrate it. Tomatoes in August were a different ingredient from tomatoes in January, and she treated them accordingly.
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In France — or at least in my father's kitchen — technique was everything. Not in a cold, academic way; he was a home cook by the time I knew him, and the restaurant rigidity had softened. But there was always a *why*. Why do you sweat the onion before adding the liquid? Why do you deglaze the pan? Why do you not stir the risotto too fast? The questions were as much a part of cooking as the stirring and the chopping.
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I spent my teenage summers in Lucia's kitchen and my school years in Lyon. I studied literature at the Université Lumière Lyon 2, which is where I discovered that I was more interested in food than in anything I was actually studying. I would cook for friends, obsessively, and I would stay up too late reading cookbooks and then wake up early to go to the market on the Quai Saint-Antoine.
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## Cooking School and After
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After my degree, I enrolled in a professional cooking programme in Paris. I did not want to be a chef — I had seen what the restaurant kitchen life took out of my father, and I knew I did not want it. But I wanted to understand technique at a level that home cooking had not given me. The programme was eight months of fundamentals: stocks, sauces, pastry, butchery, the French brigade system. I emerged with knife skills I had not had before, a better understanding of heat control, and a confirmed sense that my real interest was in home cooking rather than restaurant cooking.
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After Paris, I spent time in Italy again — first with Lucia, then working in a trattoria in Bologna for a season, and then travelling through the south, which taught me that Italian food is a category containing enormous variety. The food of Puglia is not the food of Piedmont is not the food of Sicily. Each region has its own logic, its own pantry, its own idea of what a meal should be.
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## Why I Started Writing
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I began writing about food because I kept noticing that the recipes I was reading online were, very often, missing the interesting part. They gave you the ingredients and the steps, and if you were lucky they gave you some headnotes, but they rarely told you *why*. Why this method and not another? What should it look like at this stage? What does it mean when the sauce breaks, and how do you fix it?
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I wanted to write the recipes I wished I had been given as a young cook — recipes that explained the reasoning, that described what you were looking for rather than just listing steps, that treated the reader as someone capable of understanding and not just following.
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## What I Cook
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My food is not particularly exotic. I cook Italian and French food, the food I grew up with, and other cuisines I have learned from books and travel and cooking with friends. I have a strong interest in the food of North Africa and the Levant, which shows up in some of my braised dishes. I bake bread twice a week. I keep a sourdough starter that is older than this blog.
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I cook seasonally, not because I am precious about it but because seasonal produce tastes better and costs less. I use whole animals and whole fish when I can. I make stock on Sundays.
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## About the Blog
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I started writing here in 2024, posting once or twice a week. The posts fall into three rough categories: full recipes with technique explanations, shorter technique-focused pieces, and occasional essays about food and cooking. I test every recipe at least twice before I publish it.
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I do not do sponsored content or paid partnerships. If I mention a product or a producer, it is because I use it and think it is worth telling you about.
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The name comes from Lucia's kitchen in Turin. She had a kitchen table with a marble top, and everything happened at that table — pasta making, pastry, homework, wine in the evening. It was the centre of the house. I wanted to name the blog after that.
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Come cook with me.
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