You can keep Jamie or Nigella; Keith Floyd will always be my
TV food hero. He’s downright bonkers and always just on the wrong side of tipsy; I watched an episode once where he
was so drunk after cooking for a Rugby team that he slipped and dropped their
entire meal on the way to the dinner table. Classic. Normally you can only
catch snippets of his amazing programmes squeezed in between live slots on
awful Saturday morning cookery shows. During a moment of sluggish TV watching I
was therefore lucky enough to catch ten minutes of Floyd on Italy last week. In between complaining, cooking outside a
grotty restaurant for a bunch of even grottier looking locals and catching
nothing on a miserable fishing trip, the great man had time to whip out a huge
newspaper-wrapped parcel of breadsticks and sing their praises. According to
Floyd, Napoleon liked his “Grissini
Torino” so much that he sent a man to Turin every week to pick up a batch,
which he ate every morning before battle. They looked so good and sounded so
crunchy that I immediately had to scout around to find an appropriate recipe. At
last there was a chance to employ my Italian Level 2 Reading Skills! Italians across
the net seem in agreement; the dough must be spiked with a gummy, moreish
spoonful of malt extract.
