Bake Off winner Giuseppe dell’Anno has moved to Cheltenham – and loves it! Katie Jarvis spoke to everyone’s favourite Italian - always a winner, never an ‘‘assle’ –about his new local baking courses, and appearing at this month’s Malvern Autumn Show
Picture this.
The Tyrrhenian Sea is sparkling turquoise as it laps at the ancient Italian city of Gaeta; a city where you learn to swim like you learn to walk. Portly ancient Romans would desert their crowded, sweltering byways for the coolness of Gaeta’s coast – its sandy beaches, grottos and mountains – in the summer months. (The extraordinary tomb of wily politician L Munatius Plancus, ‘friend’ to Cicero, Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian, still overlooks Gaeta from its dominion on Monte Orlando. Medieval doors – of a thickness and strength only huge nails would hold together – still pepper the streets, tall enough for horse and mounted-rider to pass through.)
Young Giuseppe dell’Anno has just been to Mass (as he does every Sunday morning). He’s now looking forward to the usual pit-stop at his grandmother’s. Each Sunday, she makes tomato sauce for pasta. And each Sunday she saves a couple of meatballs for her grandson for a mid-morning meal.
It’s as if relatives – people Giuseppe knows in general; maybe the whole world – is defined and distinguished by the dishes they create and bake. His great aunt, who cooks lasagna for the extended family each week. His aunt’s fresella (delicious rough, hard bread, with tomato and olives). The two cakes his dad bakes every weekend: one for them; the other for grandparents.
(One Christmas when Giuseppe is 15, an aunt arrives, last minute; too late to buy a present for her. So he makes for her from scratch some orecchiette, the best gift of all.)
He’s telling me this on our Zoom interview. And, as he speaks, the rich, sweet, tart flavour of tomatoes; the aroma of pungent, spicy basil; the sound of clattering pans swirls around my mind.
‘Next week,’ he says, ‘we fly back to Italy for our summer holiday and I’ll go to visit my in-laws. My mother-in-law, she knows that I like a couple of things, and she would never forgive herself if I leave her house and she hasn’t cooked for me the things she knows I like.’
His flavours – back in 2021 – wowed Bake Off judges Paul and Prue so convincingly, they crowned him champion. Walnuts, figs, orange zest, sweet and sour amarena cherries.
He’s taught us so much – this Italian, who has made his home in the UK for the past 20-odd years.
Have we taught Giuseppe anything about food?
Ah, he says. Bedfordshire, 2002, when he first moved to England.
‘I was renting a room, and I had the quintessential British landlady: big hair, fluffy slippers; movie-type. Perfectly-made nails. Full make-up at 6 o’clock in the morning. Lovely lady, I will never forget her.’
But when she told him she was preparing a full English breakfast as a welcome gift for his first morning… He panicked.
‘I was like, Jesus Christ. The Italian breakfast is caffé latte and either a croissant or biscuits or cake. Something sweet to go with it.
Uh-oh…
‘But I had it once and I was hooked for life. There’s nothing I like more than a full fry-up in the morning.’
I’m not sure I’m flattered.
‘Take it as a compliment.’
Here he is on my laptop screen. Giuseppe dell’Anno. Looking exactly as he did on my TV screen, three years ago. Luscious locks scraped back. The kind of Italian accent where you pretend you need words such as ‘fresella’ and ‘orecchiette’ repeated, for the sheer poetry of hearing him say them. (An accent that gave Matt Lucas a fright when he misheard Giuseppe describing the making of filo pastry as ‘a massive ‘assle’. Google it.)
Listen, I tell him. The excitement in my household is off the scale.
He laughs. ‘You’re flattering me now.’
I’m genuinely not. This is an accurate description. We are big Bake Off fans.
‘I can relate because so are we. The only show the kids [he has three with wife, Laura] are allowed to stay late for.’
Does he still watch it?
‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
In some ways, having been a contestant, he enjoys it even more. In others, maybe some of the magic is rubbed off…
Why? Give me a state secret.
(Don’t get him wrong, he says: everything you see is authentic. It’s just the effort they have to go through for scenes that look effortless.)
‘There’s an enormous amount of work that goes into those fraction-of-a-second shots.’ A rotating platform, a zillion cameras, a track curved on the floor, with cameraman on a trolley and another pushing him round.
‘Even the squirrel shots are carefully captured.’
I tell you what gets me, I say to him. That moment where they announced ‘Bakers, you have five minutes left’; and you get shots practically of contestants still struggling to put their pinnies on. It gets me so stressed, I have to lie down in a darkened room afterwards.
‘You’re absolutely right. I don’t think whatever they are using as little shots actually happen 30 seconds before the time is up. BUT I think that is a very fair way of conveying the amount of stress in the tent.’
Other times – when something is chilling, or dough is proving – there’s a surprising amount of down-time.
‘And those are actually quite interesting moments; because that’s when you can let it go and interact more with the presenters, with the judges; with the other bakers.’
‘The day before we started filming, when we met for the very first time, we met up with the executive producer. She said, ‘You guys are going to become best friends. You’re going to be inviting each other to your weddings.’
‘And I was like, ‘Oh, come on, Jenna. That’s not going to happen. I don’t even know these people…’
‘She was bloody right!’
They’re all on a WhatsApp chat altogether – 10 out of 12 of them. ‘When I moved to Cheltenham, I told everybody. And when my son was accepted into a grammar school, I told everybody.’
They’re settled into a 1970s house ‘That hasn’t been touched for 50 years’, and they love the town. ‘I’m now 15 minutes’ walking-distance from John Lewis so I can really enjoy the centre, which is something I’ve never been able to do before.’
When they moved last September from a village between Bristol and Bath, he cried.
‘My next-door neighbours were the closest thing I had [in this country] to mum and dad. We will remain extremely good friends forever. I was very sorry when we left.’
But when their eldest got into Pate’s in Cheltenham – one of the country’s most prestigious grammars – the dice were cast…
Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that. A cracking tale that he relates in more detail than I can squish in.
‘I’m sorry,’ he laughs. ‘Chatterbox.’
So. The thing is, he and Laura (also Italian; they met when both studying engineering in Tuscany) had been trying to move back to Italy for a few years before Bake Off, with no success. Finally, 60 or 70 CVs later, he got into the final few for a fab senior management job in Milan. Both families back home were beyond thrilled.
Thing was – at exactly the same time, he was summoned to take part in the Bake Off selection process.
In the end, he got them both: job and Bake Off. The trouble was, Giuseppe had no idea when he was going to be kicked out of the tent. And he couldn’t explain to the company why he was being so coy about starting dates.
‘I filmed the final on the 4th of July, 2021; I drove home on the 5th of July to Bristol. On the 7th, I had my first Covid jab. And on the 10th, I was already on a flight to Milan to start a new job.’
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But fate was still shaking the dice cup.
Christmas Eve: Just as he was about to move the family over, he got a call from his agent. ‘And she goes, ‘I’ve had an offer [for a recipe book]…’ Actually, there were two competing offers; she got me a really good advance and said: Do you want to take it or not? It was going to be a global publication; and it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And it wasn’t compatible with my position in Italy because I was looking after 25 people.
‘So I had to quit.’
Big decision?
‘That would be a massive understatement, Katie. My mum and dad were very happy because I would have been four hours by train from there; one hour flying from my wife’s family. We could have enjoyed our summer house throughout the year because it was literally one hour away from home.’
Financially?
‘The worst decision I could probably have ever made. But I don’t regret it.’
Plus, Giuseppe is running his classes at (the wonderful) Foodworks in Colesbourne. ‘I’m in a room with 12 people who all love baking. I can talk cakes for the whole day.’
But the Bake Off story I love best is this.
The company in Milan wasn’t the only one who couldn’t know what Giuseppe was doing while he was ensconced in the famous tent for seven-and-a-half weeks.
‘My wife knew, obviously. But the kids – I couldn’t tell them I was filming because the whole village would have known!’
Even when he got back, he couldn’t breathe a word.
‘In August, we went to Italy for our summer holidays – that’s when I told them because I felt it was safe. I sat them down on a sofa, and showed them the very first video that I shot of me, walking toward the tent. And I said, ‘Guys, I wasn’t in London working [as they’d thought]. I told you a lie. This is where I was – can you recognise it?’
‘And my eldest immediately said, ‘That’s the Bake Off tent!’ And they went crazy. Completely ballistic.’
Then there was the guest at a party, for which he made 23 different salads: ‘A pasta salad with homemade pesto; a green salad with asparagus and avocados and a mustard vinaigrette…’
Oh, do stop!
‘There was roasted pepper salad with preserved lemons; there was roasted aubergines with a yogurt sauce…’
Much of a muchness, this guest sniffed.
Let’s not forget the fellow English engineer, either. On seeing Giuseppe eat a lentil dish for lunch, left over from the previous night’s dinner, he said: ‘I never imagined Italians eating bland food.’
‘He was tugging at my heart right there. He didn’t realise how hurtful that was.’
Not surprising: food is Giuseppe’s past, present and future. Quite literally. Formed from the moment, as a baby, he watched his dad bake.
‘I would need a crystal ball to say that.’
For Giuseppe, the memories come thick and fast, conjured up by echoes in the senses. Opening his mum’s wardrobe – even now, when he goes home – and smelling that lovely aroma of mum on her clothes.
The black olives and bread he’d eat as a snack with his grandmother, before he was even old enough to go to school.
‘So she would have never imagined – nobody would have ever imagined – that the olives would be the one thing that would become the most thought of.
‘But that’s the point. You must create memories with your kids and let them decide what it is that they want to remember. As long as you feed them memories, it’s up to them to pick their favourite.’
· Giuseppe is appearing at the new Malvern Autumn Show feature, the Great Malvern Cake Off, featuring well-known faces from previous series of BBC and Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off, September 27-29: malvernautumn.co.uk
· For more on Giuseppe and his classes, visit giuseppedellanno.com
