URSULA Ferrigno doesn't use scales, doesn't follow recipes ("recipes were made to be broken"), eats pasta every day while staying as thin as a stick of rosemary grissini and knows how to sex an aubergine. Her wedding present to her sister was a full-body rub of olive oil and sea salt
Although billed as a course in Italian bread and pasta making, a day with Ursula Ferrigno - and she is heading to Ireland to spend several days at the disposal of Irish food enthusiasts amateur and otherwise - is like being transported to Italy itself, to the village on the Amalfi coast where she learnt to cook at her grandmother's knee; where her grandfather once tipped everything out of the window when lunch wasn't up to scratch.
In my village. not a single thing happens except to do with food. The focus is on the market, on cooking, on eating. You have all your rows at lunchtime, knives and forks are thrown down, and everyone hears these explosions because all the doors are open. There is no entertainment apart from food, so we always talk about it night and day."
Although she speaks perfect English, Ursula's voice swoops and dives like the finest Italian bel canto. She may not have inherited her grandfather's temper, but her love of food is just as ferocious and all-consuming. She runs a summer cookery school in Umbria, has a daily food slot on Granada and cable TV is editor of Tesco's vegetarian collection. writes evocative yet simple books and still finds time to cook lunch once a week in the tiny cafe in Books For Cooks, the specialist bookshop off London's Portobello Road. ("I like keeping my hand in. I can actually test things out and get an instant reaction, either from the staff eating my lunch or a customer. Much better than writing a receipe and waiting for someone to test it or waiting till it gets published.")
Her latest book is Really Fast Vegetarian Food (Wild Mushroom and Basil tart, Ricotta and Gorzonzola Gnochi, The Richest Chocolate Cake Ever) - and she is now working on a fourth, on Italian "Dolci". Unlike many cooks-turned-author, she writes everything herself (by hand) and it shows. Her recipes are as straight-forward and inspirational as Ursula in person.
"My work, it's not work, it's a passion. I feel very privileged to be able to do it, and when I teach, I can't believe I can talk about what I want to talk about and people will listen." What she wants to talk about is food: how to buy it. how to prepare it, how to cook it, but above all how to enjoy it. She talks of finding truffles in the mountains, of the onion stew (cooked in white wine and thyme) served by the local charcoal burners. the "portable feasts" of bread oozing with caramelised onions, roasted new potatoes and cheese. Each anecdote involves food; each dish triggers an anecdote. We sit as entranced as children in the presence of a natural storyteller, her flashing hands and non-stop stream of tips and tales punctuated only by laughter.
Ursula Ferrigno spent the first 5 years of her life in the village of Minori in southern Italy where, in the early 1960s, her father had been captivated by a dark-haired, green-eyed beauty from Tipperary who had gone there on holiday. ("They fell in love and got married, and that was that.")
The Ferrigno family were vegetable growers and exporters and in the 1970s grandfather Ferrigno ruled that the time had come to make the push into England.
So Ursula and her family were packed off to Cheshire. Until then, she remembers, they had eaten what every other family in Minori had eaten pasta ("A meal without pasta is not a meal"), vegetables, meat and fish.
England changed all that. Her mother took one look at what the local butcher and fish monger had to offer and had a fit. "My mother has always been an amazing cook, as well as my grandmother. We've always eaten a lot of vegetables, a lot of pulses. And, of course, pasta every single day. And Mummy said: "I can't use this. It doesn't taste right, it doesn't look good. it doesn't smell right. And Daddy said: `We're not eating that.' So that was it. We just had vegetables, pasta and beans and lots of lentils."
Which is how Ursula became a vegetarian. She bates the term. "I feel I have been forced into a vegetarian role. To me it's like promoting yourself as being ill. It's so negative. Labelling my food in that way is not how I want my food to be seen. It's about good, fresh food, and the best quality ingredients. And for me the quality of the fish and meat in England is not sufficiently good for me to want to use it.
And she despairs of what passes for Italian food in England. "I get distressed when I see these huge amounts of pasta piled on to plates. Pasta is only supposed to be part of a meal, the "prima piatti". Italian cooking is about lots of different flavours. If you look at a cross section of yourself there should be layer upon layer of flavours."
Italian cooking is not a question of recipes, she says, "it's an attitude".
How different it was in Escoffier in Paris who, when they discovered Ursula was left-banded, sent her packing. Only students who could chop with their right hand could be accepted, they said. Two weeks later she was back, fully ambidextrous.
But the strait-jacket of French haute cuisine has been left far behind. Although in her books she cherry-picks from the best the Mediterrean has to offer, Ursula Ferrigno's passion is the food of her homeland: grilled peppers, aubergine ("poor man's meat"), whole roasted young garlic, sage leaves rolled in flour and parmesan and deep fried, broad bean and goats' cheese salad, lentils cooked like risotto, soups rich in pulses and herbs, and breads like you've never tasted before.
The large boles that are the trademark of Italian bread come from using a three-day-old yeast starter, called a "biga", which she describes as the "turbo" of the Italian breadmaking process. (Tip use only quarter the yeast most recipes recommend.) You know it's ready, she explains, when it has "a good head on it, like a glass of Guinness". Not only does Ursula have an Irish mother, but an Irish boyfriend. actor Adrian McCort, currently filming in "Sicilia". They too met in Italy, in Umbria, where his mother has a house and where Ursula was staying for a short break. ("It was The house was called St Ursula.")
In London, Ursula Ferrigno's breads can be bought at Harvey Nichols, made under licence, but her ambition is to open her own bakery. "I would not compromise in any shape or form. A wood burning bakery very, very specialised. Michael Caine's backer, who is Italian, has approached me to do it with him." Caine is a very successful restaurateur, in London, Hollywood and Miami.
The day with Ursula Ferrigno left me reeling from her ebullient enthusiasm and heady with the rich possibilities of vegetables and cheese. Not only could I feast on home-made ravioli and breads oozing with tomatoes and cheese but I had garnered enough tips to" last me a lifetime: how to chop an onion without crying, how to keep hands free of the smell of garlic; how to stop cauliflower or asparagus smelling while they're cooking (add a bayleaf to the water); how to clean my palate while tasting olive oils (slice of apple) and, naturally, how to sex an aubergine.
Ursula Ferrigno believes cooking is not for the chosen few. "It's the most sincere thing anyone can do. And if you love yourself or anyone else, you cook well. There is quite a lot of loving going on. It is a very, very giving thing to open up your heart and your soul in your cooking. You want to give. you want to please, you want to make people feel special by giving them something really special, so I hope that's what I do.