Laura Mansi Salom’s elegant profile looks straight out of a Renaissance portrait. Lean, lithe, and stunning, with fine high cheekbones and jet-black hair drawn back on her neck, Laura looks incontrovertibly aristocratic, although she has no interest in resting on old family laurels. Yes, she is seventy, but she could be in her fifties, a tireless and voluble woman who is entirely up-to-date.
Laura has just started teaching cooking to Italians, using only recipes that can be done quickly and without fuss. Her approach is everything that her growing up was not. She spent her childhood at Palazzo Mansi, the great house in Lucca, with three chefs, one for each course, plus a pastry cook. The family ate a major five-course meal twice a day with four or five wines, to say nothing of an elaborate tea in the afternoon, but Laura is convinced that people must have just tasted, not eaten with vigor, because no one was fat. “La vera mangiata si fa più ora” (“People really eat more now”), even if there aren’t all the various courses and the food is much simpler.
