Nadia Moscardi

At the foot of Gran Sasso and ten kilometres from L’Aquila, where nature towers over and earth, sometimes, shook. On the enchanted oriental side of the Apennine, Camarda, a hamlet of Abruzzo’s capital, watches over. Here the new cuisine of Nadia Moscardi, the chef who was reborn in the kitchen of Elodia nel parco, resists. It all began in 1975 with her mother Elodia, after whom the restaurant was named, taking from her also the vigour of a goddess Kali, capable of mixing sauce, feeding the newest born, look after the rest of the family and serve guest using only two hands.

From the maternal milk, the chef must have taken a couple of essential genes too, the uterine passion for cooking and the superpowers of a family that, when together, has the strength of a pack. Before earning the place of kitchen leader, Nadia learnt the lesson given by her mother Elodia by heart, while with Ferran Adrià she saw the future and Maurizio Santin helped her discover a very intimate passion of her own, a sort of soft spot for cakes. Generational variance and a leap of pride together make “The textures of pasta and the vegetable garden”, the dish Nadia Moscardi will present at Identità Milano 2015, the evolution of “le virtù teramane”. “It was a very rich minestrone which once the future daughter in law would prepare for her mother in law, drawing from the last winter vegetables and the first summer ones, the meat left over and the pasta left in the pantry”. It is a known fact, after all, that women always need to demonstrate everything, even being the champions of frugality and skilled housemaids in the kitchen too.

In the hands of the chef from Abruzzo, tradition is wrapped in a stratification of colours, textures and ingredients full of identity such as white beans from Paganica, lentils from Santo Stefano di Sessanio and chickpeas from Navelli, which is also the home to Italian saffron. After the first mouthful, mothers in law fall silent, usually and for good. But things weren’t always easy. On April 6th 2009 the earth shook so strong that it pulled down the house on top and the restaurant below. When counting the damages among the rubbles, however, it was all square: they were still there, alive and strong thanks to each other. Among the crystal walls of the new restaurant, in the mountains of the Gran Sasso national park, Nadia’s cuisine has risen to new life. While grandmother Elodia can finally enjoy the view of the valley.