Donatella
Pastry Chef
I joined the Hall in January this year as the Pastry chef, the only woman in the kitchen, possibly the first woman employed by the college in this role.
The world of professional kitchens is still a male-dominated industry. According to the most recent national statistics, only 17% of chef positions in the UK are held by women, but the data also show that most of the cooking at home is still done by women.
I don’t have a clear answer for this, possibly a combination of the family-unfriendly working hours, along with a stereotype of the testosterone-driven kitchen, with volcanic-tempered chefs, which in my experience is becoming increasingly rare. Today’s kitchen culture is one of courteous civility and camaraderie.
Even more so in colleges, which are a family for their employees. I am grateful for the warm welcome given to me, from the first day, by all the members of the kitchen and the wider college community. When I visit the lovely staff room to feed my addiction for cappuccino, I am energised by the greeting “Delizioso”. It gives extra meaning to my work to bake for each one of these friendly smiles, not for anonymous customers.
I think gluttony is the root of my desire to become a pastry chef. I remember how exciting it was to go with my parents and browse the Roman patisseries on a Sunday morning, on my way to visit relatives and friends. Where I could never decide what to take with us from the mouth-watering pastry creations that were beautifully displayed.
I actively cultivated my gluttony in the pastry shops around the world during my years as flight attendant, but I had first started baking, for people other than my family, many years before that when I was reading history at La Sapienza University, as a distraction and a counterbalance to the stresses of being a student. I volunteered making birthday cakes for the homeless in a Caritas Shelter at a time that I needed to put things in my life in perspective. Baking is inherently a very soothing task. Every home baker knows well from experience that grounding sensation, the awareness of one’s body and the feeling of presence in the moment and how that can reduce stress and improve one’s mood. But the happiness I witnessed during these improvised birthday parties for the destitute and abandoned, with my amateur cakes that were a crime against Patisserie, resurfaced years later when I decided on a career change. Making people feel like they are members of a family, that they are cared for and that their life is worth celebrating is what I still consider part of my job, just with better cakes!
Later training as a Pastry chef in Italy, France, and England, took me to work in differing places, from a tiny 200-year-old café in Genova where Giuseppe Verdi used to have his breakfast before going to the theatre, to the busy kitchen of the grand hotel where Monet stayed and painted his famous series of views of the Thames, then all the way to Oxford restaurants, hotels and now Colleges.
I love Patisserie, it’s a beautiful land that I never tire to explore in the search of the perfect flavour and the most fabulous composition. My challenge will be to get rid of useless artifice, cut the fats and sugar to make it healthier, and replace the animal products to make it kinder and more sustainable.
Cakes are markers of celebration, of rites of passage, a fragrant “soundtrack” to living experiences. Fairy tales written on a plate that bring us back to that excited child browsing a pastry shop window. Cakes are strictly constrained by chemistry but equally open to unlimited creativity. Food is a common ground, a universal experience, eating and talking together around a table makes us into a community and our kitchen contributes to bring together the family that is the Hall.