Yorkshire’s little Italy

WHEN Yara Gremoli looks out of her kitchen window, at certain times of year she could easily, she says, be back home in Tuscany.

“The hills and woodland, the bales of hay and the yellow flowers of oil seed rape colouring the fields. It’s a landscape I love,” she says.

Yara, 35, comes from a small village just outside Montepulciano which, she says, is a similar community to the one in Masham in the Yorkshire Dales, where she lives now.

It was love which brought her to this old, three-bedroomed stone cottage on a country estate, where her partner Patrick combines work as gamekeeper and farmworker with running an advertising and theatrical casting information agency. The cosy kitchen, where Tuscan and Yorkshire culture entwine, is at the heart of their home.

And food clearly plays a central role in their lives. Yara, who has set up a successful online business importing and creating speciality Tuscan products, from olive oil to pasta sauces, cooks Italian, of course. Patrick makes stews and more exotic dishes such as Thai curry.

“Our relationship has always been concentrated on the kitchen. This is where we live,” says Yara.

The pair – who have a five-year-old son, Luca – met in London, where Yara worked in a series of jobs, including computing and interior design and, at one point, ran two Italian restaurants.

Patrick, who realised he could run his TV commercial and theatre casting information service, linking actors’ agents with producers, on the internet from anywhere in the country, was keen to return to the area of North Yorkshire where he grew up.

They had to make a quick decision when the cottage became available. “When I got pregnant, we decided London wasn’t the place for us any more. This house came up and we decided we would try life in Yorkshire. We just had three weeks to turn it all around,” says Yara.

Everything from the old, rustic wooden kitchen utensils to the fresh, soil-dusted organic produce plucked straight from the vegetable garden and the stacks of logs piled up by the wood burning stove mirror the kitchen of Yara’s childhood Tuscan home. She holds up a well-used wooden-handled half moon cutter.

“I slice absolutely everything with this. It’s just like the one my parents use,” she says.

She inherited her love of fine food from her parents, Michele and Marina, who produce olive oil from the small grove at their family home in Chianciano, southern Tuscany, with the olives hand-picked, ground and coldpressed locally. “Food was such a big part of my upbringing. Dad used to shoot game and come back and cook it. Mum would make cakes and sweet things,” she says.

There are jars of dried produce, from the finest flour to specially imported Italian pasta and grains, lined up on shelves in the old, glass-fronted kitchen cupboard. The larder is brimming with cured meats, truffles, jars of rich tomato sauces and flavoursome Tuscan cheeses. And there is always some strong Italian coffee on the go.

Up to ten people often gather on benches round their long, narrow kitchen table. “We wanted a table where we could squeeze people in tight, close together. It’s intimate and convivial,” she says.

Yara feels the people of rural North Yorkshire feel just as strongly about their local produce as the Italians and she recognises many similarities. “I love the warmth and friendliness of the people. They are plain-speaking and refuse to suffer fools. That goes hand-inhand with having a furiously proud and passionate independent food and drink producing culture,” she says.

“Here, we have Wensleydale cheese, where the Italians have pecorino. There are familyrun breweries in Masham, vineyards in Tuscany.

Yorkshire produces rapeseed oil, Italy olive oil. Yorkshire might not produce prosciutto and salamis, but there is a strong pig industry here.” GAME, just as popular in Tuscany as in North Yorkshire, is one of the couple’s favourite foods. Yara won special praise from judges, including food critic Tom Parker Bowles, on ITV’s Food Glorious Food cookery challenge show for her innovative game lasagne dish, combining Tuscan cooking methods learnt from her father with the wild game from their estate.

She also makes a mean game risotto. “We do game in all sorts of ways, I am constantly adapting it in recipes,” she says. “We have so much, mostly pheasant and venison, also partridge and pigeon. It’s all locally sourced. We don’t tend to eat much beef or chicken unless we know where it’s from.”

Yara initially left Italy for London 14 years ago to work in computing and was appointed food and beverage manager at the Swinton Park castle hotel when she moved to North Yorkshire nine years later.

It was bringing over small quantities of her parents’ first-pressed olive oil for English friends to taste that gave her the idea for her Tuscan imports food business. “It’s not like most of the olive oils you taste from the supermarket,”

she explains. “The olives are hand-picked, ground and cold-pressed locally.

It tastes of artichokes and lettuce with hints of cut grass and tomato leaves. People just love it.”

The oil became so popular, she started to take orders and was soon also bringing back Italian truffles, salami and cheeses such as Pecorino Folgie di Noce, a strong, salty and particularly pungent sheep’s milk cheese, which is wrapped in walnut leaves and fermented for three months in terracotta pots.

Her company, Etruscany, was launched in 2011, followed by the Yara’s Kitchen range of fresh pasta sauces last year.

After being at Swinton Park for 18 months, Yara decided to give up her full-time job to spend more time with her family. “I worked long, anti-social hours and had little time for family life. My aim was to create something that worked for my lifestyle, rather than adapt lifestyle for work. We want to make our living from what we love and enjoy doing,” she says.

Yara also wanted to give Luca the opportunity to experience Italian culture. “There are no jobs that will let you go off to Italy with your son for five weeks at a time,” she says.

Now she spends about ten weeks of the year in Italy with Luca, who is about to enrol parttime at a local Italian school close to Yara’s family home. Luca who, to everyone’s amusement, insists his favourite food is porridge, stays with her parents while she visits suppliers.

“I come back with new ideas and new products from every trip. Once back in Yorkshire, I can work from home, despatching everything and organising deliveries from warehouses in London.”

The fresh pastas Yara sells are made in a family-run pastificio she has discovered in Piemonte, northern Italy. Other best-sellers are her tasty, cured meat sausages made from rare breeds such as the Chinta Senese. “It’s half pig, half wild boar and bred in the wild, producing an intense flavour,” she says. “It’s slightly peppery when warmed and tastes mature and meaty, like everything I would expect of a wild boar rummaging in the dark undergrowth.”

But giving up her full-time job hasn’t made life less busy. Yara showcases her products at markets, fairs and food festivals all over the region most weekends. She, like Patrick, a former West End actor, also juggles a second job in sales for a big interior design company with her other commitments.

“Modern life is very difficult. When I first came to Yorkshire, I didn’t realise that finding work wouldn’t be as easy as in London. And, even though costs aren’t much lower, wages are not as good. If you only do one thing around here, you’re not going to survive,” she says.

She does sometimes miss the Italian climate and a painting of the view from Montepulciano on an old, Italian wooden shutter, which hangs on the wall of their family living room is a constant reminder of what she has left behind.

But Yara loves her life in North Yorkshire. And she has even discovered a new culinary delight.

“One thing that I have started eating a lot of is Yorkshire pickles and chutneys. I have never had anything like it before. We don’t do it in Italy. They’re absolutely delicious.”

• Etruscany: Fine Foods from Tuscany, 1 Low Springs Cottages, Low Burton, Masham, North Yorkshire HG4 4DQ. T: 01138-152-218; W: etruscany.co.uk
• Fox Linton interior design: foxlinton.com