| Great success in Hamburg for the
dinner party in honour of Maria Callas that took place
on September 19th at Raffles Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten.
While the Divina exhibition was having a very big success,
in the prestigious Alsterhaus, at the incredible average
of more than 30,000 visitors a day, the most luxurious
hotel, one of the most famous in the world, organized
an evening party to celebrate the unforgettable primadonna,
offering a concert and a really special menu (see picture
below).
This is a delicious taste of Bruno
Tosi’s new book, which is going to be released
in autumn in Italy (Trenta Publisher, Milan), in Brazil
(Mercurio Editora, S.Paolo) and in Germany (Radon House
Sudest Verlag, Munich). This book, that in the Italian
edition will be entitled “La Divina in cucina”,
and will be subtitled “Il ricettario segreto di
Maria Callas, shows a different woman, who is looking
for a sort of homely ordinariness in order to seem a
peaceful housewife.
This book includes an exceptional report by Arrigo Cipriani
of Harry’s Bar in Venice, and more than 100 recipes,
concerning Venetian, Milanese, French, Greek and American
cookery.
But it also regards the strict diet she had to go on
when she weighed more than 100 kg, after which she became
the well known glamour icon as Audrey Hepburn with an
admirable waist measure of 58 cm.
“The Divina enchanted at cooker
and table too, as we can see from the very many autographed
recipes and from the rich cookery library-the President
of Callas Association declares-Her love for cooking
started in 1949 when she married Giovanni Battista Meneghini
in Verona; in fact her mother in law Giuseppina suggested
her to be a good cook since her husband was a gourmet,
and could be charmed by the pleasure of the table”.
The singer was a gourmet too; she loved delicacies,
risottos and other tasty foods, and she was quite good
at preparing appetizing home-made cakes. She used to
cut recipes from the newspapers of the time and quickly
she learned how to cook everything for her husband and
guests. “But only few people know-Tosi concludes-that
she used to collect carefully her favourite recipes
of the cooks and landladies she had known and with accuracy
used to write them down on tiny sheets of paper”.
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