Author profile - Anthony Capella

by Nicky Pellegrino writing in the Herald on Sunday, 7 November 2010.

A long, long time ago when a scoop of hokey pokey wasn’t a drive-to-the-dairy away, ice cream was the food of kings, a decadent show of power and status, and only the most privileged were allowed to taste it. For Anthony Capella the thought of writing about such an era was impossible to resist. The English author of the bestselling, The Food of Love, has always themed his novels around romance and food but stumbled over the idea of ice cream quite by accident.

“I was researching quite a different book when I picked up Elizabeth David’s Harvest Of The Cold Months,” explains Oxfordshire-based Capella. “It’s a social history of ice and ice cream and debunks the myths. One of the things I’d never realised was the first ever mention of ice cream comes from England in the 1670s. King Charles II had been in exile in France and had brought back the idea of ice houses, then someone had invented ice cream. This seemed too amazing to ignore.”

The result of Capella’s fascination with ice is The Empress of Ice Cream (Sphere, $39.99) a compelling and completely delicious historical tale of intrigue and desserts centred around two characters – the real-life Louise de Keroualle, French mistress of the English King and the entirely fictional Carlo Demirco inventor of ice cream.

Capella admits that tangling up history with fiction posed its challenges. “So much is known about Charles II you can’t deviate from the truth for the sake of the story – which is something I’ve been able to do in all my other books,” he explains. “So I was constrained by history and as a result, as a love story, this is more of a slow burn.”

The Empress of Ice Cream covers a period of great political intrigue when the English King was being manipulated by his French counterpart Louis XIV. But the story also sounds a comic note. As plots and wars are raging all around him, Capella’s pompous and utterly obsessed ice cream maker is concerned only with creating new confections to impress the courts of the monarchs he serves.

“This could have been a much darker book,” says Capella, “but it was important for me to keep it a little bit tongue in cheek. With all my books I’ve tried to tell the story in a light way. That’s what readers expect from me.’

His first two novels – The Food Of Love and The Wedding Officer – were set in Italy which Capella believes is a country many people have a passion for. “There’s a huge diaspora of Italians around the world and I feel they’re looking for books to help fill the gap,” he explains.

He himself was born in Uganda where his parents worked for the Colonial Service until the dawn of the Idi Amin era when they had to smuggle him out of the country in an old airline bag along with a small stash of opium.
“It sounds incredible when I tell that to people now,” he laughs. “But that’s exactly what happened. I was three months old, too young to have the yellow fever injections that were required to cross the border. So they had to smuggle me. And since I’d been breast-fed by a wet nurse who’d put opium on her nipples to keep me from crying – as was the tradition there - my parents had to carry a supply of it to dab on my lips.”

Capella grew up in the UK wanting to be either a writer or a farmer. After a failed excursion into pig farming, he was writing screenplays and working as an advertising scriptwriter when his agent came up with a plan to sell a movie idea about food and sex to Hollywood. The result – Capella describes it as Cyrano de Bergerac with chefs – was turned down by the Hollywood bigwigs and spent several years in a bottom drawer until he decided to dust it off and turn it into his bet-selling debut novel, The Food Of Love.

He now combines writing fiction with occasional articles for Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper where he examines the culture and history of places he visits through the food that’s traditionally eaten there. “I can’t cook at all myself,” he admits. “I just like eating food and I like researching things.”

Reading The Empress of Ice Cream is a sensual experience. It’s dotted with recipes for exotic treats like nutmeg gelato and tantalising descriptions of strawberry ices with white pepper… enough to send even the strongest-willed off in search of a Kapiti Chocolate Dipped Vanilla Creme Stick. However, Capella reckons he ate very little ice cream during the writing of the book.

“It was winter,” he explains. “It’s a slightly odd thing – ice cream is such a lovely indulgent food but this is quite a wintry book. It’s set at a time when England was experiencing a mini ice-age and the Thames had frozen over, and it’s about rather chilly characters.
“I like it when a story overlaps with myth and fairytale,” Capella adds. “This one echoes the Narnia fairtytale – the Ice Queen and the frozen lands and the King who can’t rule because the Queen has cast a spell over him.”

While exploring the history of ices was fascinating, Capella says he won’t ever try writing about royalty again.
“I enjoy digging beneath the surface of a subject like Roman food or wartime Naples but with Charles II even if I researched for six months I’d only scratch the surface,” he explains. “One of the first e-mails I received was from someone who reads widely about Charles II and told me I’d got a date wrong. OK I’m guilty but the book is ruined for people like that…they live in that period… they’re obsessed by it.”

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino, a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction, (The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009 while her latest, Recipe for Life was published by Orion in April, 2010), is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above piece was first published on7 November, 2010