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AMONG FOODIE FRIENDS Food writer and self-confessed city girl Silvana de Soissons tells the story of how she fell in love with a country house ‘in the middle of nowhere’ – now the hub for a growing community of foodies
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f home is where the heart is then my heart is right here. When I first set eyes on our house, on the northern most edge of the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire, overlooking an escarpment that is covered with bluebells and wild garlic in spring, teasel and wild orchids in summer and snowdrops and holly bushes in winter, I knew that I had fallen. I, a city-loving, restaurant-going urbanite had fallen for a house in the middle of nowhere. The house had been neglected, run down and left to rack and ruin, needing eight months of a team of builders to renovate it and bring it back to life. Yet, even when faced with so many daunting problems and eye-watering bills, my husband, daughter and I were determined to bring the light back to this Georgian farmhouse and its garden. And so the work began: we cleaned and scrubbed and rewired, re-painted, re-pointed, re-plastered, re-furbished. We grew accustomed to the pile of estimates for every “re” word, lost sleep, cried, planted trees, dug flowerbeds, cut back shrubs and lit endless bonfires to burn decades of rubbish, overgrowth and debris. After ordering seemingly endless skips and doing truly awful jobs – like having the septic tank drained and putting in new fireplaces, we saw a glimmer of hope on the horizon. It is when you start ordering curtains, planting roses, hanging pictures and laying out your family china and cutlery that you know you are, finally, home. The still, small dawn chorus of calm that greets you the very first morning after the last of the rubble is removed, all machinery gone, all the paintwork dry, is the sweetest. And so there we were, ensconced in the home we had worked so hard to make our own, plotting to grow our own food, make preserves from the orchard and getting to know all the great artisanal food and drink makers of this beautiful county. My ambition has always been to work from home and to create a business from it. I am an Italian cook and a food writer. 78 THEBATHMAGAZINE | JUNE 2012
My kitchen-dining room is used to create food photo shoots for anything from magazine articles to advertisements and campaigns. Because of my love for vintage and retro accessories it is also sometimes used by craft or period home magazines. Fresh flowers are collected from the garden, lunches, tea-parties, picnics and dinners are created in the kitchen and then, when all the action is over, I write articles about the recipes, provenance and preparation of the work I did during the day. I decided to try to create a new form of media, one that was collaborative, co-operative and inclusive. In March 2011 I launched The Foodie Bugle an online magazine that featured food and drink artisans from all over the world, with no advertising and no references to diva chefs or wannabe television presenters. Above all, I wanted to create a forum, a collective hub where people could learn about all the different aspects and characters of the food and drink industry, from cookbook authors to supper clubs, cookery schools, farmers, growers, markets, designers and restaurants. Every month new writers from all over the world contribute their news and views, photographers send in advice to anyone wishing to start in the industry, foodies send in reports of their favourite food festivals and potters show us the plates and bowls that they fired in their kilns. My home is now referred to as Foodie Bugle Towers, the place where all these stories find a home and new, unpublished writers find their voice. The photos you see here were taken by Mark Bolton, www.markboltonphotography.co.uk, a keen allotment gardener from Bristol who also happens to be a much sought-after professional travel and lifestyle photographer. He introduced
COSY SUPPERS: mismatched chairs line up along tables in the big kitchen-dining room where Silvana entertains food writers, chefs, photographers and artisan food producers PICTURES: Mark Bolton