“A casa Camilla”: a food and wine cool hunter’s blog

2017-08-30 There are headhunters who go out looking for talented executives, or for human heads to shrink… Then there are ghost hunters, who work alongside other kinds of specialists to unearth dragons, orcs, witches, vampires and zombies; and there are the more pragmatic gold hunters of the Klondike. But the trendiest of all hunters today is the cool hunter, who sniffs out the trends of the future.
Camilla Rossi is a young woman from Ferrara who writes the food blog A casa Camilla and calls herself a “food and wine cool hunter”, with a weakness for herbs and everything that has to do with Provence.
How did you come to love food, Camilla?
“I was born into it: when I was a little girl, like all children whose parents work in the restaurant industry, I used to fall asleep draped across a couple of chairs while waiting for my parents to finish work. As a teenager I said I would never work in the food industry, because it had stolen my parents away from me. After getting my diploma in European languages, I signed up for a course in the culture and techniques of fashion. But I ended up writing my thesis about food, or rather, food 2.0.”
What does that mean?
“It was a study of food, in which I focused on blogs, the hashtag #foodporn and food photography, which is intended to make you feel hungry.” Your food blog already existed in 2015. When and why did you start it? “In 2013, after an unsuccessful job interview. It was for an agency concerned with communication and organisation in food and fashion, and when they said ‘we’ll get back to you’, I realised they were never going to call me. And so that very evening I decided to start a blog, because I really felt like writing and communicating. And guess what my first post was about? Cooking! I wrote a recipe for couscous.”
So you call yourself a food and wine “cool hunter”: what do you hunt for?
“I have always been very curious about the profession of cool hunter, which I discovered while studying fashion. The trend hunters are already telling us what will be in style two years from now! I want to bring this profession from the world of fashion into the world of food. Because there are trends in food, as in fashion. I realise this when I go out to restaurants: today’s cooking techniques, for example, are different from what we were seeing a decade ago, with a tendency toward lighter cooking, with less fat and less salt.”
What do you see as the most important trend in food today?
“A great return to tradition. Phenomena such as molecular cooking won’t last long, because people don’t understand them. They’re already going back to classic local dishes. Just look at me: I’m only 25 years old and I roll out my pasta by hand, with a rolling pin. It’s a return to tradition, and this is essential for innovation” (to be continued).

Mariagrazia Villa

Photos: © A casa Camilla