Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My cast away this week is the cookery writer Anna Del Conte. Her life, like her recipes, is a rich but healthy mix, rooted in the privileged pre-war traditions of a wealthy

Milanes family.

Yet it's the unexpected ingredients that bring real flavor.

She's been machine-gunned and gone to prison twice. She describes spaghetti

Bolanese as American food and despite being an inspirational figure to the likes of

Nijella and Delia has never had her own TV

cookery show. She says I eat absolutely everything from tripe to fish eyes and

kids head but I'm not a germane. I think I am a gourmet. Right, Anna Del Conte, you have to define the difference

then between germane and gourmet. The germain for me is somebody that is just greedy and they would eat anything

that is on its plate with a sort of abandon that I I'm more choosy than that and that to me is a gourmet. It's more choosy and it would eat with pleasure what is good.

One of the first things I understand that you cooked when you came to this country all those years ago was meatballs made out of horse flesh is that right?

Yes. Yes. They didn't know. They didn't know. They didn't know. No, because if you mix it with Bortadela or Salame,

which you could buy, I mixed with egg and parmesan,

you could buy all that even if a lot of meat was still rationed and then you fried them and perhaps you

were put them in tomato sauce.

So obviously nobody knew what sort of meat it was.

I'm imagining they said to you, oh this is delicious as you say was it

rationing was was still the case when they said it was delicious did you enjoy

the secret or did you did you want to tell them they were eating no I think I'm

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