Sophia Loren, Food Writer
What her two cookbooks reveal about her stardom
Her 18th-floor apartment in Geneva’s Hôtel Intercontinental felt like a dungeon. But in the spring of 1968, Sophia Loren had no choice but to stay there.
The movie star confined herself there while pregnant with her first child, Carlo Ponti Jr., complying with her doctor’s orders. A dense layer of fog obscured her view of the city. Outside, spring collapsed into summer, summer into autumn, but she hovered above it all, insulated from the world.
She needed to feel connected to people again. She started by cooking.
Food was her family’s love language. The kitchen pulled Loren back to points in her past when food had been a salve: When she was a child during World War II living in the city of Pozzuoli, close to Naples, when her grandmother Luisa cooked rabbit in white wine, tomatoes, and olives in her kitchen, which became a sanctuary from the whirrs of fighter planes. The following decade, she ate roasted eel while filming “The River Girl” in the Po Valley in 1954. She picked at lobster cocktail when she first met Cary Grant in 1956 in Madrid. She scrawled what she could remember of the recipes down in a scrapbook.
Loren’s notes open her 1971 cookbook, “In Cucina con Amore.” Its recipes are mostly Italian in provenance…
