With all the cookery lessons available in Italy, which is right for you, a castle week or a Lecce week?

On several key dates throughout the year we at The Awaiting Table Cookery School in Lecce offer larger, thematic weeks, usually situated in a working castle, forty minutes south of Lecce. Typically, if not hyperly Italian, these courses treat each meal as loud, laughing and inclusive feasts, the organic house wine flowing, the pasta served up in giant ceramic bowls and the meat often carved from entire animals (take a moment and close your eyes and think about the phrase ‘Southern Italian Feast’. That is exactly what it is like).
Everything is larger about a castle week, if only because the castle has eight working kitchens and tables long enough to require raised voices. We still cook together every day, but rather than sober and introspective instruction, there tends to be fifteen of us gathered around the pasta board. We load the 16th century fireplace with olive wood passed up the stairs, in a one-handed, bucket-brigade-style, careful not to spill the wine in the other. We grill entire schools of fish, sip entire lemon trees of limoncello (made from organic lemons (limoni biologici) picked from the trees inside the castle’s massive stone walls). You will see the local farmers’ faces light up when they ask how many of their fresh vegetables we want that morning, when you’re the one that says ‘tutti’.

Our 2008 dates
From June 22 - 28th, 2008, we've secured an entire Mediterranean castle for the week, among the red-soiled, twisted and noble olive groves, not far from stunning Adriatic coast.
We've invited the world's leading olive oil experts to guide tastings of the new oil, tours of both state-of-the-art olive mills and those unchanged for centuries. And as with everything we do here at The Awaiting Table, these will be open dialogues between experts and students, rather than a serious of lectures.

You'll also meet a who's who of our local olive growers, millers, bottlers and retailers, each leading discussions on a particular link of the production and distribution chain, and what we need to know about each. We'll visit their shops, mills and fields, tasting this year's oil long before it's ever imported into your home country. Together, we've chosen an autumnal menu designed to highlight the new oils, which we'll cook with in one of the castle's eight kitchens, staff, experts and students together, anointing our collaborative efforts with oil pressed that very day.

If you’ve always loved olive oil but felt in the dark on the subject, this is the week of a lifetime!

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