Profile

Biography

Ursula Ferrigno is a talented vegetarian cook with a deep love of Southern Italian food. She is half-Italian and learned to cook as a child by watching her grandmother preparing the traditional family dishes. She returns regularly to Italy, to visit family and to teach cookery.

She trained in hotel catering and took an Escoffier course in Paris, before starting her own business manufacturing vegetarian recipes. She started the first vegetarian restaurant in North West England, where she devised the recipes, cooked and ran the restaurant.

An enthusiastic vegetarian, she has been principal tutor for the Vegetarian Society, and she now runs highly popular seasonal Italian cookery courses at the Books for Cooks Cookery School.

Having been brought up in an environment in which bread was present with every meal, Ursula is a passionate baker, featuring bread making in her many cookery demonstrations. With Italian breads her speciality, Ursula teaches both professionals and amateurs to make an array of national and regional breads from ciabatta and focaccia to volcanic stromboli. She is the driving force behind National Breadmaking Week, designed to promote the role of bread in the modern British diet.

She has appeared on GMTV's Saturday Disney, TVam, Granada TV, BBC North, Good Food Live, BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme and Good Food Live for the UK Food Channel and has been profiled in a number of magazines. Ursula presented three programmes for HTV's cookery series Green Grow the Dishes. Her first cookery book, The Nineties Vegetarian a colourful collection of recipes inspired by the Mediterranean, was published in September 1994 by Merehurst, followed by Pasta, Pizza, Polenta in autumn 1995. Real Fast Vegetarian Food which was published by Metro Books in autumn 1996, went straight into the Sunday Times paperback reference charts and was nominated for the BBC Good Food Magazine's Cookbook of the Year. A fourth book Ursula's Italian Cakes and Desserts was published by Metro books in autumn 1997 and Dorling Kindersley published The Bread Book, which Ursula co-authored. Truly Italian was published by Mitchell Beazley in Spring 1999 and a follow up called Bringing Italy Home was published August 2001. She has also published Risotto for Ryland, Peters and Small and Truly Madly Pasta was published by Quadrille. Mitchell Beazley published Italy Sea to Sky in May 2003 Trattoria in 2004, followed by La Dolce Vita a book of desserts in 2005 and most recently, Ursula Ferrigno's Italian Cookery Course, 2006 and The New Family Bread Book (2007).

She specialises in demonstrating to the public the making of Italian breads, Italian soups, risottos, vegetables, fruit dishes and every kind of pasta dish.