linguine (also known as bavette or trenette), so called because the oval cross-section of each strand means it resembles a lingua, a tongue,

Pecorino simply means sheep’s milk cheese and there are hundreds of varieties from all over Italy, the ancestors of which are some of the most ancient cheeses. In this book, however, I mostly refer to pecorino romano, sharp, salty, undeniably sheepish, also persistent, ringing in your mouth and stinging the tiny cut on your tongue long after the

To prepare salted anchovies for eating you need to brush away the salt, rinse and then open them out like a butterfly in order to ease away the bone. Once boned, blot, lay in a shallow dish, cover with olive oil and use within 3 days. A faff, but you are rewarded with fat, pink fillets of a quality and flavour usually found in only the most

From this nexus, agriculture moved, each area of the world developing its grain of choice, rice in Asia, corn in America, sorghum on the African continent and wheat in the Mediterranean. The French historian Fernand Braudel defines these as the ‘plants of civilization’. New societies were constructed around the chosen one, agriculture, economy,

The basis is clear: cooked chickpeas are added to some sort of soffritto (that is, the finely diced mix of onion, celery and carrot fried in oil), water or chickpea cooking liquid added, everything simmered with pasta added towards the end. Beyond this, the variations are endless and it is up to you. Pasta e ceci can be brothy or creamy; can

Busiate is still a homemade shape, one which varies according to the cook. At the Anna Tasca Lanza cooking school, for example, rather than a pierced rope busiate is more like a ringlet or a ribbon round a maypole. It is also a factory-made shape and one worth seeking out, the long spiral the most magnificent sauce-catcher imaginable, especially

To get vegetables to work as sauces, though, they need to be cooked until soft, coated generously with olive oil and seasoned with chilli, or garlic, or anchovy, the dish finished with cheese.

Pasta, from the word impasto – a magma of flour and liquid – can be made from any flour; the Italian pasta lexicon includes shapes made from chestnut flour, acorn flour, rice flour, corn flour, broad bean flour and buckwheat. The hard king and tender queen, though, are hard or durum wheat semolina flour and soft wheat 00 flour.

a huge family of tiny shapes that includes puntini (dots), stelline (stars), tempestine (little storms), anelli (rings), fregula (balls) and quadrucci (little squares),