Mythology, cats and ceramics

 A view from Relais Regina Giovanna

Off the boat and into the Sorrento sunshine, we were far too early for hotel check-in but just in time for the start of lunch. Of the two waterside eateries, we picked Ristorante Bar Ruccio, since it seemed to have the most conventional and Italian-looking menu.

As it happened, it also had cats. Although not before we had food in front of us.

I rarely opt for soup – it’s usually too filling a starter for me – but the primavera caught my attention. I’m glad it did. A huge bowl of beautiful, seasonal vegetables in a light but flavoursome stock. Genuinely scrummy – bang full of flavour. I had grilled octopus next, refusing to let myself be put off by the previous evening’s poor Neapolitan experience.

A generous portion, it was shared with the two cats – a ginger tabby and, we believe, her daughter; still technically a kitten, but with a very grave face and advanced skills in the ‘give-me-food’ telepathy department.

Mummy tabby cat

It was a pleasant meal and the cats – who were clearly not considered a problem by the staff – added to the experience. Then it was into a taxi for the trip up the steep, hairpin road into central Sorrento and then south along the coast, hugging the hillside, to the hotel.

Relais Regina Giovanna is a series of buildings, gloriously refurbished and set in a 50-acre estate. The hotel itself has a dozen rooms, while a block 500 metres away has five apartments for self catering. Other buildings are dotted around, including one that hosts yoga classes.

The estate is a joy to wander in. It’s never going to be crowded and includes olive and lemon groves, plus the vegetable and herb gardens that supply the hotel restaurant. Relais Regina Giovanna makes its own olive oil and limoncello.

There’s a small, private beach at the top of a small inlet, with clear emerald waters washing gently in. Unfortunately, we were too early in the season for that to be open. Another time, then. And more of that another day.

‘I want the octopus’

Signs let you know what birds you might see: during our stay, we spotted at least one buzzard, many white-throated swifts and flashes of bright yellow that we eventually identified as canaries, plus abundant Italian wall lizards.

In places, you can hear only the sea below, the wind in the trees, birds singing and your own thoughts. If you want an idea of paradise …

And at this point, let’s digress for a spot of history.

Queen Giovanna D’Angiò was a sovereign of Naples. It seems that, between 1371 and 1435, she often went to the area. And it now bears her name.

So this is a point: the whole area reeks of history: you simply cannot escape it.

And at this juncture, let’s take a step back a few decades.

In the first year at my (state) grammar school, everyone did Latin. I took to it like the proverbial duck to water, while modern languages never caught my imagination.

Around the estate

To be fair, that might have been influenced by my father who, while he had nothing negative to say about Latin, was disgruntled at my having to learn French and, when I had to swap Latin for German in my second year, was apoplectic. It was not, after all, Why We Won the War.

But stopping Latin after a year meant that I was not introduced to the mythology of southern Europe. When I finally came across any mythology it was years later, when a friend told me the story of the Nibelungen.

I was gripped. Memory can be a dodgy thing, but I don’t remember my parents telling stories like that (or even reading to me). German and Norse mythology leapt in to a vacuum. I’ve dipped into the Classical variety since, but it’s always seemed tame.

Yet between the presence of Vesuvius and the knowledge that this part of the Mediterranean has the far older sounding name of the Tyrrhenian Sea, something started to come to life.

On a long, narrow street in Sorrento, after passing shops laden with mass-produced souvenirs, we found Terrerosse.

Terrerosse bowl

It’s a small shop with space at the back to work. There, Allessandro and Enrica create unique ceramics that are bound up in the mythology of the region.

Sorrento … the name comes from ‘siren/mermaid’: winged creatures that became sea-bound.

If you’re in Sorrento, seek out Via Fuoro, 73 – because the work of Allessandro and Enrica has a magical, mythical quality you’ll rarely find elsewhere.

We’ll be going back in September. Italy has captivated us. In August, we will now spending time in the shadow of Etna, at Aci Trezza, before making our way back to Sorrento and Relais Regina Giovanna. I fully intend to make a trip to Terrerosse my primary ceramic aim of the the holiday.

And in the meantime, I find myself increasingly dreaming of an amazing mythological landscape that is coming alive for me as never before.

Blue sky thinking

Parts of the UK are basking in sunshine this week - but the temperature has been climbing for a week or so.

When that happens, your mind starts turning away from the big, comforting dishes of the cold, dark months to lighter fodder for lighter days.

And then it's difficult to avoid thoughts automatically turning toward the food of the Mediterranean.

It's some years ago that I started becoming aware of southern Italian cooking, thanks in large part to River Café Two Easy. Without ever really giving it much thought, it became a favourite book - particularly turned to whenever The Other Half was out of town and I was cooking for myself and could eat things like squid.

Alongside very rustic soups, roasted meat dishes (the three-and-a-half hour chicken that I do comes from this book) are various pasta dishes - many of them striking even on the page because of their extraordinary simplicity.

Take the classic Sicilian combination of sardines with pasta. In that book, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers use filleted fish with garlic, flat-leaf parsley, dried chillies, pine nuts, raisins, saffron, lemon and, of course, good virgin oil, and serve it with linguine.

It's not far removed from the apotheosis of exactly that fish and pasta combination, sardo.

Actually, I knew the basics of this specific mix of flavours from an earlier purchase - a book of 32 Practical Pasta Sauces (no author listed) that I picked up for something like £1.99 in Lidl some years ago.

On the basis of cost per recipe, it's possibly the best value cookery book I have.

There's a nod toward sardo in its pages - although it uses fennel bulb, thinly sliced, instead of the dill-like herb that is so much a part of Sicilian cooking and grows alongside the roads of that island.

Otherwise, the only real difference is that it skips the saffron and raisins.

In Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Sicily, however, we get something closer to the real deal.

His Pasta con le sarde has the sardines, of course, but with anchovies too as well as the saffron. And "3 sprigs of wild fennel" of the sort (hopefully) that is now growing in a pot in my garden and which I was astonished to find on Columbia Road being sold as 'bronze fennel'. The raisins are replaced in Locatelli's version with the greater succulence of sultanas.

Okay, there are one or two other refinements: a little white wine here, some breadcrumbs and some chopped onion there, plus a small amount of 'strattu, a Sicilian type of particularly intense tomato purée. Or you can just use purée, since you're unlikely to find 'strattu anywhere outside Sicily, where making it is very much a community affair.

And if you haven't got wild fennel, you can use a teaspoon of fennel seeds, soaked in a little water.

But in those very Arabic ingredients of the nuts and the spice and the dried fruit, together with the chilli and the lemon and the really good oil, you start to get a sense of the island's history - and its cuisine.

Now close your eyes for a minute and imagine it all as fresh as it's possible to be, cooked and eaten under a blazing sun and a saturated, azure sky.

But back to that Lidl book: regular readers may remember a dish of roasted tomato, pepper and chilli, with toasted, ground almonds that has become a favourite. The nuts and the chillies suggest the south of Italy.

Another dish from the same book - actually described as a "Sicilian sauce" - combines roasted tomatoes, pine nuts, sultanas, anchovies and tomato purée.

Returning to River Café Two Easy' I've tried several more dishes - and often the ones with some crumbled dried chilli and lemon.

There's a lovely combination of squid, courgette, garlic, chilli, lemon, with olive oil and marjoram, that's served with spaghetti.

And another favourite of scallops, pan fried with chilli, garlic, borlotti beans, lemon, virgin oil and rocket.

Time and again, since starting to discover these combinations of flavours, I return to them at the first opportunity.

And the Locatelli book is expanding my range. He has a beautiful and ridiculously simple salad with chopped green olives and celery at its heart, plus finely-chopped mint, and finished with a simple dressing of red wine vinegar, white wine vinegar, a little water, seasoning and virgin oil - and since it'll keep in the fridge for six months, it's not extravagant or wasteful to make a batch up even for one person.

Regardless of the currant weather, perhaps the emphasis on simplicity and quality ingredients that are the hallmarks of southern Italian cooking in general and Sicilian cooking in particular really is blue sky thinking when it comes to culinary matters?

An Italian job

The weekend began in conventional style: wakened early by a combination of my internal alarm clock, the light outside and the cats, I made coffee and hauled out various recipe books.

Elizabeth David's Italian Food had me reading of ricci (sea urchins) that taste of "the sea, iodine and salt" and should be eaten by scooping out the coral flesh with bread, but "within sight and sound of the sea, preferably after a long swim, and washed down with plenty of cold, local white wine".

You can almost smell and taste them and, if you shut your eyes, the picture that forms in your mind's eye is so tangible that it's almost possible to feel the salty air in the soft down on your flesh.

But this is Hackney; it is early March and the early morning was grey - grey with a vengeance.

At least concentrating on the matter of food helps lift the spirits.

The Other Half had defrosted the freezer, so it was clearly time to start making things to fill it up again.

Since he was off to the other side of London for a rugby league match in the early afternoon, and I needed bag carrying help, we headed up to Broadway Market together nice and early.

With Mrs D's evocative writings in mind, I was about to go all Italian.

Saturday evening was easy: roast chicken, done à la River Cafe Easy Two and which I've mentioned more than once. Three and a half hours and the best roast chicken I've ever produced – every time.

Yesterday, it was served with baby new potatoes that were boiled and then finished off in the oven, for the final half hour of cooking the bird, in olive oil and with fleur de sel and a spring of rosemary.

And then there was some cavallo nero, the Italian kale, which I'd not cooked before.

It was remarkably easy. As per the same book, you cut the cores out of each leaf, and then cook them for five minutes in boiling, salted water. Then refresh and drain. When you're nearing readiness, smash up some fennel seeds and dried chili, and slice some garlic, popping all that into a pan with olive oil and allowing it to cook before adding the leaves for a minute at the end.

Voila! Or whatever they say in Italy. The job was a good un.

In the afternoon, I'd concentrated on making nice things from a vast (and heavy) bag of lemons, plus a 300g bag of frozen, organic raspberries.

The latter went into a very easy sorbet.

The lemons - organic, unwaxed and from Sicily, which place seems to be cropping up more and more in my imagination at present - were unbelievably fragrant.

Zesting and juicing as though my life depended on it, I turned 15 into a sorbet, as per Felicity Cloake's Guardian piece here, while several others were added to a luxurious custard made with organic, unpasturised milk from a Jersey herd, plus unctuous double cream from another Jersey herd, and then popped into the freezer to form a gelato, a form of ice cream.

I haven't the space for an ice cream maker, but you really can manage without, as the four boxes now in the freezer will attest.

And the taste of the gelato in particular attests to something else - the merits of using the very best ingredients you can get your hands on.

The evening concluded with a double dose of Sicily: art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon and chef Giorgio Locatelli continuing their cultural and culinary tour of the island. And then Montalbano, another episode of the Sicilian police procedural based on Andrea Camilleri's novels.

A fitting end to a very Italian start to the weekend.

And all after our little part of Hackney even managed to throw up a crime this week that would hardly have been out of place in Montelbano's Mafia-ridden world.

Looking out of the kitchen window as I prepped those Sicilian lemons, I could see across the road, past a block of flats and then to the Regent's Canal. On the far bank crime scene tape was visible, along with police officers.

There, earlier in the week, the torso of former soap actor Gemma McCluskie had been found floating. Her brother is currently in custody.

It was a striking concatenation of events and ideas, flavours and smells, light and darkness.