Featuring easy and accessible recipes from all over Italy, you will be transported into the very heart of the Italian home to learn how to make great-tasting Italian food. Pasta styles range from pici – a type of hand-rolled spaghetti that is simple to make – to lumachelle della duchessa – tiny, ridged, cinnamon-scented tubes that take patience and dexterity. Each recipe is taught by a different granny - or nonna - as one would say in Italian. The reader is given a little introduction to the nonna and where she’s from. We are also given some interesting facts about the dish or the unique ingredients. She lived in a very remote, rural part of Liguria in the mountains, and there’s so many villages that have been depopulated, and people have gone into cities. The resilience of these women came through in a lot of the stories. The fact is that in poor society, money isn’t the currency, labor is. Society functions through helping each other.”

The whole point of recipes is that you make them your own. The publishers like me to put a lot of detail in [the book], but trust yourself. Of course, you can substitute. Follow the recipes, but if your taste buds tell you something different or if you can’t find something, swap it out. You will make it something wonderful.” To begin with, weigh out your eggs and flour separately. Tip the flour onto a pasta board and make a generous well in the middle in which to pour your eggs. Put the clove in a mortar with the pine nuts, then pound with the pestle and grind the two together into a rough paste. She loves growing her own vegetables and cooking from scratch. She even makes her own flour using locally grown whole wheat; it has a wonderful nutty aroma, but don't worry, you do not need to do this! We tested her recipe using 00 flour. If you do want to copy Nadia and use your own wholewheat flour, then sift the flour first, to remove the flakes of bran, otherwise your silk handkerchiefs will be more hessian in texture. Add the pasta to the sauté pan. Toss the pasta with the courgette and 1 tablespoon of the mint and sauté the mixture for a minute or so. If you feel the pasta is drying out too much, add a bit of pasta water.

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Make the egg pasta dough as described in Silk handkerchiefs with basil pesto from Liguria, below, swapping one egg for 55ml of water. Leave the dough, covered, to rest for at least 30 minutes. The layout is very concise, and complemented by beautifully wholesome photos of the nonne in action or of their completed dishes. Learn how to make pasta like Italian nonnas do. Inspired by the hugely popular YouTube channel of the same name, Pasta Grannies is a wonderful collection of time-perfected Italian pasta recipes from the people who have spent a lifetime cooking for love, not a living: Italian grandmothers. Spending time with our family and friends has never felt so important - and so often this means cooking for the ones you love.

When you have formed a ball, turn it out onto the pasta board and knead for 5 minutes until smooth and lightly bouncy. Cover and let it rest for at least 30 minutes. Pour a slug of olive oil into a large casserole dish. Heat this over a medium heat for a couple of minutes then start browning the beef a few pieces at a time. Once all the beef pieces have a bit of colour, return them to the pan along with the vegetables. I recount a conversation to Bennison that I’d had with my neighbor earlier that day in which I’d raved about a cookbook I loved.To make the pesto, remove the skin from the garlic clove and halve the clove lengthways. If there's a green shoot (or anima, as Italians call it), hoik it out and discard. Wash and dry the basil leaves thoroughly. Add a handful at a time to the mortar, with a pinch of salt, then pound and grind the leaves into the paste. To make the sauce, add a slug of olive oil to a large saute or frypan and place it over a medium heat. Add the onion, carrot and celery and fry gently for 7-10 minutes until soft. Add the garlic and dried red chilli flakes and a pinch of salt and cook for another minute or so, making sure the garlic doesn't brown. Bennison’s father worked in agricultural development, so the family was based on a farm in Kenya for much of her childhood in the early 1960s. Traveling, exploring, and learning about food and its cultivation is evidently in her blood. Indeed, Bennison was a management consultant in international development for most of her career, which entailed a constant itinerary of places, faces, and novelty. Food was both a comfort and her avenue to a shared language in far-flung places: “Food was the unifying theme. The first thing I’d do when I arrived in a country [that was new to me] would be to go and look at the markets to see what was on offer and how people were eating.” When you have good ingredients, you don't have to worry about cooking. They do the work for you."– Lucia, 85

Once it's kneaded, place the dough in a bowl that fits the size of your ball and cover it with a close-fitting lid or dampened cloth which has not been cleaned in perfumed detergent; air is the enemy of pasta, and you don't want it to dry out. Let this rest for at least 30 minutes.Pour in the water, then add the greens. Give them a good stir and add the tomatoes. Chop up the herbs so you have a good 2 tablespoons and stir this mixture into the sauce. Continue to simmer for 20 minutes or so.

Bennison is adamant that anyone, anywhere, can make these recipes, with a sprinkle of creative spirit. But, I say to Bennison, there is something magical about the texture, the aesthetic, and weight of a cookbook that remains so enticing, a quality that is missing from a search engine-generated recipe. The pasta very soon became a vehicle for celebrating women of a certain age,” she says. “I feel strongly that food isn’t just the preserve of the young. Women over 65 were underrepresented in the food media, and I wanted to celebrate their experience. No classical TV channel would commission something with no jeopardy, no macho-style throwing of the pans around.” When you’re poor, eating meat is a great luxury and one that you don’t turn down. For many of these women growing up, they ate meat twice a year, but they don’t call themselves vegetarian,” she says. “For these women, growing up, everything mattered. They were the workforce of the family, working in the fields, making food from scratch at an early age. Everything is used. Excess pasta is turned into a frittata or a soup, and you eat modestly. If you place importance on food, you cherish it. It’s a way of bringing family together.” There are recipes for vegetarians, as well as seafood or meat lovers. Readers are also spoiled with a sprinkling of traditional pizza, pie and pastry recipes.Of choosing the nonne and recipes to include in Comfort Food, she says it was a puzzle of trying to combine recipes that are mostly easy enough for home cooks while also throwing a few challenging recipes in for enthusiasts. After about 10 minutes the meat will browned and will have crispy edges. Remove the pieces from the pan and set aside. Use the lovely fat to sauté your courgettes over a medium heat for 4 minutes or so until the pieces are soft.