Having climbed back to the surface after two days of torrential rain battering the skylights, My faith, assuming I had any in the first place, was restored both by the sun blessed cookery of Giorgio Locatelli and the verve and sheer joy of the art that Andrew Graham-Dixon unlocks for us.

After binge watching them again: From the Stones to the Stars, The Art of the Feast and In the Footsteps of the Poets. The art of Piedmond, Lombardy, Bologna, Calabria, Rome and the Cinque Terre is laid before us anew. “Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?” Asks Leonardo da Vinci.

What struck me was the combination of Locatelli with his sense of wonder and perfectly calibrated familial, political and moral compass (I know, it’s hard to believe I am talking about a chef) combined with Graham-Dixon’s lightly worn erudition, is utterly beguiling. Before the end of each programme I find myself frantically surfing google (again) to find out how to get to where they are whilst taking notes on what they see and do.

Locatelli is at his most fervent when describing the cookbook he carries closest to his heart Pellegrino Artusi’s The Art of Eating Well. In fact so well does he articulate his love for the book that I found myself shelling out £30 for a copy online.

It is indeed a thing of wonder – written in a gossipy, slightly hectoring tone (like a conversation with a favourite uncle). Here’s Artusi on his long struggle to get it published…

“Because my book smells of stew, do you disdain to take it seriously? The day will come when words which nourish the mind and body will be widely sought.” (It eventually surfaced in 1891.)

On apple strudel… “It may look like a giant leech, but you’ll like the way it tastes.” And meatballs… “A dish everyone knows how to make, beginning with the jackass.” Anyone enthralled by culinary tales, legends and dreams, cannot fail to be seduced.

Artusi is credited with popularising pasta in the North of Italy. 

No small thing – as Guiseppe Garibaldi put it: “It will be spaghetti, I swear to you, that unifies Italy.” He is right on the money regarding diets, describing the best as “not eating or drinking when you are not hungry or thirsty.” Effortlessly cutting through the bullshit which attends that debate today.

And, in our age of ‘multiple food allergies’, there is even a section “for those people of weak stomach.”

As I write, the horsemeat fiasco labours on. To me it seems simple, label things correctly ‘our lasagne may contain horsemeat’ and let people make an informed choice. As Pellegrino Artusi pointed out in 1891, you get what you paid for.

If I were on Desert Island Discs and needed to choose a book to be marooned with it would be this endlessly giving, sprawling, encyclopaedic masterpiece would be my choice.A curious choice as I’m only half way through reading it for the first time!

On the other hand

I’ve also been boning up on Molecular Gastronomy as you do when the rain is still pouring down in sheets: So Molecular Gastronomy as retro food? Hard to swallow I know but, as far back as the Battle of Mahon, chefs were making stable emulsions out of eggs, oil & lemon juice – Mah(y)onaisse. The cognomens ‘fine dining’ and ‘gastro pub’ spurious titles at best, are now firmly retro… The Good Food Guide banned the words gastro pub from its’ publications years ago.

The declension (or deconstruction) of a single ingredient – say a tomato -into a granita, essence, jelly, foam and simple seeds, a classic El Bulli trope, will be rendered as Proustian ‘taste memory’ after the closure of the greatest restaurant of the times.

All the foams, spumes, cold cooking with nitro-gas, hot jellies, spherification techniques, will become retro overnight, which is to say, a parody of their former concept.