Confessions of a pasta master

If William Black is a pasta master, he's in no hurry to prove it in his cook's tour of regional Italy.

It's only in the book's penultimate section that we get down to the hard stuff. But, mind you, not too hard. Al dente pasta is - and I've never read a better description of it - 'the middle ground between crunchiness and sloppiness'.

Black suggests a simple, if messy, method of testing whether spaghetti is sufficiently cooked: throw a strand of it up to the ceiling and, if it stays up there, it's done.

Anyone who can make polenta sound interesting deserves some kind of medal. Black gets one from me, though I wonder what evidence he has for declaring that Hannibal almost certainly was a polenta guzzler.

Any recipe that begins with 'Take 600g of donkey meat' automatically excludes itself from my must-try list. The same applies to eel-head risotto and to the pecorino cheese snack that has worms wriggling about in it.

But it's when we get to Sardinia that things turn really nasty. Before local chefs can prepare polpo con l'agliata (garlic octopus), fishermen bash the inoffensive cephalopod 100 times against a rock - or give it a quick bite through the nerves of its head. It takes a committed gourmand to write stuff like this, let alone eat the poor thing afterwards.

William Black has some Italian blood in his veins, which probably explains why, like many an Italophile (myself included), he prefers la Cucina Italiana to haute cuisine.

Al Dente is a good read - funny, at times poetic, and most useful. It is travelogue, recipe book, history-without-tears and a detailed account of one man's dig into Italian soil to find his ancestral roots. And it is so passionately subjective that when Black is eulogising over Sicilian icecream stuffed inside a fresh brioche, he confesses that his keyboard is dribbling with drool. For my part, I found myself salivating when he itemises the ingredients for, and the effect of, Ischia-style rabbit stew.

Mussolini said Italian meals shouldn't last longer than three minutes. A pity William Black's book wasn't written 60 years earlier. It might have sharpened Il Duce's appetite for food and blunted his appetite for conquest.