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This recipe was orginally written on prison walls by Galileo Galilei in the early 17th century. There, a prison warden, a distant ancestor of mine, copied the recipe down and took it home for his wife to cook. Times were hard though and during the great Rome winter of 1642, the prison warden was forced to burn the recipe as fuel. Before doing so though, he had the recipe tattooed on his arm so it would not be lost

When the prison warden died, his wife preserved the recipe at a backyard tannery in Tivoli. This recipe was then handed down through the generations. At one stage, in 1872, it would almost certainly have been destroyed had it not been miraculously plucked from a lava stream flowing from the mouth of Mount Vesuvius

It was finally given to me in my 21st year during a secret family ritual which involved tiramisu, bocce, and rolling cans down an inclined plane. But now I feel the time has come to share it with the world…

Aglio e Olio (for two)

Chop a dozen chillis (or more), about 9 cloves of garlic, and cook in a generous amount of olive oil pressed from the first moon’s harvest by holy monks (if you can’t find such oil then any cold pressed extra virgin olive oil will suffice). Cook Vermicelli spaghetti and drain. Mix the chillis and garlic into the spaghetti and add a handful of finely chopped Italian parsley. Serve with parmesan, crusty bread and your best cask red