A Dinner in Rome

Rome in the morning smells like burnt seed oil – like a fryer that's been left on too long, hot and electric. We (my wife and I) are here to cook what we are calling a Britalian dinner with our friend Gaia who lives in Rome and works at Latteria Studio, a small space on a residential street used for cooking classes and cookbook shoots and pop-ups with a marble sink, a fearsome oven and an extremely impressive array of crockery and cookware including a classic British pie-bird of which more later. The idea is for the dinner to be guided by the market and so we deliberately avoid planning too much in advance although we do decide the dessert, baked stuffed peaches in cold custard, and we think we should probably decide the main bit of the main course. An initial desire to make a big pork pie, very English, is abandoned before we even get to Rome; as it warms up here I am reminded of what it is to mess around with pastry in a hot kitchen, and anyway we don't really have time in this flying visit to make a pork pie (hand-mince the filling, make a jellied stock, rest the whole thing at least overnight). I come across a guiding principle for the dinner in the book I take with me to read on the plane, Iain Sinclair's Edge of the Orison:

prodigiously English, meat that tasted, that offered up the beast's biography as you chewed, platters of vegetables from the kitchen garden, summer puddings: which way to shove the port?