You’ve chosen books on Mediterranean cooking but only one on Italian food: Sicilian Food by Mary Taylor Simeti. Is there any reason for this?

I’ve lived in Italy for nearly 40 years. But I don’t like English-language books on Italian food. I don’t really enjoy Italian cookbooks either. Most of the time, I learn from people in food markets and restaurants and other places I visit on my travels.

But this particular book is fascinating. Mary Taylor Simeti, who I’ve met, went to Sicily as a young graduate to work as a social activist. She met and married a Sicilian and brought up a family there. She got interested in food as everyone does who raises a family.

Sicilian Food is not just a book of recipes. Simeti writes about food in a very interesting way, explaining the origins of some dishes and the different versions. This is my kind of cookery book. The American version originally had a lovely title: Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food. The title points to the book’s rich details of Sicily itself. Writing about food is, after all, social history. And that’s what I find most interesting.

Why pomp? Is Sicilian food particularly festive?

When the south of Italy was known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Spanish king brought over lots of aristocrats as back-up. This was in case the local people got fed up with him. And these nouveaux riches decided they should have French chefs, who each insisted on being called ‘Monsieur’. The local people couldn’t get their tongues around it so they called them ‘Monzu’ instead.

The locals wanted their pasta: their great love. The chefs thought they should start with a French soup. But they then invented festive dishes of pasta and rice that could be made in advance, moulded and cooked at the last minute. There’s a lovely scene in Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa where they are all sitting down expecting to be served a French soup. They are on tenterhooks. A wonderful timballo of pasta comes in and they relax.

As in Spain, there is great ceremony attached to everything in life in Sicily and Naples, including food.

What are your favourite foods in this Sicilian food book?

I was doing a cooking school in Sicily recently and I discovered a different version of these moulded dishes, done with rice. It’s great for dinner parties. You cook risotto beforehand and, while it’s still hot, you stir in fresh tomato sauce and some parmesan. You line a mould at the bottom and the sides and fill the middle with anything you like: meat or crumbled Italian sausage. Top that with slices of cheese. In Sicily they use hard-boiled egg, which doesn’t really appeal to me. Then you cover it with rice again and pop it in the oven for 20 minutes. When you turn it out of the mould it looks spectacular.

On our tour of the Mediterranean, where are we going next?

If we’re travelling anti-clockwise we should head to Morocco. The great thing about Moroccan food is that you can go off and do your own thing once you’ve learned a bit about it. You can make up your own versions because the spices and colours are so enchanting.

With Moroccan food, I always go back to Robert Carrier. There’s a very beautiful illustrated edition of the book. You turn over a couple of pages and you can’t wait to start cooking. You feel you’re going to be able to conjure up all this magic and colour from it.

Although he can’t show the extraordinary smells of Morocco.

That’s true. But the publishers will get around to that eventually! The other thing about Robert Carrier is that he makes it manageable. Many ‘ethnic’ cookbooks are so complicated. My pet hate is when they tell you to take a portion of a recipe from one page and use it with a recipe from another. In the end you give up.

What’s so appealing about Moroccan food?

The fact that you have a lot of lamb and chicken but also a lot of fruit. And the spices are slightly different from the Middle East. But the main thing is the sensation of the fruit and nuts with the meat protein. You don’t really get that with European food.

One of my favourite recipes from the Carrier book is his version of harira soup – the lentil broth Muslims drink during Ramadan. This soup is also alluded to in the Old Testament. Esau is said to have ‘sold his birthright for a mess of potage’, which always fascinated me when I was young. In Italian we call it un piatto di lenticchie.

Many Muslim communities have different versions of harira. But Robert Carrier’s is probably the first version I made. The lentils, ginger, saffron and other spices take on a completely different character. It’s a meat soup, made with pieces of lamb and a meat stock. But you can do a vegetarian version.

So you think Carrier stands the test of time? Wasn’t his heyday the 1970s?

The dishes in some of his other books are certainly the things that people would eat in restaurants in those days: steak diane or something like that. But he had a house in Morocco and lived there, so this particular book feels different.

We are moving on around the rim of the Mediterranean.