Eleonora Galasso’s Roman recipes: five Italian classics

Bucatini with clams, vegetable tortino and grandma’s custard pie: traditional-with-a-twist recipes from the Italian capital

Eleonora Galasso’s As the Romans Do is cookbook as a Technicolor vision of Rome that takes our romantic notions about life in the Italian capital and runs with them. What Romans do, if the book is to be believed (the subtitle is La Dolce Vita in a Cookbook), is ride Vespas through markets in flowing orange dresses, skip through fountains à la Anita Ekberg and feast in palazzos that are bedecked with Renaissance art.

It’s a glorious fantasy, but what, I ask Galasso when we meet in London, is her life really like, when you strip away the romance and the cinema references? It’s different, surely, to how she portrays it in the book.