Rachel Roddy’s recipe for hazelnut and mushroom ragu with pasta | A kitchen in Rome

“Antica e desueta [archaic and forgotten] is a beguiling introduction to a recipe,” I said to my friend, the cook and writer Stefano Arturi, when we talked on the phone the other week. He laughed, noting that those words in relation to recipes made him both curious and, because of their foggy closeness to mythologising, suspicious.It was his recipe for hazelnut ragu that started it all, sending us down more or less the same paths in books and online, where we met more of the same thing: fabulously contradictory stories in which ragu made from hazelnuts was an ancient Piedmontese dish of great beauty born out of economy and hardship, and also “forgotten”, which justifies the lack of any evidence as to where it actually came from. Yet also, a breezy, contemporary dish that, like so many modern dishes, was scorned by those faithful to more traditional (ancient, authentic) versions. There were other claims, too, such as “This is the authentic recipe” and “This is an improvisational dish: do as you wish”

Pappardelle alla Yorkshire? Gourmet producers inspire a boom in British pasta

The UK imports more than £1bn worth of the Italian staple a year, but now sales are taking off for makers in Yorkshire, Cumbria and beyondNutty, chewy and with a chestnut-brown hue, it’s a far cry from the pasta you may be used to serving with your bolognese. But the Northern Pasta Co’s products, from rigatoni to fusilli, are part of a growing wave of the Italian staple being made in the UK.The Cumbria-based company’s sales increased 357% in the year to February 2024, and from the spring its products will be sold on Ocado. Similarly, the Yorkshire Pasta Company, founded in 2019, is now stocked at more than 600 shops. Cornwall Pasta Co makes flavoured pastas, while Riverford sells pasta made by the Fresh Flour Company in Devon

Notes on chocolate: mini eggs are major fun

Mini eggs have such a special place in our hearts and mouths. I’ve heard of them getting people through exams, divorce, long train journeys, sickbeds. When I say mini eggs I mean a sugar-coated, egg-shaped confection containing chocolatey things.Marks & Spencer does an acceptable ‘every day’ version for £2 a bag (Speckled Eggs). If you want to go posh, then you cannot better Chocolate Detective’s Blue Tit Eggs (go for the praline version), £14

Putting Mumbai on the menu: Dishoom’s founders in the city that inspired them

The team behind the much-loved restaurants explore the places that inspired their ‘Bombay comfort food’ dishesWhen Shamil Thakrar talks about Bombay, he has a favourite word: palimpsest, “something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form”. In fact, Shamil has been (fondly) banned from using it by his cousin Kavi, with whom he co-founded Dishoom, the hugely successful group of Bombay-inspired restaurants, 15 years ago.But palimpsest is an apt word to describe Bombay – or Mumbai, as it is known internationally – the port city on India’s west coast, where multicultural influences eternally trickle in without erasing the layers of what came before. Two eras of imperial rule, two waves of Persian migration, a Hindu majority and a large Muslim community, people from every Indian state, language and ethnicity rubbing shoulders with one another, Maharatis, Gujaratis, Punjabis, Goans; 19th-century gothic architecture alongside art deco, neoclassical opposite mid-century, and the onward march of new development along every major road. And it is absolutely its own place, of itself: “Everything has coalesced here and become ‘Bombayified’,” says Shamil, as we wander around Colaba, the southernmost tip of the old city

Wine: fantastic specialities from Australia and New Zealand

Neudorf Rosie’s Block Moutere Chardonnay, Nelson, New Zealand 2022 (from £34.99, tauruswines.co.uk; bowlandforestvintners.co

Don’t Tell Dad: ‘It’s a class act’ – restaurant review

Don’t Tell Dad, 10-14 Lonsdale Road, London NW6 6RD. Snacks and small plates £5-£14, large plates £18-£29, desserts £9, wines from £36Don’t Tell Dad in London’s Queen’s Park is a self-declared neighbourhood restaurant in a knowingly dishevelled neighbourhood. It sits on a part-cobbled, mews-style lane which was once home to stable blocks and very much looks like it. If you want to snoop at the red-rust frontage on Google Street View, however, you can’t. It’s a private street, through which Google’s cars may never pass