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Together these combine to make the sauce this region is most famous for and which is almost a staple of our own diet now, too: pesto.FarinataServes 8-10 as snacksThis is one of the tastiest and simplest things I’ve eaten for a long time. It was so delicious I certainly wouldn’t mind eating it a few times a week. We were eating a stand-up lunch before our return flight at the local organic olive oil mill or inguano, Frantoio Sommariva in Albegna, which belongs to the Sommariva family. As a couple of the locals told me over a plate of farinata – a dish of chickpea flour, water and oil baked in a brick oven – this type of dish was a typical daily meal.

The oil these and many more groves produced was once one of the region’s main trading commodities. It was exported from ports like Genova, Christopher Columbus’s home town, which in turn imported spices from the East to sell on throughout Europe.
Much of the rest of the region was not so wealthy and had to make do with simple foods. I’d always wondered where all those flowers in the garage forecourt came from, and I’m sure most friends would rather be given a bottle of olive oil than a sad bunch of flowers, so although the flowers look extraordinary, I’d rather see more olive trees growing.I was there recently for a short olive and oil immersion with an Italian food company and our hotel, La Meridiana, was on a golf course where even the fairways were lined with olive trees. Put two quarts milk and half a pound of butter into the pan; keep basting it all the while it is roasting with the butter and milk until the whole is used, and your hare will be enough [done] You may mix the liver in the pudding, if you like it You must first parboil it, and then chop it fine.. Liguria once produced more olive oil than anywhere else in Italy.

Now, as you cross the border from Monaco leaving Provence behind, and drive through Bordighera and San Remo, you find yourself amid fields of carnations. Sew up the belly, spit it [put on to a spit], and lay it to the fire, which must be a good one Your dripping pan must be very clean and nice. The clue is in the first line: cas’d means catched (or caught). The “pudding” is a stuffing, the element that lifts this simple country recipe to an elegant dinner party dish for the aspirational 18th-century metropolitan.Take your Hare when it is cas’d and make pudding; take a quarter of a pound of sewet [suet], and as much crumbs of bread, a little parsley shred fine, and about as much thyme as will rest on a six-pence, when shred; an anchovy, shred small, a very little pepper and salt, some nutmeg , two eggs, a little lemon-peel: mix all this together, and put it into the hare. Would Nigel Slater, for example, have brought us food so comforting it can lift the soul had he not experienced such sadness in his childhood, documented so touchingly in his autobiographical book, Toast, the Story of a Boy’s Hunger?So Hannah Glasse, faced with financial struggle and mourning the loss of her idyllic Northumbrian childhood in a wealthy household, brings her know-how to cooks. She makes their lives one hundred times better and spawns several generations of well-fed families – she gets little thanks and life dishes her a few more blows.

Dickson-Wright, who herself has not had the easiest of lives, is a Glasse-ean cook. I remember her planning a dinner party that would include a dish of roasted veal loin, stuffed with veal kidneys That’s very high class, very Glasse.Suffer, lady, suffer Hannah Glasse is on BBC4 at 9pm on Friday. First Catch Your Hare is published by Prospect Books, priced £20 To Roast a Hare This is the recipe that inspired the words “First Catch your Hare” – a phrase that doesn’t actually appear in The Art of Cookery but for which Hannah Glasse is famous. The hell of a restaurant kitchen introduces the sensual pleasures of good food and no one looks back etc, etc. The unhappiness of others is responsible, then, for some very delicious recipes. And it’s not just the girls; every other chef’s biography opens either with tales of tragic loss or grumblings of childhood on a sink estate. No image exists of her – the only record is that of her death in 1770, an announcement in the London Gazette.Compare this to the fanfare accorded to Mrs Beeton’s career, and it’s easy to see why Dickson-Wright has taken up the Glasse cause.

But there is a common factor between the two – and with other successful recipe writers. The lives of Beeton, Glasse, Elizabeth David, Fanny Cradock, Alexis Soyer (soon to be the subject of yet another television programme) and even some contemporary cookery writers, notably Nigella Lawson, share a running seam of tragedy and drama.Their knowledge of pain and suffering must relate to their ability to choose, for us, food that brings comfort and happiness. Neither was as successful as The Art of Cookery but worse than that is the fact that this woman who made such an extraordinary and valuable contribution to other women’s lives was written out of history – both her family’s and ours. Poor business decisions led eventually to her being declared a bankrupt and being sent to debtors’ jail. Before entering the jail she sold the copyright of The Art of Cooking.