I ate well every day of my life until I came to England Her mother, though deeply interested in food, was an intellectual who disdained the humdrum of everyday meal preparation. But she was a great cook. After the war, with no cook, she did it all. That's why Maria, our family cook, learnt so well.' Maria, with the family when Del Conte was a child, made wonderful potato gnocchi: 'Even after I was married, whenever I returned to Milan, Maria would come and make her gnocchi - she was the best!' Maria was warm and loved little Anna, who spent hours in the kitchen helping her. Del Conte was lucky too that, unlike an upper-class English girl of that era - for whom the kitchen would have been a forbidden place, and discussing food a social taboo - she gained an early appreciation of the traditional gastronomy of her own region, Lombardy, as well as enjoying Maria's local dishes from Friuli. While Del Conte was still quite young she had decided that polpette (meat balls) with truffle was her favourite dish. And her food education extended beyond choosing the right ingredients in shops: 'Though I was a city child, we would hunt for wild mushrooms in the woods, and pick dandelion and summer savory in the fields.' The annual seaside holiday in Liguria introduced her to pesto when it was unheard of outside that region. 'Pesto was unknown in Milan before the 1980s,' she says. The food of Liguria did not travel. And I can't make pesto here in Britain - well, I can, but I wouldn't choose to...It doesn't feel right to eat it here, the basil is just not scented enough; it needs the sun.' This leisured life of sunny holidays and cultural pursuits in Milan, of opera at La Scala and chic lunch parties was brought to a brutal halt when war came. We had to leave Milan and went to live with friends in the Emilia-Romagna. It was a terrible time. Life became dangerous as they harboured her elder brother, Guido - an army deserter - and some partisans in the attic, with four German officers billeted in the house below, knowing that discovery would mean the firing squad. 'As a teenager, I delivered messages on my bike; they were just verbal messages,' she says casually. She was once strafed by machine-gun fire from Allied fighter planes, and threw herself, bike and all, into a ditch to escape. A family friend was executed, and she herself twice went to prison on suspicion of being a partisan. 'It just seemed the way life was in those days,' she says. 'We didn't think about the danger.' Meanwhile, the family took part in the country life around them, tending the vegetable garden, rearing pigs, hens and chickens, bathing in a zinc bath once a week and knitting in the evenings. I ate very well during the war - it was the best food of my life. When I look back I feel a bit guilty that we had so much when in Milan and Rome people were starving. But a historian, a friend of my daughter, explained that only a quarter of all the produce got through to the cities. They attacked the roads, you see, so most of the food produced on the farm, stayed on the farm. Del Conte helped with the annual pig killing, making brawn from the head, and learnt to make salamis and prosciutto and the celebrated local pasta - all invaluable experience for a food writer. News of the war was scarce and life continued in its rural way until one day in April 1945: 'We saw an army lorry drive up, and the first soldier to jump out was black. We knew he couldn't be German - there wouldn't be black soldiers in the German army - and in that moment we realised the war was over!' Then wine was drunk and a wonderful feast prepared for those lucky soldiers and everyone laughed and laughed for sheer joy. The return to life in Milan after the war, when they had lost everything, was far from joyful and, after a spell at university, Del Conte decided to come to England as an au pair. 'I ate well every day of my life until I came to England,' she says, for, though she was grateful for the kindness and skilful cooking of her hostess in East Molesey, rationing in postwar Britain made it hard to produce anything approaching her diet in the Emilia-Romagna. In December 1949, in the last week of her stay in Britain, on a farewell visit to her beloved Westminster Abbey, a handsome, shy Oxford undergraduate made a slightly lame attempt to talk to her. 'It was a bit of a cliché, and I just laughed,' she says. She had met her future husband, Oliver Waley. When we married, the food in Britain was terrible. Well, the meat was good, better than it is now, but the rest was terrible - how do you make a pudding when you can only get salted butter?' she asks. Every Sunday the couple would go to church and then to the shops in Soho, among them Lina Stores and Camisa (both of which still exist), which served the Italian community in London. 'It is hard to be married abroad,' she says. 'It is not just the food; you don't have all those small cultural references, the fairy tales, the jokes, the sayings you have grown up with.' She and Waley shared a respect for reserve, for the British stiff upper lip and a dislike of the modern cult of sentimentality - 'all that crying and hugging and saying, "Love yoooo!" and, "You are amazing!' she says, with a curl of the lip. But I do love the British sense of humour - the Italians have none at all. Oliver [who died in 2007] was extremely witty, quick witted. He'd make a slight remark, quickly said, almost under his breath, that would be so funny and clever.' He was the first reader of all her books and the first taster of her recipes. It was a long and happy marriage, so readers of her recent biography, Risotto with Nettles, were taken aback by her almost casual admission of a passionate affair 10 years into her marriage and two other more minor affairs later. 'Oh dear, how I regret writing about it now,' she says. It is only one paragraph, but I made a mistake revealing it. The most important thing in my life was Oliver. It was not rare to have an affair, I can count quite a lot of people I know who did; it might last two months, six months...One of my friends had an affair that lasted 17 years. At the time I wrote about it, after Oliver's death, I wanted to be frank.' For her, loyalty and the family were more important than fidelity. While bringing up her children, Del Conte worked part-time. It was in 1973, during a coaching session for Italian A-level, that she casually mentioned to her pupil that her brothers were constantly urging her to write a book of pasta recipes. That night the girl's father, a publisher, rang up and commissioned Del Conte's first book, Portrait of Pasta, which appeared in 1976. It was a bold move, as in those days most people in Britain experienced pasta via macaroni cheese or Heinz tinned spaghetti. Her second book, the encyclopaedic Gastronomy of Italy, appeared in 1984. In it she displayed considerable erudition, building on her personal knowledge of the cooking of Lombardy, Friuli, Liguria and the incomparable Emilia-Romagna. More books followed, each clearly written, practical, and with recipes that taste authentically Italian but could be made easily by British cooks. They are full of recipes you want to cook every day. Del Conte has a habit of deflecting praise by changing the subject. When I ask if she is proud of all that she has done for food in Britain (for which she received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Guild of Food Writers in 2011) or promoting the understanding of Italian food in Britain (for which she received the Italian Order of Merit in 2010), she simply says, 'Well, it just happened. I was just there at the right time. I couldn't do it now, because it has all been done. I was extremely lucky. My...excuse me..."cleverness" was in catching the right moment. Now, you can tell me one thing: why is Britain so bad about fish? This is an island, after all. Why do all the cuttlefish go to Spain?