In the months following its publication late last year, I looked at and looked at and touched and looked at Giorgio Locatelli’s Made in Italy. Still, I didn’t know that I needed another cookbook. I eventually bought it and sent it to CC in Sydney so that I could buy it without owning it. But then, after Christmas, at fifty percent off on Amazon, I took the plunge myself. I tell you! It is the best fourteen pounds ever spent. Fourteen pounds! For a heft of six-hundred-and-something pages of recipes and stories and white-bordered photographs. I want to eat everything in it. Okay, maybe not so much the calf’s head salad. I say “maybe”: Giorgio could make me do it.

Giorgio Locatelli. How did the force of the media collect behind him and put him – literally, in the case of the Observer Food Monthly magazine, which had him swathed in a white robe and standing on a plinth – on a pedestal? If Giorgio Locatelli had been a celebrity chef – hello, Gordon! Hiya, Jamie! Kiss-kiss, Nigella! – before the book came out, I certainly didn’t know about it. And I read US Weekly! At least four times an issue! Until last weekend, when I finally, sadly, put it in the recycling, I still had the copy Jazon brought me from New York last summer. I digress. Thing is, I don’t think Giorgio Locatelli is a celebrity chef. Or maybe that’s what they want us to believe. Behold, the anti-celebrity celebrity chef: where Gordon Ramsay is known for swearing in the kitchen and Jamie Oliver is recognised for his casual bunging-it-all-together while ravishingly ruminating over it with a lisp, Giorgio Locatelli is known... for not being known.

Not any more, though, because the book is everywhere you look, and it is a very good-looking book to look at. It is charmingly written, too. Listen:

The first time someone tastes a truffle, they often find it quite disappointing, even off-putting, because usually they have heard so much about them and they expect so much. Sometimes people say to me, “Oh, they smell of feet. Horrible!” It hurts me to hear it, but I understand. If life could be described in a smell, then it is the smell of truffles. They smell of people and sweat.

This is not a man gesturing furiously with a fish knife! This is not a man with a lisp! This is a man who will take a truffle from a pile of truffles and generously shave it into your truffle risotto; this is the man who will then add a walnut of truffle butter just before giving the whole gorgeous mess a couple of final earthy-smelling swirls with a wooden spoon. This is a man who seems like he might be nice.

I made a caponata the other day from the book. Really, I can only say it was inspired by Giorgio Locatelli, because I missed more than half the ingredients, probably, on his list, including the one he said was the most important. Look – I was just trying to use up all the zucchini in the house without having to buy anything else. I didn’t want to head out for sultanas, not for an aubergine, not for celery stalks or fennel bulbs. And I’m certainly not buying any tomatoes till June. The point is, while including only a third of what was necessary (and maybe a couple of things that hadn’t even made it to the ingredients list) the zucchini bruschette were very well received. Imagine what could have been, had I had the appropriate market-fresh cornucopia on my hands. Marc says – I know we are starting to sound like The Giorgio Locatelli Fan Club here, sorry – and this Sunday we will be cross-stitching his likeness onto large cushion covers – Marc says that we need to make his risotto exactly the way he says, even up to the fifty grams of butter. Apparently it is one of those experiences that will change you. Olive scored four fat bundles of asparagus at the Berwick Street market yesterday, and I have just looked at the recipe for asparagus risotto. It calls for one hundred grams of butter. We will be very changed.

In the meantime, though – and this is where this all began, I was sitting on the sofa with a slice of currant toast and Giorgio Locatelli’s dessert pages – I’m looking for inspiration today for Sunday’s tea party. I want a Victoria sponge and some cupcakes, maybe, and there will probably be some sort of chocolate something. We have a couple of oranges in the fruit bowl, so maybe I’ll make an orange cake, too. But all of this seems too easy somehow, too familiar. I need to try something new. What can I make that won’t involve buying too many crazy ingredients? Something seasonal and fruity? What is grey and cold the season for, anyway? Rhubarb? I am not above a rhubarb crumble at a tea party.

Anyway – nothing like a little stream of consciousness to start the day – so I am looking to Giorgio Locatelli for a tea party treat, though I will secretly tell you, in a whisper behind the hen house, that I’m not entirely optimistic about the results. I like gelato, I really like gelato, but other Italian desserts have failed to wow. Matthew Fort writes, in Eating Up Italy, his engaging socio-historico-culinario-travelogue:

The Italians are limited in their pudding horizons.

(And here he uses “pudding” the way many Brits do, a way I’m still getting used to – to mean “dessert”.)

True,

he continues,

zabaglione, the velvety combination of beaten eggs, sugar and Marsala, is a great pudding; panna cotta, happily adopted by contemporary British restaurants, passes muster in its finest form; and ice creams reach a degree of perfection in Italy that we can only dream of. But for the rest? That ludicrous confection, tiramisu? The trifle of an impoverished imagination. Crostade? Tarts as heavy as manhole covers. Panettone? Better turned into bread-and-butter pudding.

It’s true, I like a slice of toasted panettone with a hearty black tea, and I do appreciate a light and rummy tiramisu, but so often... meh. Still, I have only just begun, and there is time yet for Giorgio to save us. We are only, so far, on the introduction to Dolci. “When the boys on the pastry get too carried away,” he writes, “I tell them that all the chocolate and vanilla must have gone to their brains and made them crazy.”