As Strong As Soup

This is part two of my very short series of the Italian recipes that I felt I finally needed to write down. Like the caponata recipe I'm afraid it's probably a little elegiac in tone. I suppose that's what happens when you're as ancient as me. Never mind, it's the food that matters. Alvaro Maccioni was one of the food celebrities in Britain through the 1960s and 70s. It's generally accepted wisdom that food in England was rubbish during that period but I'm not completely convinced. I admit there were certainly some highly questionable and eccentric restaurants around at the time but Maccioni's La Famiglia just off the King's Road definitely wasn't one of them. It tended to attract a celebrity crowd and hard up, scruffy people like me didn't necessarily eat there often - well, OK I did once or twice. Maccioni was a great advocate of authentic, delicious and often quite simple Tuscan food. Ahead of his time in many ways and hugely influentia

I've just noticed that it's 2018. I know I should be reviewing last year or predicting the trends for the months to come but it's as cold and grey as any self-respecting January should be and so here's a summery sort of recipe for cheering up dismal days. I've been told that guinea fowl is at its best in the depths of winter and so that's the perfect excuse for making it now. (Of course, I might have been misled - I frequently am). There's a traditional way of cooking guinea fowl with lemon in the Roussillon and this recipe probably owes its origins to that tradition, but it's more directly inspired by dishes that turned up fairly often in England back in the 1980s and early 1990s in some of the better, unpretentious restaurants of those long-lost days. These days I don't often use cream in sauces (or any recipes for that matter) but I make an exception here because it works so well. You could use chicken in this recipe if that's what you hav