Rachel Roddy’s recipe for sweet-and-sour aubergines with capers, pine nuts and mint | A kitchen in Rome

This sweet-and-sour summer side will complement anything from roast lamb to tomato salad

The heaviest cookbook I own is Profumi di Sicilia, which I bought from a secondhand bookshop in Tor Marancia the same afternoon I twisted my ankle. The accident had nothing to do with the 3.1kg book, which was already safely on the back seat of the car by the time I didn’t notice the kerb or the cyclist. Years on, and the scene repeats on me whenever I see the cream cover of not just the heaviest, but maybe the most handsome cookbook on my shelves. Written by the journalist Giuseppe Coria and first published by Vito Cavallotto Editore in 1981, Profumi di Sicilia is an encyclopaedic exploration of Sicilian regional cooking – the smells, ingredients, recipes, folklore, trivia, traditions and origins. A significant part of the book’s great beauty is the photographs of ingredients, dishes and scenes by Melo Minnella, which saturate the pages with colour and which appear in pairs every eight pages of text.

Broken into many familiar chapters and subchapters, with small line drawings – a snail, bowl, potato or flask – the hundreds of recipes are in paragraph form, with many containing no quantities at all – just a description of how to put ingredients together to make X. Others, meanwhile, have specific quantities included in the descriptive paragraph, but always with plenty of leeway; Giuseppe’s ability to judge when a reader/cook needs general advice and when they need specific quantities is not just impressive, but inspiring.