Rachel Roddy's favourite recipe for arancine | A kitchen in Rome

This year we may be missing out on Sicilian street food, but there’s always Alba Allota’s recipe for making these delectable, deep-fried rice balls at home

As a food and recipe writer, I spend quite a lot of my time trying to find comparative measurements for things. First as a way of describing them, which is a minefield. The leaves of the basil that grows in and around Genova, for example (about which the Genovese are rightly proud, hence the need to describe it accurately), are generally no larger than a grape. What sort of grape? A grape the size of a marble. What sort of marble? A marble the size gobstoppers used to be when we were children. How old are you? And so on, until you give up and compare the leaves to a teaspoon.

Just as important, and maybe more, are comparative sizes for chopping, bearing in mind that not everything can be summed up in centimetres. Cut into pieces the size of a standard dice/Scrabble tile/square of Dairy Milk, rings the size of a pound coin/Ritz cracker, batons the size of a matchstick/finger/cigarette … How big is “a little bit of”? Is it currant-, raisin- or prune-sized? Also squeezes: comparisons to toothpaste are useful up to a point, then where do you go? Is counting helpful? A three-second squeeze, or until it looks like an average serving of mustard/conditioner/bird poo? And if the latter, which bird? I grew to like one food writer even more when she mentioned a toenail clipping as a guide.

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