Rachel Roddy’s recipe for pork, lemon and fennel polpette, cooked two ways | A kitchen in Rome

Meatballs are an old favourite, and these pork-and-lemon numbers can be cooked in a frying pan or baked with bayleaves

Last weekend, my sister-in-law, Kate, was chopping parsley at a friend’s kitchen table, a place we both know well. The parsley was from my mum’s garden, a huge bunch that seemed even greener against the white table. There were lots of people about, adults and children, either doing things in the kitchen or tearing around shrieking. So the table, which is right in the middle of a relatively small kitchen, was getting bashed – I imagine her chair was, too. All the movement made Kate seem even calmer as she pulled the leaves from the long stems, pausing every so often to pick up her gin and tonic, which made the ice cubes clink, or to eat a salt-and -vinegar crisp. After chopping the parsley and shoving it into a mountain, she peeled and diced some tomatoes. Steps and movements, good timing; it was almost as is she was doing some sort of dance, a waltz box step in a church hall: slow, quick-quick; 1-2-3, 1-2-3.

I thought this while drinking a large gin and tonic the night after a party. Also because Rebecca May Johnson’s essay is still on my mind. The one in which she describes making the same recipe many times, moves repeated like a dance, which had me calculating what I have made many times, going over the series of steps and movements required to make tomato sauce, roast chicken, a cheese sandwich or a yoghurt pot cake. My own good and bad timings; my own good and bad kitchen dancing.

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