Rachel Roddy’s recipe for double cheese and potato croquettes | A kitchen in Rome

Cheesy potato dipped in crumbs, wrapped around stretchy cheese then fried … would you share them?

The dining room had more windows than walls, and through most of them you could see the temple on the top of the hill, as well as the beach meeting the sea. The waiters wore white jackets and cummerbunds, although in an old-fashioned rather than formal way. At night, the bar had a choice of set menus, but in the morning, after asking if you wanted coffee (Greek, filter or instant), tea (various), hot chocolate or eggs, the waiters would bring dishes with things on them: slices of cake, bread, breakfast rusks, honey biscuits, thick yoghurt, butter, honey, cream cheese and apricot jam. Pretty standard, and perfect for three children aged 11, nine and six, because not only was there cake for breakfast (in what we thought was the best hotel in the world), but most of the rest came in individual tubs, pots, triangles and packets: the magic of the single portion – and my brother, sister and I not having to share.

I remember putting the apricot jam on the thick slices of yellow cake, and butter on the breakfast rusks; a noisy scraping, spread to the corners of the hard, rough squares, which were the perfect vehicle for butter. As a child, I considered myself good at spreading crackers, having learned from grandma Roddy who had Ryvita with margarine with her tea from the Teasmade every morning. However, breakfast rusks, hard and twice-baked as they are, are brittle things and crack under pressure. This is what I remember at the table in Greece: the rusk breaking under my knife, but the butter holding the fragments together like mesh netting in plaster.

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