A few weeks ago, on a hot evening, the English chef Thom Eagle, along with the Italian cooks Adriana Zanchi and Gaia Lochetto, cooked a Britalian meal in Rome. They made exquisite antipasti, in particular deep-fried quail’s eggs, and to finish Adriana made her heavenly stuffed peaches sitting in a pool of Ravneet Gill’s custard.

The highlight for me was the perfectly roasted chicken, carved and shared, and four large platters of salad that were brought around so we could help ourselves. One was of crisp romaine lettuce with herbs and a lemon dressing, another with different types of ripe and sweet tomatoes dressed with basil, olive oil and red wine vinegar; the third was a mixed salad of cold melon and even colder cucumber, and the last platter was grilled aubergine with sesame dressing.

It was the ingredients and preparation that won me over, as well as the contrasting temperatures on a very warm night: the lettuce icy, the melon and cucumber cool, the tomatoes at room temperature, but also cooling somehow, while the room-temperature aubergines tasted warm. The chicken was welcome, but we would have been happy just with bread, which is also more helpful when it comes to mopping up juices. I was sitting with an Italian-American chef called Sara Levi, who summed things up neatly by declaring: “Salad season is here.”

The tomato salad was maybe my favourite of those platters, four or five different types of tomatoes – nothing particularly fancy, just a good mix of sizes, sweetness and ripeness – all chopped into fleshy bits, tossed with a huge handful of basil, and dressed generously. If they need it, you can always add a teaspoon of icing sugar to tomatoes, to kickstart their sweetness, which is then offset by red wine vinegar. A tomato salad of this kind can be turned into a meal by adding a ball of mozzarella or a thick slice of feta, in which case, add a few black olives and sliced red onion – do all of this and you pretty much have David Carter’s Greek salad. Or, if you have salted ricotta, pair it with tomato and onion for a Sicilian-style salad that works very well with yoghurt flatbreads. In fact, that reminds me of another way to turn any salad into a meal: stuff it in a flatbread.

Grilled halloumi also pairs beautifully with tomatoes, as well as with grilled lettuce and a herby sherry vinaigrette in Gail Simmons’ recipe, or with Sami Tamimi’s watermelon and za’atar number. Another wonderful Tamimi salad is little gem lettuce with burnt aubergine yoghurt, smacked cucumber and shatta. I am also happy to be reminded at this time of year of Fergus Henderson’s little gem lettuce, anchovy and roast tomato salad, which can be bolstered with goat’s cheese or roast chicken – as can my own simple salad of lettuce, radish, egg and homemade salad cream. I might even be tempted to put salad cream on my salade niçoise, although I am not sure what Felicity Cloake, Nigel Slater and Pierre Koffmann would think about that. Another recipe I often think about on hot days is tabbouleh according to Yotam Ottolenghi and Meera Sodha, who has a lovely version with leek, herb and almonds.

The Marvellous Ms Colwin | It’s 23 years since the American writer and essayist Laurie Colwin died, at just 48. Best known in the UK for her two collections of essays with recipes, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, Colwin also wrote eight critically acclaimed works of fiction. My favourite is the recently reissued Another Marvelous Thing, which is a series of everyday episodes between Billy and Frank, a peculiar couple having a passionate affair. As with all of Colwin’s books, there is plenty of commonplace food, as she wrings magic from ordinary lives.

A big hand | Paolo Sorrentino’s autobiographical film The Hand of God is a dreamlike telling of a tragic coming of age. It is set in Naples in the 1980s, a city delirious thanks to the football club’s recent signing of Diego Maradona, and stars Filippo Scotti as 16-year-old Fabietto (that is, Sorrentino himself), at the centre of a garrulous swirl of family members and occasions. Like his hero Fellini, Sorrentino is a master of painting-like set pieces, including one that may well change your opinion about how best to eat mozzarella di bufala.

The spice of life | Sumac berries are the size and colour of redcurrants, and hang from the plant in grape like-bunches (they are also known as sumac bobs). Dried, the berries produce the tangy, lemon-like condiment so beloved in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon and Syria, to name a few places. A wonderful source of Lebanese sumac in the UK is the brilliant Shorkk, a family run business that came about as a personal response to the economic crisis that hit Lebanon in 2019. Their aim: to raise the profile of Lebanese ingredients in the UK.