La Gastronomia, 86 Park Hall Road, West Dulwich

La Gastronomia is on the long road out of West Norwood, past the cemetery with Mrs Beeton's grave. It sits on a bank of shops that are the last signs of life before you enter the deadzone of Dulwich's weird little nest of private schools. Linger here, because ahead there is nothing but endless rugby fields.

La Gastronomia is an Italian deli that sells all the food that you can see in the painting above, and lots more. It's near a book shop and the new Dulwich Lyceum, which is the sister restaurant to the great Peckham Bazaar. So, goods things happen here.

You ever read a recipe book where the author will say something like "...and this ingredient, X, can be found in all good delis"? Infuriating.You know instantly that you'll never find those things. The writer gazing out of their Marylebone townhouse and assuming that the whole of Britain is the same. I once knew someone who lived in Notting Hill who assured me that "all of life is here".

Anyway, La Gastronomia is one of those rare places where you can actually get the ingredients that famous food writers have promised us as our birthrights. You can get just about anything here that you'd need to make Italian food at home. I go there mainly to get ricotta salata - aged salted ricotta. It's the only place I've seen in South London that sells it. So I end up popping every couple of months, another routine stop to add to the list.

Ricotta salata is meant to be the cheese for pasta alla norma, as opposed to parmesan or pecorino. It's what the Sicilians would swear by, and they invented the whole thing. No one yet has asked me for my recipe for pasta alla norma.  And that's OK, With the climate crisis, international terrorism, fragile post-industrial economics etc etc people have a lot on their minds. It's fine. But as and when they do ask me, I have my story straight. I would tell them, with a gentle smile and a twinkle in my eye, that the secret to good pasta alla norma is a conceptual leap. A paradigm shift. Consider it not, I would say, as a tomato sauce with aubergine. Consider it, rather, as an aubergine sauce with tomato. That is the secret. That, in summary form, is what I would tell them.

I'm generally not keen on the rule-following school of cookery that privileges the "authentic" as infallible. At best it's middle class snobbery and an elaborate game of showing off:- English people pretending to be aghast that anyone would even think of putting garlic in carbonara etc. At worst there's some vaguely fascistic about it. Paying homage to the traditions of the fatherland, ruthlessly purging the foreign impurities. The gatekeepers and disciplinarians telling us we're doing it all wrong.

But life is about  making exceptions, and it is a pleasure to go somewhere like La Gastronomia and be able to cook something that is Just. How. It. Should. Be. It's a break, a release. So much of our lives is just winging it, isn't it? A fudge, a compromise, an improvisation that  sort of works out in a lop sided way. And that's exhausting isn't it? To constantly invent, hustle, muddle along.

But now, as a brief holiday from all that, we can sink into the warm bath of rules, of history, of the mass of accumulated knowledge. With our ricotta salata we can make a dish according to age old practices and immutable rules.  We can make, or at least endeavour to make, the perfect example of its type. We can imagine ourselves stepping in the worn footprints of countless others.

So, to sum up: good shop, lots of interesting things to buy. And something about freedom through constraint, if you look hard enough. Recommended!