A spring soup-stew known as scafata and typical of Lazio, featuring chard, potatoes, artichokes and new-season broad beans

Broad beans are back – long, green fingers with the odd black nail. And so are the warning signs, for those who suffer favism (a rare but acute haemolytic syndrome), as well as for those, such as my neighbour, who think that fave are an abomination. For fans, the first young beans are good raw, with pecorino or cheddar. In Lazio and central Italy, scafa is dialect for a broad bean pod, and scafare the verb for removing the beans from their pods; therefore, scafata is a dish involving podded beans. As you might expect from a dish shared by different regions, scafata has as many variations as cooks that make it, but, broadly speaking, it can be described as somewhere between a brothy stew and a dense soup involving broad beans and other spring vegetables, such as chard, onions, potatoes and artichokes.

The cooking method is what I think of as a steamy braise, which is also a possible chapter title for an as-yet-unwritten detective story. One steamy braise might start with a letter containing a feather and a ring. The other – this one – starts by cooking vegetables in a generous amount of olive oil. Once they are just starting to soften, liquid is added and the pan half covered, allowing the vegetables to soften further in both the liquid and steam, which (having done its job) evaporates, leaving behind a vegetable liquor and an olive oil broth.

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It’s that delicious but oft-forgotten fried potato scaffolding made moreish with any number of cheeky seasonings or toppings

The Swiss have a reputation as a secretive people, and indeed there is a curious dearth of cookbooks for English speakers hoping to master recipes such as this crisp potato pancake described by the Swiss government as “one of the country’s best-known national dishes”. Originally a rustic breakfast, it’s now a popular accompaniment to everything from sausages to cheese, and too good not to share.

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A diced potato binds this cheesy leek and pasta dish into a delightful gluey mess

Watching any pasta shape being extruded, be that through a small domestic machine or a vast industrial one, is hypnotic. Short shapes are particularly mesmerising, because the dough – made from durum wheat flour and water – emerges at speed from the bronze or Teflon-coated die, and is then chopped to size by a rotating blade. And then there are fusilli, whose helix form is created by an ingenious die that was invented and perfected in the early 1900s. Fusilli twist their way into being, the Syd Barrett of pasta shapes, emerging from the die in a psychedelic spiral.

The fusilli shape is an old one. In her Encyclopaedia of Pasta , Oretta Zanini De Vita traces the shape back to the fruitful Arab domination of Sicily and Sardinia, and the forming of the pasta by twisting dough around a thin reed known as a bus. The habit travelled and De Vita notes that fusillo became a southern Italian dialect term for any pasta made by wrapping or pressing dough around or into a ferretto , a thin metal rod with tapered ends, known as a fuso. As you can probably imagine, shaping pasta around a slender rod (or, alternatively, a knitting needle, bicycle wheel spoke or umbrella rib) and sliding it off makes for a particular form, sometimes like scroll of paper, at others canoes or even loose ringlets, all of which are still found in southern Italy. The industrial form, meanwhile, which took decades to perfect, is a helix or spiral and has since travelled all over the world. As with all pasta, the quality of the durum wheat used, and the way it’s extruded (through bronze, which gives texture) and dried (steadily, and with great attention) has a huge effect on the taste.

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Both sides of the changeable season are covered here: in like a lion with hearty cheese and pickle roast potatoes, out like a lamb with a light gratin with lemon, capers and herbs

Easter is an in-between time of year. I have spent some basking in the garden, while on others, there’s been snow. Spring demands food that is both fresh and hearty. Today’s gratin is loosely based on one from the cookbook Sunday Suppers at Lucques – coins of early season courgettes with a perky salsa verde topped with golden cheesy breadcrumbs. And you can’t go wrong with this spin on roast potatoes with cheese and pickle, served with a crisp bitter leaf salad.

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Fried, roast and boiled are all well and good, but to make your spuds the stars of the Easter show, spice them up, stick them on the barbecue or drown them in cream

• Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

A celebration without spuds is really no celebration at all. Whether you keep things humble with nothing but butter or go for something more performative, choosing the right variety of potato for the job is essential, as is the addition of fat and salt. “They’re the three things that make potatoes amazing,” says Elliot Hashtroudi, head chef at Camille which opened in Borough Market, London, last month. Chips are the prime example, though that’s not to say potatoes should be confined to a side: “They’re always the bridesmaid, but never the bride, so make a main out of them for Easter,” Hashtroudi says.

With the long weekend falling earlier than usual this year, you’d be hard pushed to better a tartiflette. You’ll need waxy potatoes, plus the usual creme fraiche, onions, lots of garlic, white wine and reblochon cheese, but Hashtroudi would “put a spin on things” by swapping the traditional lardons for smoked eel. “Cheese, potatoes, a bit of wine: you can’t really go wrong,” he says. “A simple side salad with that, plus chocolate for after.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

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Whether small, waxy new potatoes in a salad or big floury spuds best for baking, you can always turn to spuds for satisfaction

When my garden was more of an allotment, there was nothing I enjoyed growing more than potatoes. The planting and earthing-up, the first green leaves poking through the soil and the mauve and white flowers like tiny stars were pleasures enough; the real business started when I plunged my garden fork into the earth and dug them up.

I no longer grow them – this garden is tiny – but I will pounce on any good-looking tattie when I’m shopping. Potatoes, pasta and polenta get me through the winter and those first chilly days of spring. Waxy fleshed or floury, “new” or as big as a brick, I always come home with a few potatoes, to bake, steam or sauté till their edges are crisp and golden.

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A layered bake of potatoes, risotto rice, cheese and mussels that will leave your kitchen smelling like the sea

Leafing through Luigi Sada’s book of La Cucina Pugliese , I couldn’t find riso, patate e cozze (rice, potatoes and mussels). I was looking for rice dishes in primi piatti , lost in the countless, great-sounding recipes for mussels and other shellfish from the heel of Italy – in short, the wrong chapter. This layered bake of rice, sliced potatoes, tomatoes, cheese and mussels is the first recipe in the chapter titled Les Soupes (oddly, in French). Sada crowns riso, patate e cozze , also known as tiella , “ the queen of minestre ”, and notes that it is made differently from town to town, and that this “mothership recipe” is tiella barese from Puglia’s capital, Bari. It includes courgettes and uses pecorino. Meanwhile, other recipes from Bari remind us that there is no such thing as a definitive version, each suggesting wildly different proportions and all sorts of rice, or not to include courgettes and to use parmesan instead.

What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that a rest brings out the best in tiella – they all advise waiting before eating – as well as the importance of opening the mussels by hand. Several people reassured me that this is just like opening oysters, which, after being defeated by shell-clenched oysters and shamed by a professional shucker, I didn’t find reassuring at all. However, it turns out that if you insert the point of a knife near the hinge, then run the blade between the two shells, mussels, while a faff, are much easier to lever open than oysters. Yet they’re no less dramatic when you pull apart the shells apart and see the soft, secret flesh inside.

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There are as many different recipes for kare raisu as there are cooks who make it, so can our in-house perfectionist discover the winning formula?

In the early years of this century, not long after I ate my first “sushi” (M&S vegetarian selection, since you ask), I tried my first katsu curry at a cool London noodle bar, with my cool new university friends, one of whom had been banging on about this Wagamama place since freshers’ week. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I found that the thick, brown gravy dolloped over neat slices of breaded chicken reminded me of nothing more than good old chip shop curry sauce .

Of course, I didn’t mention this at the time, for fear of ridicule – it wasn’t until many years later that I found out this was no mere coincidence. As Japanese chef and author Hiroko Shimbo explains , “Indian curry came to Japan from England”, via the Royal Navy, when the country first opened up to foreign trade in the second half of the 19th century. After adoption by the Japanese armed forces, it became more widely popular as an example of yōshoku , or western food.

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Weeknight heaven: throw blanched gnocchi, cherry tomatoes and peppers in a roasting tin, cover with sliced mozzarella and within half an hour you’ll have yourself a panful of gooey, crisp goodness

Can you have too many recipes for crisp gnocchi? I think not, especially given what a cinch it is. This is an amalgamation of two favourite dishes from my Roasting Tin books, and it’s a total winner on a cold night. Don’t bother with upmarket mozzarella in water for this dish – you want the firm, melty cooking stuff that browns beautifully on top.

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