Blue cheese and sardines can only get you so far. What you need in an emergency is a deep pantry

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I’m writing this from the North Sea coast, where I’m in a semi-enforced lockdown at my in-laws’ house. It’s only temporary. Like most of the UK, storms Austen and Boelo hit us in quick succession, and we’ve been in and out of power cuts ever since. We were in the kitchen when the first storm hit and we slipped into an eight-hour power cut.

Of course we didn’t know it would be eight hours at the time, so you can only imagine the panic-raid lunch of all the things we worried might go off: blue cheese and cold chicken on semi-defrosted bread; fridge-cold stewed apple with warming yoghurt; and, finally, a thumb of goat’s cheese with some dark chocolate that I found in my bag. Once the rain stopped, we headed to a pub seemingly untouched by this so-called “weather bomb” and had chips. All in all, a fairly civilised array of picky bits, though I appreciate goat’s cheese and chocolate isn’t for everyone, which is why I ate them in the bathroom.

Catherine’s Originals denies Mondelēz claims in London high court of ‘passing off’ and trademark infringement

The owner of Toblerone is taking legal action against a tiny British vegan chocolate brand which it claims has been copying the Swiss chocolate bar’s famous chunky shape.

Mondelēz has filed papers at the high court in London accusing Catherine’s Original’s of “passing off” and trademark infringement with its O’bar – a length of chocolate divided into segments each with a rounded semi-oval hump.

A historical adventure deep in the very heart of pasta country in southern Italy unexpectedly unearths a sauce with roots in Senegal

About 30 kilometres south of Naples, the town of Gragnano is surrounded by the Monti Lattari mountain range – the limestone backbone of the Sorrento peninsula. Historically, a series of natural springs fed into a larger stream called Vernotico, which flowed down the mountainside, passing through what was at the time the small village of Gragnano.

The natural slope of the terrain was fortuitous, because it allowed for the construction of a sequence of mills, which started in around 1263. During a visit to Gragnano last month, local historian Giuseppe Di Massa explained how it all worked; how gravity drove the flow of water from one mill to the next, in order to power vertical millstones – a system created for the inconsistent flow. The valley, with its clever water system, became known as the valley of the mills; its role milling grain, which arrived at the nearby port of Castellammare di Stabia, a vital operation to Naples and surrounding towns.

This article was amended on 30 October 2026 to correct misspellings of pasta makers Garofalo and Ducato d’Amalfi.