When my wife Marilyn and I first met, we worked a summer together in a coastal restaurant in Sardinia that specialised in cooking over the coals (alla brace). Although this isn’t so common in restaurants anymore, people still cook this way at home, making a small fire using just a couple of bricks as a base and building up dry, untreated wood in the centre; acorn is a popular wood for this, as are the roots of the corbezzolo (‘wild strawberry’) tree. This is a