The ferry from Split to Brac was meant to be the easy bit. I had done the hard part: persuaded three friends that a self-catering stone house in Milna was preferable to a package deal in Trogir, navigated the airport bus with a rucksack full of flip-flops, and even remembered to download the ferry timetable. What I had not accounted for was my own spectacular talent for spatial confusion. I spent twenty minutes trying to unlock a stranger's hire car in the Split ferry queue, wiggling the key and muttering, before the actual owner wandered over from the cafe and politely suggested I might want to try the identical silver Fiat three spaces down. The same colour, the same dents, the same inexplicable pine tree air freshener. I have never moved between vehicles so quickly in my life.

By the time we reached Milna, I was ready for something to go right. And it did, immediately, overwhelmingly, in the form of our Brac Milna holiday home. The stone walls were that particular Dalmatian grey that somehow looks warm in late afternoon light. Terracotta pots with lavender lined the path. My friend Sarah took one look at the outdoor grill and announced she would be appointing herself head chef for the fortnight. I did not argue. I had seen her attempt cevapi on a camping stove in the Lake District. It had ended with a trip to AandE and a permanent ban from that particular campsite.

The kitchen, though, was a revelation. Proper knives, not the butter-spreaders you usually find in holiday lets. A decent gas hob. Enough pots to actually attempt something ambitious. I opened the fridge and found it empty and waiting, which felt like both a promise and a challenge. We dumped our bags and headed straight for Milna's small harbour, where a man was selling fish from his boat with the casual air of someone who had caught them that morning and would rather be having a beer than doing business.

That first evening set the pattern. We bought squid, still glistening, and some tomatoes from a woman whose stall was basically a folding table and an umbrella. Back at the house, Sarah commandeered the grill while I attempted a potato salad with olive oil I had grabbed from the Konzum without properly checking the label. It turned out to be extra virgin and extremely peppery. The potatoes tasted like they had ambitions beyond their station. Nobody minded. We ate outside until the mosquitoes drove us in, drinking Plavac Mali from plastic cups and arguing about whether the bread had been properly warmed.

The next morning I walked to the market proper, if you can call a handful of stalls gathered near the post office a market. I bought dried figs that tasted of honey and dust, and a hunk of Pag cheese from a man who insisted I try three varieties before he would accept my kuna. The middle one was so aggressively salty I had to buy a bottle of mineral water from the kiosk opposite just to recover. I bought the mild one and the aggressive one both, because holiday logic is not ordinary logic.

By day four I had convinced myself I could cook Dalmatian food. I could not cook Dalmatian food. My attempt at brodet, the local fish stew, involved three types of fish from the harbour, a bottle of wine that was too good for cooking, and a quantity of garlic that seemed reasonable at the time. The result was edible, technically, but had a murky quality that made everyone politely focus on the bread. Sarah took over again. She grilled sea bass with lemon and olive oil and made it look insultingly simple.

The local konoba became our backup plan, our treat, our lazy evening default. There was one in particular, tucked down a side street where the harbour curved, that served prsut so thin you could read through it. The owner remembered us after two visits, which in a place that sees tourists come and go felt like being inducted into a secret society. He recommended a white wine from Korcula that I have been trying to find ever since, without success. Perhaps that is the point. Some things only exist in the place you first taste them.

I did learn to make a decent zrnovski makaruni, the hand-rolled pasta particular to this island, though my rolls were fatter and more apologetic than the ones I ate at the konoba. The woman who sold me the flour at the market demonstrated the technique with the resigned patience of someone who has watched many incompetent foreigners try. Mine tasted of effort and flour and not much else, but we ate it with a simple tomato sauce and felt genuinely pleased with ourselves.

The fortnight became a rhythm of small food discoveries. The bakery that opened early and sold burek that was still warm, if you timed it right. The fish market on Wednesday mornings, chaotic and specific, where you needed to know what you wanted before the good stuff disappeared. The evening ritual of deciding who was walking to the shop for more bread, more wine, more of that dangerous cheese. The grill got a workout. Sarah's confidence grew. My own cooking attempts became less ambitious and more honest: grilled fish, simple salads, bread drizzled with olive oil that was better than anything I could do to it.

On our last night we cooked everything remaining in the fridge, a strange medley of leftover cheese, the end of a sausage, some wrinkled peppers. It was not a meal that would impress anyone, but we ate it on the terrace with the same wine from Korcula, watching the harbour lights come on, and it tasted exactly right for where we were. I thought about the wrong car in Split, the oversalted potatoes, the brodet that had looked at me with fishy disappointment. None of it mattered. That is the thing about feeding yourself in a place like Milna. The mistakes are part of it, and the good stuff, when it comes, tastes better for the trying.