I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Grado was no exception. We had driven down from Trieste, full of excitement about our week in a proper Italian seaside flat, when I confidently directed my partner down what I swore was a shortcut. Twenty minutes later, we were wedged between two delivery vans in a car park barely wider than a bicycle lane, our suitcases sliding about in the back while a man selling watermelons from a three-wheeled truck watched with the patient amusement of someone who had seen this many times before. I waved cheerfully as if this had been the plan all along. It had not been the plan.

By the time we found the actual property, I was ready to abandon the car entirely and live among the salt marshes. But then we opened the door, and the smell hit me immediately - not the sea breeze I had expected, but garlic. The previous guests, it turned out, had cooked their final supper and left behind a kitchen that smelled gloriously of slow-simmered something-or-other. I took this as a sign. This would be a week about food, about eating, about attempting to cook like people who actually knew what they were doing.

The flat had a decent kitchen, which mattered enormously to me. I am the sort of person who arrives at self-catering accommodation and immediately opens every cupboard to assess the state of the pans. These were adequate, which in holiday terms counts as a triumph. There was a small balcony too, just enough space for two chairs and a table where we could sit with our morning coffee and pretend we were locals rather than obvious tourists who had got lost near a watermelon van.

That first evening, exhausted and slightly embarrassed by my navigational failures, we did what any sensible person would do. We walked to the nearest restaurant and ate someone else's cooking. Grado's old town is full of these places, family-run spots where the menu changes depending on what the lagoon has offered up that morning. I had a bowl of boreto, the local fish stew, which arrived looking like something a fisherman might actually eat on his boat - rough, honest, absolutely delicious. My partner had grilled sardines, which she ate with the focused concentration of someone who had not had a proper meal since breakfast somewhere near the Slovenian border.

The next morning, I was determined to cook. The market in Grado's centre runs most days, and I approached it with the overconfidence of a person who owns several Italian cookbooks but has never actually shopped in Italy. I bought vegetables I could not properly name, a length of salami from Friuli's interior that the vendor sliced with theatrical precision, and some local cheese that smelled strongly of the barnyard in the most appealing way possible. I also bought far too much bread, because the bakery stall had a queue of elderly women who clearly knew something I did not, and I refused to be outdone.

Back at the flat, I attempted to make a proper meal. The results were mixed. My attempt at a local-style frico, the potato and cheese dish that Friuli is famous for, became something closer to a cheese-flavoured pancake with structural integrity issues. It tasted excellent, which I told myself was the main thing, though my partner's raised eyebrow suggested she had noticed the difference between my effort and the photographs in my cookbooks. We ate it on the balcony with some local white wine, and gradually the cheese settled into something almost respectable.

The fish market became my morning ritual. I would walk down before the heat built up, past the early swimmers already in the lagoon, and watch the boats unloading their catch. The fishermen found me amusing, I think, this English person pointing uncertainly at various silver creatures and attempting to pronounce their names. One morning I bought a small sea bass, and the man selling it spent several minutes explaining exactly how his mother would cook it, gesturing with his hands in a way that made me feel I was receiving important wisdom I would almost certainly misapply.

I did misapply it, slightly. The fish was edible, even good, but I knew his mother's version would have been better. Some things require generations of practice, not a borrowed kitchen and optimistic enthusiasm.

By the end of the week, our little flat smelled of all our accumulated efforts - garlic, of course, and fish, and the slightly burnt cheese of my frico experiments, and the fresh herbs I had bought from a woman who grew them in pots outside her front door. We had eaten well, both our own attempts and the proper cooking of people who actually understood what they were doing. I had learned that self-catering in Italy is partly about the cooking and partly about surrendering to the fact that someone nearby will always do it better.

On our last morning, I made a final trip to the bakery, joining that same queue of elderly women. This time I knew exactly what to ask for. The woman behind the counter smiled as if I had passed some small test. We ate our last breakfast on the balcony, watching the early boats, and I thought about how I would attempt to recreate all of this back home in my own kitchen, knowing perfectly well that I would fail. That is the trick of holiday cooking, I think. You cannot really take it with you. You can only enjoy it while you are there, lost among the markets, slightly burning the cheese, eating someone else's excellent fish stew when your own efforts fall short. I would do it all again tomorrow, including the wrong turn and the watermelon man. Especially the watermelon man. He knew exactly what he was watching, and he was absolutely right to laugh.