I should have known the Sat Nav was plotting against me the moment it sent us down a track that looked like it had last seen a Fiat Panda sometime in the late seventies. There we were, two hours out of Turin, crawling past hazelnut groves and vineyards that clung to every slope of the Monferrato hills, when the voice calmly announced we had arrived. We had not arrived. We had arrived at a locked gate, a very cross-looking goat, and what I can only describe as an existential crisis in a hire car.

My partner, ever the optimist, suggested we simply open the gate. I, ever the realist, pointed out the goat was now chewing my sleeve. Twenty minutes, one panicked phone call in GCSE Italian, and a small bribe of leftover motorway crisps later, a local chap on a scooter appeared and led us the actual final mile to Ponzone. I have never been so happy to see a gravel driveway in all my life.

The house itself sat perched on the hillside like it had grown there organically, all weathered stone and terracotta tiles, with a view that made me temporarily forget I smelled faintly of farm animal. The owners, a charming couple from Asti, had left a bottle of their own Barbera on the kitchen table alongside a handwritten note. "The butcher in Moncalvo opens at seven," it read. "Do not be late." I took this as both hospitality and a threat.

The kitchen, I should say, was the heart of the place. Proper gas hob, ancient but fiercely sharp knives, and a pantry that still held the ghost of someone's grandmother's tomato passata. We had grand plans for that first evening. Market research, if you will. I had read somewhere that Piedmontese cooking rewards patience and decent butter, so naturally I attempted vitello tonnato at half past eight with nothing but a blunt grater and misplaced confidence.

The veal was fine. The tuna sauce was, by any objective measure, a war crime. We ate it on the terrace regardless, accompanied by that excellent Barbera and the sound of crickets who definitely judged us. My partner was kind enough to call it "rustic," which is what people say when they mean "you have dishonoured several generations of Italian grandmothers."

The morning market in Moncalvo became our salvation and our routine. Up at six, which for me on holiday counts as a personal triumph, down winding roads past misty vineyards, arriving as the stalls were still being unpacked. The cheese man, who I suspect never learned my actual name and simply called me "Inglese," sold us rounds of Robiola so ripe they practically walked to the car themselves. There was a woman with wild mushrooms whose varieties I could never quite keep straight, though I nodded enthusiastically and bought whatever she pointed at. Fresh tajarin, that impossibly thin egg pasta local to these parts, became our weekly staple. I learned to make it properly on our third attempt, which is to say I stopped breaking it into the pot like a monster and learned to twist it round a fork first.

The vegetable stall run by two brothers became my favourite. They would heap fennel and cardoons into my bag with the casual generosity of people who had grown too much and frankly could not be bothered with the arithmetic. I once asked for cooking advice regarding artichokes and received a fifteen-minute lecture, half in dialect, that I understood perhaps forty percent of. I nodded throughout. We braised those artichokes in white wine and garlic that evening, and they were transcendent. Sometimes pretending to understand is its own kind of wisdom.

Self-catering, I discovered, is really just controlled panic with better ingredients. Our attempts at bagna cauda, that glorious anchovy and garlic dip, involved three false starts and one incident with smoke that required opening every window in the house during a thunderstorm. The final version, served with raw vegetables and a defiant sense of accomplishment, tasted of relief and too much butter. In Piedmont, too much butter is barely enough.

The local bakery in Grazzano Badoglio, a village so small I suspect we doubled its population, supplied our breakfast ritual. Proper brioche, not the French sort but the Italian kind, filled with apricot jam that stained your fingers orange. We would eat them with coffee made in a moka pot that the owners had left, its handle wrapped in tape, its coffee better than anything I have managed at home despite owning three different machines. Some things simply belong to their place.

By our second week, I had stopped attempting restaurant-style presentation and embraced the reality of what we were doing. Long lunches of salami and cheese and whatever vegetables looked promising, eaten with bread that went stale by evening and was revived the next morning under the grill. Dinners that started at nine, because we had lost track of time watching the light change over the hills, involving pasta that was always slightly too much because I cannot gauge portions for two people after years of cooking for a family that exists only in my anxious imagination.

The goat, by the way, we saw again on our final morning. It was standing by that same gate, chewing something that might have been my map. I chose to interpret this as closure. We left Ponzone with suitcases heavier than when we arrived, filled with wine we should not have bought, cheese we should not have kept unrefrigerated for six hours, and the certain knowledge that I will never make vitello tonnato again without professional supervision. Some lessons are worth learning the hard way, preferably with excellent wine and someone patient enough to call your disasters rustic.