What really distinguishes the modern kitchen from that of rural Ireland a hundred years ago is that we have handed more and more of the kitchen tasks over to industry.

There are obvious examples such as bread which is now almost totally the preserve of bakeries. Poultry and their eggs are no longer common in gardens, we leave it to large batteries instead. No one keeps a pig any more for bacon and lard. We leave vegetable growing to market gardeners; bottling soft fruit and making jams is becoming rarer. Increasingly we leave the cooking of our food to large industrial concerns.

What troubles me in all this is not its convenience, but rather that the traditional skills, once taken so much for granted, are disappearing. In the rural backwater of Italy that I come from people still make, grow and preserve much of their own food - although even here supermarkets and convenience foods are making headway. I have for years now been collecting as many of these ancient skills as I can, since it seems a shame to hand everything over to commercial enterprises. Making flitches of ham, sausages, cheese and pickles may not be something that you'd feel like doing twice a week, but perhaps we should all know at least how it's done. The EU bureaucrats are doing their best to ensure that you can't buy any foodstuffs that don't come from a large factory. You can no longer legally buy farm eggs, unpasteurized milk or soon home-made cakes and jams. Meat can come only from an abattoir; there are varieties of fruit and vegetables that are no longer available for sale; even the bend in a banana is regulated. Unless you can do things yourself, you'll soon have no choice but to buy the EU regulation fare in a supermarket.

Even though there are huge butter mountains and milk lakes, we pay through the nose for cheese. Yet cheese is not hard to make. You may not be able to create a fine Stilton or a runny Brie, but simple cheese is simple. I like to use unpasteurized milk, but it is hard to get unless you live outside the city. You can use pasteurized milk, but you'll get less cheese per litre as it's already been skimmed of cream.

You can buy rennet in some large chemists. It's what turns milk into curd. Heat the milk to blood heat (roughly 100 Fahrenheit) remove it from the heat and stir in the rennet as directed on the bottle. Cover the pot and leave it to cool. You will find the milk has become like a jelly. With a long knife cut the curd in two directions, making cubes of roughly one inch square, cover the pot and leave it. The curds and the whey will separate. To make a cottage cheese drain off the whey and drain the curds through cheese-cloth. Work salt by hand through the curds and add the herbs of your choice. Push it into a mould and turn it out onto a plate. Keep it in the fridge.

If you want to be cleverer than this and make a long lasting hard cheese you must pitch the curds. After they have separated from the whey leave them in it. Every eight hours or so take a small piece of curd and drop it into a cup of very hot water. If when you take it out it goes stringy, then it's ready. If not, wait a little longer. Depending on the ambient temperature this could take three days. When the curds are pitched add a small amount of salt and form the cheese. Put it in an airy place and it will begin to form a hard skin. Turn the cheese every couple of days and occasionally paint the outside with salty water to keep mould at bay. After a month or two you'll have a cheese similar to pecorino - hard, picquant, and good for grating on pasta.