Giorgio Locatelli’s recipe for pasta con le sarde – pasta with sardines, anchovies, fennel, raisins and pine nuts

Pasta con le sarde – pasta with sardines, anchovies, fennel, raisins and pine nuts. Photograph: Romas Foord/The Observer

I remember one night a famous American art critic came into Locanda to eat. This guy looked at the menu and then said, “You know, I have just come back from Sicily and I loved the pasta they made with the sarde.” I went back into the kitchen and said to Rino, my head chef, who is from Sciacca, on the south coast of Sicily, “We have to cook this pasta for him.” We had some perfect sardines, beautiful sultanas, and I had just come back from Sicily myself, so I had brought some of the wild fennel that grows so freely.

We cooked the pasta for him, and every single year since he has sent me a card at Christmas, saying, “That pasta with the sarde was the best I ever had.”