Orzotto with leeks, peas, and pancetta

Roman gladiators were nicknamed hordearii, which means barley men, because barley was what they were fed.

This was not a compliment. Barley was the grain of soldiers, slaves and animals, the cheap thing you ate when wheat was reserved for other people, and Roman writers are noticeably snobbish about it. Pliny called it the oldest of foods and also the food of the poor, managing both in one sentence. The gladiators presumably had views of their own, which nobody bothered to write down.

Then wheat won, comprehensively, and barley spent roughly fifteen hundred years in Italy as a thing you put in soup if you happened to be from Trentino and otherwise ignored. It is only in the last twenty years that Italian restaurants have rediscovered it under the name orzotto, a barley risotto, and begun charging accordingly.

For anybody eating lunch at a desk the rediscovery is genuinely useful, because barley does one thing rice cannot. It holds its texture. A rice risotto is at its peak for about four minutes and then begins a slow decline into porridge, which is why it has never really worked as a packed lunch however good it was the night before. Barley does not do that. It keeps a distinct chew for three days, and an orzotto opened at a desk on Wednesday is recognisably the dish you made on Sunday.

It is also far less demanding than rice. You still stir, but the twenty-five minutes are forgiving, and wandering off for a minute does not ruin anything.

Leeks, peas and pancetta because they are cheap, because leeks go sweet in a way onions do not, and because pork with peas is a combination that has never once let anybody down.