The last time I watched Massimo Bottura on Instagram, life in his kitchen was, as ever, a little chaotic. Bottura’s wife, Lara, glamorous in white jeans, told a rambling anecdote at the top of her voice. His son, Charlie, somehow ended up with whipped cream on his cheek. His daughter, Alexa, could as usual be heard hurriedly translating her father’s running thoughts from Italian to English. As for the Michelin-starred chef himself, he was in particularly fine voice. “Ragazzi! Ragazzi!” he shouted, trying (and failing) to get everyone’s attention. Italy’s lockdown having finally been eased some days before, however, the mood was also valedictory. Freedom – and work – now beckoned once again: perhaps this would be one of the last times the Botturas would entertain us at home. “This is a real leftovers meal,” Alexa explained, as her dad made an elaborate pile of some dry-looking chocolate breakfast pancakes, a few slices of banana, and a large dollop of preserved cherries.  

Gazing at this toppling confection, I wondered vaguely if he was taking the piss. But, no. At the stove, more serious work was under way. “Look!” instructed Alexa. “This is a pasta that thinks it is a risotto.” In a pan into which he had crushed some plum tomatoes, Bottura tipped a bag of tiny macaroni – the kind you might usually add to soup. He then added a ladle of broth made from the liquid in which he’d cooked (separately) both some mussels and some pork belly, and stirred. Things, it must be said, did not look terribly promising. In the mix, we could see two pale cloves of garlic, bobbing like white sharks in a blood red sea, and a small, floating tree in the form of a huge bouquet garni. He stirred some more. He added some more broth. And on and on. Finally, he threw in the mussels and pork, a few lumps of cold butter (“to bring down the temperature and to make it creamy!”), and a sprinkling of orange zest, grated from a fruit that was roughly the size of Jupiter, and which had been sent to him by a kind friend in Sicily. Pronto. The pasta was now ready for the table. 

To what culinary rules, if any, did this improbable dish subscribe? I’m still not sure, though pork and mussels are, I know, often eaten together in Spain. But then, Kitchen Quarantine isn’t intended to be what we might call a precision-based venture. Filmed on Alexa’s mobile phone at the family home in Modena (the Italian city that’s also home to Bottura’s three Michelin-starred restaurant, Osteria Francescana), the family’s Instagram series, broadcast nightly throughout Italy’s long and severe lockdown, is a confidence-builder for cooks everywhere – not because it tells us exactly what to do, but because it reminds us that, if we keep things simple, they’ll usually come out all right in the end. A bit of this. A bit of that. Stir, taste, repeat. This is improvisational cooking for dummies – albeit dummies who might have a certain flair for drama and a decent supply of parmesan. To watch Bottura eat cold mozzarella on toasted day-old focaccia is to know that when it comes to food, the good and the elaborate are not necessarily the same thing. 

Kitchen Quarantine began almost by accident. Stuck at home, and having been furloughed from her job at Maserati, Alexa filmed her father cooking the family’s supper. It was a spur of the moment thing. But then, as she told the New Yorker, she focus-grouped the result on FaceTime. People told her that they liked what they saw and wanted more, so she duly kept going. Thanks to her efforts, the charming, warm, lovable and deeply Italian Bottura family have since become something of an internet sensation: more than half a million people watched the video in which Massimo made béchamel sauce. Last month, he won a special achievement prize at the Webby awards in recognition of this “inspirational” project.  

Bottura’s shaggy-haired charisma – in spectacles, he looks more like a shrink than a chef – has certainly played a big part in the success of Kitchen Quarantine: who wouldn’t want to be sequestered for a while with so energetic a man? But he’s hardly the only cook to have migrated to the internet. Across the world, restaurants have been closed for weeks, and while in some countries they’re now beginning to reopen – Osteria Francescana is once again taking bookings; there will even be, for the first time in its history, tables available on Sundays – in the UK, they’re not expected to reopen until July. With time on their hands, and a desire both to inspire and to remain present in the minds of their customers, where else might professional cooks usefully appear? 

Those keen on cookalongs can go high end, and watch other Michelin-starred chefs: you might also like to road test Jason Atherton’s Social Kitchen Isolation (Atherton’s empire includes the Pollen Street Social), in which he makes chicken and leek pies and Thai curries. Or they can go mainstream: the executive chefs of both Wagamama and Nando’s are online now, should you be yearning for a certain kind of katsu curry or peri-peri chicken. My favourites, however, are the demos available from Bread Ahead, the excellent bakery in Borough Market (every day at 2pm; an ingredients list is published in advance if you intend to join in); from Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich of Honey & Co. (roll your own vine leaves); and from Padella, Tim Siadatan’s genius no-bookings pasta restaurant (though he posts less frequently than some, the good news is that his demo of perfect pici cacio e pepe is already up). But whether high or low(er), these offerings all have one thing in common. What’s great about them is that unlike, say, cookery shows on TV, there’s no padding or guff; any cosiness is real, not staged. And herein lies the secret of their infectious accessibility. Direct and intimate, you absorb small tricks of the trade without even realising it. 

But if videos aren’t your thing, there are other options. I love Home Cooking, a podcast by Samin Nosrat, the American cook best known for the Netflix series based on her book Salt Fat Acid Heat: especially the fourth episode, in which she and her co-host, Hrishikesh Hirway, discuss everything from chocolate mousse to what to do with a surfeit of ginger, after which they’re joined by special guest Yo Yo Ma (listening to him talk about the Parisian bakeries of his childhood is wonderful – almost, though not quite, as good as listening to him play Bach’s complete cello suites). Or maybe you prefer to read. In the wake of Covid-19, several new platforms for food writing have sprung up, among them Vittles, a “food newsletter for novel times”, whose contributors include Ruby Tandoh, and In Digestion, a weekly survey of the best food media on the web “and why you should care about it”.  

The overall effect of this mass shift to the internet is, broadly speaking, one of democratisation. Not only is all this information free. The playing field is more level: whether a cook is young and little known, or older and long-established, they’re all using the same means to get across their message. In lockdown, moreover, everyone is muddling through, even the most skilled among us: Srulovich seems to approach his fridge just as trepidatiously as the rest of us right now – which is reassuring. It’s not that perfection has been consigned to the past; rather, that it has been redefined. It is messy and human. When Bottura was making his risotto-style pasta, a rogue mussel landed in his pan ahead of the others. For a while, he did not notice (I felt like I was watching a panto: “Look!” I wanted to shout. “It’s there, behind that tomato!”). When he finally did spot it, though, he was eager to point it out. “If my clumsiness doesn’t worry me, why should yours worry you?” he seemed to be saying, prodding the alien mollusc with his wooden spoon. In this world, a shrug is everything. It may be more reassuring even than knowing your weighing scales are accurate and to hand.  

I have to admit that there are days lately when my laptop is a very useful bit of kitchen kit. But I’m not entirely convinced this shift will be permanent. Or perhaps I mean that I hope it won’t be. If there’s joy in all this cooking, there’s melancholy in it, too. It reminds us powerfully of what we miss. For one thing, where are all the people? Who, I sometimes ask myself, am I doing all this cooking for? How good it would be to have people round, to hear them coo over my star anise-scented chicken pilaff and my salted chocolate blondies (my two great triumphs so far). 

For another, there are our shuttered restaurants, about which, with every day that passes, I worry more. We miss them a lot, whether Pizza Express or… well, think of your own favourite: that beloved place that you turn to first for comfort or celebration. It is said that people are trying to replicate restaurant experiences at home, and I think there’s truth in this. Those serious restaurants that have ploughed their efforts into home delivery are doing brisk trade, even if this cannot, for their owners, begin to make up what they are losing financially: I’m planning to order from Orasay, Jackson Boxer’s marvellous London fish restaurant, for my birthday next month. I’ve also taken to replicating, as others also have, certain restaurant twiddles at home. The other night, I put a load of chips (oven chips!) in a newspaper cone, which I then placed inside a pewter tankard that belonged to my dad – a stab at making us feel we were eating our goujons of sole in a certain swanky West End place rather than in our basement kitchen. 

In truth, I’ve had enough both of my screen and of my own cooking for now. Food and people: they cannot, and should not, be separated. I long to be out in the world again. I long for the clatter of cutlery, and the sound of strangers laughing; for the good-humoured crush of a bar, and the murmured approval of a maître d’. I want a wine list, even if it is overpriced, and napkins as big as sails. I want a little pat of butter, and a basket full of warm bread. I want proper chips, and I want pudding, even if I’m full. I want to run for the bus afterwards feeling slightly tipsy, and go to bed thinking of whatever delicious thing it was that I ate – a dish made with love and skill and with which I had no involvement whatsoever save for the fact that I willingly scoffed it all down.