“THE first time I ate it,” recalls Giovanna Eusebi, “it was just like eating air. It had a crisp, low-fat base and was oval in shape … it was highly digestible.”

"It" was pinsa, a traditional Roman flatbread so old that it was mentioned in Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, and that it also pre-dates pizza itself. “About 10 years ago,” adds Eusebi, a well-known Glasgow restaurateur, “I was in Rome and one of my friends there, a chef, introduced me to pinsa, and I immediately became fascinated by it. It was the first time I had even seen it.”

Pinsa has since become one of the signature dishes at the Eusebi Deli which opened two years ago in Park Road, in Glasgow’s west end. She hasn’t heard of it being sold anywhere else in Scotland

The pinsa – the dough is made from a blend of soybean, wheat, rice and sourdough – is served either bianca (white) or rosso (red): toppings range from the "contadina" – Parmesan cream, spinach, zucchini, aubergine and red onion, to the "Toscano" – tomato, mozzarella, Italian sausage, potato, onion and chilli. In late 2015 a well-known London food critic came north to sample the restaurant's Toscano as well as a pinsa topped with chips and hot dogs. The result, she wrote, was “engaging: pillowy, air-bubbled dough with great chew and a nicely charred base”.

Pinsa comes from the Latin "pinsere", meaning "to squash or pinch", explains Eusebi. “Normally a Neapolitan dough is hand-stretched, though some pizza dough is rolled. The pinsa dough is pressed with your finger. The cherry we’re always chasing is to keep the air in, so that the dough base is almost like a little cloud.

“The first time it was ever mentioned in print was by Virgil, who talked about grinding wheat and sifting flour and mixing it with water, and making this 'schiacciata', which means a flattened bread, cooked on a hot stone. So pinsa comes from ancient Rome, and the recipe was resurrected in Rome maybe about 15 or 20 years ago, as far as I can tell.

“The dough was made from all different kinds of grain, and it’s said that ‘pizza’ comes from the past participle of ‘pinsere’, so we reckon that pinsa came before pizza. When it was resurrected, it was done so using all sorts of scientific and gastronomic techniques, mixed in with this really old philosophy. They mixed four types of flour – the soybean, wheat, rice and sourdough – with water and yeast.

“It is then proved for between 48 and 72 hours. You take it out and turn it over, let it prove again, and then pinch it with your fingers. We aim for a PH value of 5.5, so it neutralises your stomach, and it has a high water content – around 75 per cent – so that it retains as much air as possible.”

There is a serious point to be made in the lengthy proving process, she believes. “This is good, because yeast is a natural, living organism. Nowadays many people have problems with their stomach. Why? Because bread is being made – by the big companies at least – in half an hour or one hour.” A Daily Mail article from 2011 quoted critics as saying that reduced fermentation time meant that yeasts had less time to be broken down, and could upset the delicate balance of bacteria in the gut.

“I believe that people have lots of problems because we’re not slowing things down any more,” Eusebi continues. “We’re too fast. We’re also so used to buying everything ready-made. Our philosophy here is about going back and slowing things down.

“My grandparents in Italy ground their own wheat, and even the wheat that was left, which no-one would use, they would grind it into a type of black flour called grano arso, which is now being used to make pasta. All these old ways are the healthy ways: I believe people didn’t have as many digestive problems as we do now.”

Eusebi, who has two children, aged 18 and eight, was born in Glasgow. Her mother Gina’s parents were peasant farmers in Castelforte, in the Lazio region of Italy. She spent many summers with them when she was younger, and remembers her grandmother “in her wee farm, cooking in an outside oven. They did things the old way. Everything was from land to table. They made their own bread, and they worked with the seasons, which is so important.

“Nothing was ever wasted. My mum remembers that you would get one pig a year and when you killed it for food, every last thing was used. It really was nose to tail. The trotters would be used. The leg would be used to make Parma ham. They would salt everything to preserve it.

“My grandmother would slow-cook pasta e fagioli [short pasta and beans] out of doors, on the embers in a wee terracotta pot, so when you came back at the end of the day your food would be ready for you. In winter we would pick wild asparagus – really earthy, beautifully tasty. I would go up into the mountains with my grandfather and pick them and bring them home, and my grandmother would make a frittata.

“Their cooking was very much ‘la cucina povera’ – the kitchen of the poor – and that is where my heart is, particularly now. It’s heart-breaking that many people don’t have enough money to eat, especially in a developed country.”

Eusebi's paternal great grandparents arrived in Glasgow from Italy in the 1930s. Her great-grandmother opened a café in Shettleston; her husband ran a barber’s shop next door. Their son – Giovanna’s grandfather – went on to launch an ice-cream factory and café in Partick.

In the 1970s Gina and her husband Eddie, (“both great cooks”) opened their own business in Shettleston. “It was a fruit shop but they also sold such things as pasta and tomatoes and olive oil. This was a time when you could only really buy olive oil in a chemist’s. They also sold – and this was really exotic, back then – things like mushrooms and peppers, which of course we take for granted today.”

In time, the Eusebis, responding to (and shaping) demand, would assemble home-cooked Italian meals that eager customers would take home in their own dishes. “This was before ready-made meals. People loved that home-cooked food. Women were starting to go to work and they had less time at home. Times were starting to change.”

Food, then, has always been part of the fabric of Eusebi’s life. “As a child I had spent a lot of time in Italy with my grandparents. I studied Italian at university here. My mum was brought up in Lyon, in France, and I spent a lot of time there with her and her sisters, who were all great cooks. So great food was around me all the time. Great food, but simple food.”

She took over the reins of the family deli some 15 years ago, when it was still located in Shettleston. “We wanted to take people out of their comfort-zone so far as Italian food was concerned,” she says. It’s the same with the Park Road restaurant/deli: it wants people to think about seasonality and regionality, it wants to discourage the old received ideas about Italian food. Carbonara, she points out, is only ever eaten in Rome; Tagliatelle Bolognese is only eaten in Bologna.

Marvelling at how far Italian food has progressed in this country during her lifetime, she recalls a “lovely quote, so true, so true” by the renowned chef, Antonio Carluccio OBE, who had died, aged 80, just the day before our interview. A swift Google check on her phone refreshes her memory. “He said, ‘When I came to Britain in 1975, the Italian food wasn’t fantastic. Today it has improved quite a lot …’” She laughs. “That just shows how basic things were, back then.”

The restaurant sources much of its food from Italy: summer fruit and veg from Puglia, prosciutto and salami from Umbria, from Norcia, the town that was struck by an earthquake just over a year ago. Eusebi herself visits Italy often. She was there last month, taking in such places as Milan, Brescia, where her niece is studying, and Rome, where she paid a surprise visit to the friend who introduced her to pinsa, all these years ago.

She went to Milan to study some Christmas products. In Italy the countdown to Christmas began two days ago, on December 8, with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary or L'Immacolata Concezione della Beata Vergine Maria. “When the crib scene is unveiled in St Peter’s Square in Rome, outside the Vatican, it’s a big celebration,” she says. “It’s lovely.

“Christmas in Italy isn’t as commercial as it is here. In this country, no sooner had Hallowe’en finished than Christmas started. In Italy, people will worry more about what they are going to eat than about what presents they are going to open.

“Christmas Eve is when you have your big dinner and when people open their presents together. It’s the day of La Vigilia, the vigil, and was originally a time of abstinence, of fasting. But over time it meant that people didn’t eat meat on that day. Now people eat fish and that’s their multi-course dinner – the Feast of the Seven Fishes, as it’s known.”

She will be working on Christmas Eve, however. “It’s always going to be one of our busiest days. I remember queues out the wee shop in Shettleston down the street: working till midnight, getting the orders ready, as all butchers, bakers and candlestick makers do at that time of year.

“But there’s something nice about it, getting a buzz from other people. There’s something lovely about helping to make people’s celebrations special. You’re a part of that private celebration. But on Christmas Day we’ll adhere to the old traditions. My mum will be with us. We have lots of traditional things to eat – things like panettone and panforte. We have a six-course meal around the table all day, everyone working together to make everything from scratch. There’s an element of conviviality, of bringing people together around tables.

“Christmas is all about love and time with my family is so precious,” Eusebi adds. “We’re all working, we’re in different places. That time you get together at Christmas is something to be treasured.”