Everyone has their own version of the flavour of things past. For me, lukewarm Orangina from a paunchy glass bottle is my first trip to France, snails are Marrakech and the smell of Africa. This summer, I found myself in a cab in the dismal suburbs of Naples, looking for a man called Enzo, reputedly the king of Neapolitan pizzaiole. Enzo has trained pizza chefs everywhere from Tokyo to Heathrow, and the Friday night crowd outside his restaurant combined local families with pizza-hounds from Argentina and Australia in search of a hit. Buffalo mozzarella and tiny zucchini flowers, sharp oregano and dripping Calabrese salami spiked with fennel were pretty unbeatable, but the pizza which sang to me was served at Donna Sofia in the centro storico, the simplest cloud of pale dough with a smear of intense tomato paste and a few careless leaves of basil, part of a meal which began with a volcano of fried artichokes and ended with perfect black figs bobbing fatly in a bowl of iced water.

Enzo's pizza was undeniably more delicious, but Donna Sofia's conjured the first time I had ever tasted its like-not in a picturesque back alley but a nondescript Italian joint in the north of England 30 years ago, a seven-year-old's culinary revolution in a world which until then had tasted mostly of my Aunt Ethel's beige gravy. In Naples until recently, it was still possible to throw a couple of coins at the children playing in the street and have them pose eating spaghetti with their fingers, just as mischievous southern urchins were meant to do, an entirely inauthentic experience but one which spoke to the tourists' desire to inscribe food with a sense of place and community lacking in the sterile chill-cook cabinets of home. It might seem risible in a sophisticated world of gastro-travel, where everyone poses and posts as a food critic, where we are all experts on ethical sourcing and organic production, but what makes holiday food so enchanting is precisely that desire for connection with our happiest selves.

This year, in a trip that took me from Transylvania to the Balearics, the Aeolian islands to the Montenegro archipelago, I was lucky enough to eat velvety raw tuna with the merest shaving of sea salt, fresh cream cheese with preserved orange rind, grilled mussels with lemon and breadcrumbs at a plastic table on a dock overlooking the Albanian coast, exquisite tagliolini with sea urchin, pastries of Swiss chard and ricotta in a glaring white Venetian courtyard, formidable stuffed cabbage at Bucharest airport. It was all better than the octopus burger, and none of it was as good as that pizza. For the greedy traveller, holiday memories encompass the layers of what we have eaten this year, and what we will enjoy the next-the best food, maybe, is not the most expensive, original or impossible to find, but that which encourages us to put down the iPhone, resist the urge to record, close our eyes and taste.