All the meat-eaters I know bend over backwards when entertaining vegetarians and cook them the most delicious and inventive dishes. I always hope vegetarians make similar plans for their carnivorous guests but rather doubt they do, with one notable exception. Friends of ours praise to the skies their vegetarian son-in-law who one year cooked a Christmas goose with all the trimmings for them.

However, even the most dedicated meat-eater sometimes wants a change. After all, what do you cook after the fish on Christmas Eve, the turkey on Christmas Day, leftovers, leftovers and leftovers on days two, three and four, and then it’s almost time to start again for New Year?

If you want to cook some meat-free meals over the holidays, there are wonderful alternatives, which make spectacular centrepieces: majestic pasta pies based on Renaissance recipes from Emilia Romagna; a tall cake of stuffed pancakes or thin omelettes; aromatic and comforting vegetable crumbles and gratins; crisp and golden parcels of filo pastry filled with spiced pulses and cheese, served with a sharp, fruity sauce; colourful risottos.

Certainly the Italian repertoire offers the most inspiration, and it is from here that I developed my pasticcio recipe, a meatless version of the one we were served at Fini in Modena some years ago. It looks complicated, but the various components can be made in advance. The pasticcio is, of course, a cousin of the timpana, as well as being closely related to the ‘monumental dishes of maccheroni’ served to Prince Fabrizio, in Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s The Leopard.

He was known to be partial to French food and his guests at Donnafugata were distinctly worried that he might have adopted the “barbaric foreign usage of serving insipid liquid as a first course”.

So they sit down to dinner with some trepidation, quickly dispelled when “three lackeys in green, gold and powder entered, each holding a silver dish containing a towering mound of maccheroni… the appearance of those monumental dishes of maccheroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they invoked. The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a smoke laden with aromas, the chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles in masses of piping hot glistening maccheroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede.”

These majestic pasta pies were a feature of the baronial table in Sicily, similar versions appeared in Naples. Indeed, none of these dishes is far removed from the patina apiciana of classical Rome.

At this time of year I also make a rich, red risotto, red wine and beetroot giving it depth of colour. So often in the past, when I have cooked sauces and risottos with red wine, they have tasted wonderful, but the ruby colour fades into a purplish brown. Then I discovered the colouring powers of beta carotene, naturally present in carrots.

My vegetable stock was made from the fibre left over after juicing carrots and celery, and the carrot juice itself was sufficient to maintain a clear, bright red in the risotto. Chestnuts, pine nuts, mushrooms and dried cranberries are suitably festive ingredients for the risotto, but you can, of course, vary these at will.

Alternatively, I might make a beetroot soup with a swirl of saffron cream, and for a main course a potato soufflé tart with glazed golden vegetables and onion sauce. In a pastry case I bake a soufflé potato mix and top it with glazed, almost caramelised wedges of swede, pumpkin, carrot and sweet potato.

Pomegranate seeds garnishing a green leafy salad with a walnut oil dressing would follow the main courses very well. For pudding, I might make a selection of tangerine iced desserts followed by an intensely rich chocolate tart. No-one says vegetarians have to be abstemious.

You might wonder why I do not use meat substitutes such as Quorn in my recipes. Not only have I found the results unsatisfactory whenever I have developed such recipes, but I still find the whole notion absurd; unsatisfactory because the end product was so dull in texture compared to what I could create with grains, pulses and ­vegetables, and absurd because I’m convinced that most vegetarians do not want to be reminded of the taste and texture of meat in so-called vegetarian burgers, sausages and other travesties.

And while most meat-eaters would readily eat today’s vegetable and pulse based dishes, they would not, I feel, be happy with meat look-alikes.