MARY Contini's first memory, so far as her family business was concerned, dates from when she was just four years old.

"My big brother and big sister had started school, and there were two other children below me, so I was sort of top of the heap," she says. "My future auntie asked me to watch the shop when she had to nip out. So I stood on lemonade box, a wooden one in those days, and the till had buttons: you pressed them, and the drawer came out and hit you on the chin, so you had to be careful."

In those days, in Cockenzie, outside Edinburgh, her parents ran both an ice-cream shop and a fish-and-chip shop. It had a great location on the coast, too, and the fish shop would get the freshest catches.

Today, Contini, herself a grandmother of two, is a director at one of the 81-year-old Edinburgh business Valvona & Crolla, Scotland's oldest deli and Italian wine merchant. In 2011, her efforts to promote Italian food, and Italian history, saw her being presented with the title of 'Cavaliere', the Republic of Italy's equivalent of the OBE. Last night, at the Scottish Italian Awards, in Glasgow, she stepped forward to receive a lifetime achievement award.

Speaking to The Herald a few days before the presentation, she said she was genuinely humbled and overcome to receive the award, even if part of her thinks she may be slightly too young to receive such an accolade. She probably has a point. Ask her how old she is, though, and she politely deflects the question: "'Over 21', is what my father used to say. Put it this way: if the retirement age hadn't changed, I would have done it by now." She pauses. "Almost. But it is very nice to get that sort of recognition."

Her own family, like the people who established Valvona & Crolla, have Italian immigrant blood. Her own grandparents moved to Scotland from Lazio at the beginning of the 20th century. She grew up with seven brothers and sisters. It was a busy home, and the two shops gave them all plenty to do.

When she was older she earned a BSc in biological sciences at Edinburgh and a post-graduate diploma at Heriot Watt. Were these signs that she wanted to do something other than work with food? No, she says. "To be honest, my father wanted us all to get educated, because that was the mentality at the time. The business was just a way of getting us settled. He had come over here as a baby, and his family's ethos was to settle here and find a career for the children."

In 1977 she became the first female trainee to be taken on by Littlewoods, at that time a big name in High Street retail. "I was 21 or 22," she recalls, "but because I'd worked in my father's business all the time, there wasn't a lot of training [for her] at Littlewoods - it was my natural environment. I did very well, but," and she laughs at the memory, "the boys on the course weren't very happy because I was much more practical than they were." She ended up as a personnel manager in Edinburgh.

When she was younger, she was only allowed to go to dances if she was accompanied by her brother. One day, her brother's best friend, Philip, asked out one of his sisters. She said no, but his gaze fell on Mary instead. That was how she met Philip Contini, grandson of Alfonso Crolla, co-founder of Valvona & Crolla. At length, when Mary told her father that she intended to marry Philip, he advised her against it, saying she would end up behind a counter - another sign that he wanted her away from retail. But the wedding went ahead. Two daughters followed, Francesca and Olivia. Mary herself has been a director at V&C since 1983.

Her husband, she observes, expanded the business "to a level of speciality unexpected in the Italian community. Usually you were just expected just to sell to Italians, but he thought it would be a very shrewd idea to open things out. That has built a brand for the company.

"The other key thing was when we opened our Caffè Bar 20 years ago. We brought our Cockenzie experiences right into Edinburgh. The basic idea was - we eat well at home, and would the customers like to enjoy that? The first day was terrifying. At 11am we thought, oh my God, there are no customers. But people were just waiting for the first lunch: by 3pm, they had eaten everything in the shop." Generally, she observes of V&C, "I think the secret of our success is to give the customers what we like ourselves and not simply give them what we can make profit from - which makes it tougher, in a way."

Today, in addition to its original premises in Elm Row, and the Caffè Bar, Valvona & Crolla has a restaurant and VinCaffè 10 minutes' away on Multrees Walk. In 2008 it opened foodhalls at Jenners' stores on Princes Street and at Loch Lomond Shores, and, later, at the Frasers store at the west end of Princes Street. The company employs 120 staff in total.

As you might expect, the deli offers some fairly exotic foodstuffs. Four days before our interview, chef and author Sue Lawrence had tweeted to fellow chef Sybil Kapoor to the effect that white truffles were cheaper at V&C. "The only reason we buy white truffles," Contini notes in passing, "is because Philip loves them. I hate them."

What sort of working day does she have? "To tell you the truth, we work with our phones. I've got a Blackberry, Philip has an iPhone. We work all the time, so we use the phones to communicate with all the different staff, all the time. So I'll talk to our bakers through the night, and I'll check in the morning to see what has been going on. I spend a lot of my time recruiting staff - I do that personally, because I think that reflects a lot of how the business is.

"Every team has its own manager and I'll talk to all the managers all day. I also do all the buying of fresh food, as well as the Scottish gifts we sell at Jenners and at Frasers. Philip's job is the wine. Francesca deals with the cash flow. The only day we maybe switch off is Sunday, as we work Saturdays. We have a day off through the week. I think anyone who is self-employed doesn't really switch off."

She and her husband visit Italy some half-a-dozen times a year. "We have to go for buying, which is a very good excuse," she says, "and we make that last several days, and we do all our holidays there as well. "We go all over the place: we love Venice, we love to go down to Sicily, we go south to Salerno for our summer holidays. We are very privileged, but it's important to keep refreshing your outlook."

She speaks enthusiastically, and with an expert's insight, not just of Italian cuisine but of Scotland's "amazing" larder, too, and wonders why "we have sort of hidden that, and not celebrated it as a nation. But VisitScotland and the Scottish Government have said to everybody that they should stand up and be counted."

Contini has found time to do much TV and radio work over the years and also to write several books, including two to her daughters. There have also been children's cookery books under the title of Easy Peasy (two more are in the pipeline). She has been mildly disconcerted when some new teenage kitchen recruits tell her they learned to cook from these books. "That's nice to hear," she reflects, trying not to wince, "even if it does show your age ever so slightly."

While Francesca buys for the Jenners foodhall, her sister, Olivia, is currently in China, near Shanghai, studying Mandarin. "We're very proud of Olivia, of course," says Contini before volunteering something that indicates that her fame has spread further than she thinks. "Olivia has written an article in a Chinese magazine for expats, and the chap there asked her, 'Are you Mary Contini's daughter?'" She laughs. "How cool is that?"