Fried spaghetti

First, as Mrs Beeton never said, make your Bolognese sauce. Now I am aware that any Italian reading this would be appalled at the idea of having it with spaghetti. Linguini or tagliatelle will do equally well. But I am not going to be over-precious about this. Here is what to do with the leftovers. Simply mix together the remaining pasta and sauce and put them into a hot frying pan with olive oil. It requires a little care not to allow this to burn since, if the sauce has been made properly, there is very little liquid. Then serve. A meal best served for one as a late breakfast or early lunch - and it goes surprisingly well with lime pickle.

Tinned spag

The snow on the ground today brings back memories of Aunt Joy who lived at the bottom of a series of zig-zagging tree-lined lanes in Surrey. Little Coldharbour, the house was called. Dark woods behind, brown fields in front. Whenever there was snow at Little Coldharbour, our mother told us, the road became impassable. Half a century before, Aunt Joy had fallen ill with double pneumonia, following a blizzard. Her mother, Ellen, my great grandmother, had had to walk along the tops of the holly hedges to summon medical help. Although we rarely, if ever, had to contend with snow ourselves, visits to see her were not without a sense of adventure. My mother was not particularly talented at driving or finding the way anywhere, and so there was always an unbreathed tension: would we ever get there? "Signs for Penge", muttered my mother. That name grew to have the resonance of the golden gate to Samarkand.

Aunt Joy was usually stretched on the day bed in her sun room as we arrived at last at Little Coldharbour. Grapevines hung from the ceiling but I never saw any grapes. There was a set of eight bells on the wall with a stick, inviting any passer-by to play a scale. Beyond the sun room was a windowless room stuffed with books, sofas and blankets. It was inside that darkened sitting room that Aunt Joy's sweet cupboard was located. Inside, row upon row of jars, as though it were a miniature sweet shop. Sherbet lemons. Dolly Mixture. Mint Imperials. Pear drops. My brother and I were allowed free licence to delve among the jars and choose, which we would do, repeatedly, during visits. Even our mother was indulgent on such occasions, despite her general antipathy towards "sugary sweets" and, worse still in her eyes, "cheap sweets": "You'll rot your teeth."

Aunt Joy was also fond of allowing us to guzzle fizzy drinks. "Kids' booze, I call it", she would announce, brandishing a bottle of lemonade. "I always think it's unfair for you to have nothing while the adults are all boozing away." Another Aunt Joy treat was one of her famous Ice Cream Sodas. Drunk using a straw: cream soda in the glass followed by a scoop of vanilla ice cream. When our mother was out of the room, Aunt Joy would encourage my brother to blow bubbles in his glass.

Those, then, were the between meal snacks. What about the main meals? Aunt Joy had a number of favourite sayings, now sounding slightly ominous. They included: "I've always been a good cook" and "I've always liked experimenting with food." The experiments were conducted in her rather grubby and damp kitchen. At its rear was a larder to make your heart sink. Row upon row of tins. Tinned beansprouts, tinned meatballs, tinned cream, tinned condensed milk. It was exactly the same larder which had entranced her little nieces - my mother and her younger sister - when they had gone to stay in Bletchingley in the early fifties. At supper time, Aunt Joy would say: "Like some spag? Or baked beans?" According to my aunt CeCe: "We always had tinned spag as we weren't allowed it at home. We adored it."

As adults, though, those nieces' tastes developed into deep distrust of anything emanating from Aunt Joy's kitchen. For instance, her "Chinese" cooking, consisting of rare chicken drenched in Cook-In Sauce, soggy sticky boiled rice and those tinned beansprouts cooked until they were flabby wisps ("I've always liked foreign grub"). Or grey sausages which she’d boiled instead of frying them. But we, the great nephews and great nieces, loved it. My cousin Tom used to say indignantly "But I LOVE Aunt Joy's cooking", whenever anyone suggested the contrary.

The last time I recall visiting Aunt Joy was to pick her up to take her to her niece's wedding reception in the neighbouring county. The same niece who remembered loving the tinned spag. My mother's mini had something wrong with it on the day and the added weight of Aunt Joy caused the car to splutter in indignation. At the foot of one hill, my mother had to get us out of the car to walk to the top. The reception over – no tinned spag in sight - we dropped Aunt Joy at Little Coldharbour for the last time. In her absence, the little car sped away without difficulty.

Bolognese sauce

It seems to me that there are only four essential ingredients of a Bolognese sauce although the Bolognese themselves might well disagree - just as they would never serve this sauce with spaghetti. For reasons I have articulated elsewhere (round food) I don't rave about spaghetti much anyway. My pasta of choice with this sauce is tagliatelle. James Bond and I would disagree about the choice of pasta if not the sauce. In Thunderball, one of the "three obsessions which belonged to his former life and which would not leave him" was: "a passionate longing for a large dish of Spaghetti Bolognese containing plenty of chopped garlic and accompanied by a whole bottle of the cheapest, rawest Chianti (bulk for his empty stomach and sharp tastes for his starved palate)". This is possibly the first dish I was ever taught to cook and it got me through university. When I first published this version, I received a particularly helpful critique and have incorporated some of the suggestions from it into this revised version.

Those essential ingredients, then: an onion, about 1 lb or 500 g of minced beef, a small tin of tomato purée (I would not have added an accent but the device I am using cleverly did so) and the empty tin filled with water and stirred so as to leave the tin shiny and no remnants of tomato within it. There will be ample fat in the mince for cooking purposes. Just these ingredients will make a rich sauce far better and more cheaply than anything from a jar. One of those dishes like Shepherd's Pie which is simply not worth eating other than at home.

That said, I have refined the sauce over the years and would add the following optional ingredients: a clove of garlic, a pinch of thyme or oregano, a bay leaf, a little freshly ground black pepper, a finely-chopped carrot or two, a stick of celery, a tin of chopped Italian tomatoes, a splash of olive oil and a splash of red wine. The imprecision of some of the quantities given is not intended to sound airy or unhelpful but to demonstrate that, unlike some other recipes, it's fairly flexible. NOT, though, when it comes to certain additional ingredients...

Let me do some explaining. This, above all, is a meat sauce. The onion, garlic, celery and carrot are condiments only, to melt unobtrusively. You do not want great lumps of them in this sauce. Nor, in my view, should other, alien ingredients, such as mushrooms, peppers or, dare I say it, sweetcorn, be added. Nor am I convinced by the addition of a handful of lardons or pancetta, which is contrary to what I said in yet another earlier version of this post. The recipe continues to evolve! I like to think I favour liberalism in cooking. And if you fancy a mince and vegetable sauce for your pasta, fine. But it seems to me that too many extra vegetables or whatever cross the line between what can legitimately call itself Bolognese and what cannot. The other thing to add, while I'm being principled, is that this is a thick meat sauce: it shouldn't be watery.

The method, leaving out steps depending on the optional ingredients...

1. Finely chop an onion. My only tip on avoiding tears is this. Peel it all first and don't chop off the ends until you've done so. You want to minimise the amount of time following the first cut which starts to release in vapourised form the (very dilute) sulphuric acid that attacks the eyes.

2. Heat about a teaspoon of olive oil in a frying pan. If you're not using any oil, leave out step 5: ie add the mince first, followed by the onion.

3. Finely chop the garlic if you're using it. Warm it gently in the oil. Remove once it's added flavour to the oil.

4. If you're using lardons, fry them at this stage.

5. Fry the finely chopped onion, stirring frequently to prevent it from burning.

6. Put the mince into the frying pan, turn the heat up and brown the mince on all sides. Gradually mix the mince with the onion. Stir frequently, breaking up any clumps of mince as you do so and stopping the onion from burning. Shake the pan every so often. If there's a lot of fat in the pan, now's a good opportunity to pour it off.

7. If you're adding any of the other optional vegetables (carrot and celery), add them at this stage, as finely chopped as you can. To repeat myself, they are condiments. Similarly, the thyme, bay leaf and FGBP can all go in at this stage.

8. Add the tomato purée. Because of its thick consistency, it may be a struggle at first to mix it with the mince. Persevere: the heat will rapidly cause it to melt. Don't add water at this stage, but stir furiously. You don't want the tomato - or anything - to burn but the direct heat at this stage seals in the flavour. I think.

9. The trick, I have decided, is to cook everything on the highest possible heat you dare (stirring furiously as burnt onions are horrid) until you add the water, whereupon you turn the heat as low as it will go.

10. Add the splash of wine and/or chopped tomatoes if they're going in.

11. Finally, add the water. Turn the heat down to its lowest possible setting. Let the sauce bubble gently. Scrape down the sides of the pan every so often. Stir and/or add a little more water every so often if there's a danger of sticking.

12. I think this should be allowed to simmer for 45 minutes or longer. There should be some, but not too much, rich red liquid on the top. Cook the pasta. Eat.

Some reminiscences. This was the first thing I was taught to cook before I went off to university. It's still a staple. On one occasion - this was before I had learned to cook it - we had all been to the theatre with an extended party of family and friends. The plan was that Mum was going to cook this when we got home afterwards. But she had to be dropped off at the local hospital, having got something in her eye. So my father took us all home and asked us what we'd like to eat. In an injudicious attempt to lighten the atmosphere, I said airily, "Oh you know, some smoked salmon, some caviar, something like that". In my defence, I hadn't appreciated my mother was actually in casualty; she happened to work in the hospital and I'd thought one of her colleagues was going to sort her out. In any event, my father didn't lose his temper in front of guests but we were swiftly banished from the kitchen and he put together a bolognese sauce about which one of my cousins was a little doubtful. My roasting came the following day after everyone had left...

Spaghetti alla vongole

This is Part 2 of my trip to Ventimiglia. I remind you of the date: 11 September 2001.

After stocking up with Parma ham and Napoli salami (both to be the subjects of other entries, I predict) and a quick whisk around the covered market, we headed to a restaurant on the coast for lunch.

It was Pen’s treat – and I should add that it almost always is. The only way to prevent this from happening is to agree very precisely with her well in advance that she will in no circumstances be the one to settle up at the end of the meal. Even then, she has been known to slip quietly away from the table and, before you could say “bill”, she has already requested and paid it.

Unusually for me, it was not a meal where starters were in order. I can only recall what I ate which was perhaps as perfect a choice as I could have made at that particular moment: for the very first meal I ate in Italy, right by the coast, outside, at lunchtime on a warm September day. Spaghetti alla vongole. Normally, I avoid spaghetti. If I were being dishonest, I would say that it was because spaghetti are cylindrical and so the sauce falls off which simply does not happen to the flatter types of pasta. But I cannot even explain my prejudice to my own satisfaction.

The shells in spaghetti alla vongole are a good sign. If they are not there, I suspect tinned clams. You need little else other than the clams: a little greenery, some wine, perhaps some shreds of chilli. A plate on which to discard the emptied shells. A fork and people surrounding you who have no objection to your helping the clams out with your fingers. My heart usually sinks when I hear the expression a “light lunch”, but if it consisted of a bowl of spaghetti alla vongole, I’d be very happy.

This golden day ended shortly after we arrived back in Lorgues, at about 4 in the afternoon, French time. We had just settled down on the terrasse, when suddenly the telephone rang. Pen took the call in the house and came outside shortly afterwards in tears. Her friend, Monique, had told her to switch on the television.