Perfect pasta made perfectly simple

Pasta or potatoes, which would you choose? How can you do this to me? I do adore a really good buttery mash, but I also can't think of anything I would rather eat more than fresh pasta with shaved white truffles.

As a general rule, though, I try to avoid too much of either. I mainly eat protein, vegetables and wholegrains. I love carbs but I have learned to cut down.

What is your favourite food hack - a shortcut to success or a technique that turns something around? I don't think we use our ovens nearly enough. We tend to think that roasting is for the Sunday joint, but we need to let the oven do more work for us.

You can shove a load of chicken thighs in the oven (along with other suitable ingredients, of course), spread out in a single layer and the skin well salted. Forty-five minutes later you have a feast and you haven’t even bothered to brown the chicken (it just roasts and the skin crisps). All sorts of vegetables are good for roasting too.

People think quick cooking is food that is on the table in 20 minutes. I prefer effortless cooking – minimal time preparing, but more time for the dish to actually cook. While heat is doing its work you don’t have to do anything.

Your new book 'Simple' is about full-on flavour from accessible ingredients – what would be your five essential store cupboard items? Can I please have 10? I do keep a well-stocked cupboard. I'd say my go-to ingredients are anchovies, capers, raisins (raisins, anchovies and capers mean you're ready to cook many sweet-sour Sicilian dishes), tahini, soy sauce, honey, pomegranate molasses, extra virgin olive oil, tins of pulses and a mixture of nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts). I also always have garlic, lemons, eggs, Greek yoghurt, parsley and Parmesan. Oh and booze! Dry vermouth turns many a fish or chicken dish into something special. In terms of spices the ones I most use are chilli flakes, cumin, caraway and smoked paprika.

What's your "nothing in the cupboard or fridge" dish? Spaghetti with chilli, parsley, garlic and lemon. And I am as happy to eat this as any more complicated dish.

What do you think of the current Irish food scene in terms of produce and restaurants? I can't keep up! There are always new places opening that I hear about – more trips to Dublin are required – and I have always loved Irish cheeses. I think Ireland has fantastic basic produce which is partly why I have always loved cooking (the ingredients at home are so good). We just didn't know how good they were when I was growing up. When I'm in Dublin my first stop is Etto, I just love the food there (and the people).


PASTA MASTER: Diana Henry on where she fell in love with pasta (excerpt from her new book)
August in Rome. I'm sitting in a quiet trattoria in the suburbs. It has taken an hour to get here in the sweltering heat but it's worth it: the place is famous for its fritti – arancini, courgette flowers stuffed with cheese and anchovies – and its pasta.

As soon as the carbonara, a dish in which eggs are cooked just enough by strands of hot spaghetti to form a ‘sauce’ (but not so much that they scramble) arrives, I am completely content. I’m also reminded how good something this ordinary and inexpensive – only the nuggets of salty guanciale with which the dish is studded cost much – can be. It isn’t just the flavour, it’s the fact that it’s soft, that there is a ritual to eating it – twirling it round your fork – that it can be made quickly and with a little style.

I watch the Italians around me eating small platefuls of pasta as a precursor to their pollo alla diavola or veal chop… and think of my favourite pasta photographs, of Maria Callas and a group of her girlfriends eating pasta on a train in 1955 on the way to La Scala, of Sophia Loren looking for all the world as if pasta had created every wonderful curve on her body. They are all eating with such joy, heads held back and mouths wide open, as though a love of pasta exhibits a love of life itself.

Most of us, in contrast, have come to regard pasta not as a joy, but as a filler. It’s the convenience food par excellence; it’s easy and nearly every child will eat it. God knows what we did before supermarkets were full of packets of tubes, strands, shells, corkscrews and butterflies. Familiarity has, to a certain extent, bred contempt.

For a start, we don’t prepare it well. Pasta has to be cooked in plenty of boiling salted water (1 litre/1¾ pints for every 100g/3½oz of pasta). Dress it with melted butter or olive oil if your sauce isn’t ready and, when saucing, don’t overdo it; the pasta, with its own flavour and texture, is just as important as the sauce. Remember that the sauce should just coat the pasta, not drown it. Adding a little of the cooking water from the pasta to the sauce loosens it, and helps both pasta and sauce to combine well.

Tossed with cream, lemon zest and shreds of Parma ham, or with wild mushrooms and truffles, pasta can be luxurious, but more often it allows you to revel in the frugal… and also to cook spontaneously. I feel a little rise of pleasure as I spot a bunch of parsley that can be tossed with spaghetti, extra virgin olive oil and dried chilli. Carrying a big bowl of this to the table makes me happy: I’ve taken ordinary ingredients and turned them into something good.

Frugal, simple, generous, these are some of the best attributes a dish can have (in my book, anyway). Pasta, if cooked with care and approached with verve, can be all these things, something that Maria Callas and Sophia Loren knew well.