Cooking pasta is simple enough – if you stick to some basic guidelines.
Maya Even talks Italian

Chief among the virtues of Italian cooking is simplicity. Largely free of the daunting rules and elaborate techniques that govern, for example, French or Japanese cookery, classic Italian recipes invite the timid, the uninitiated and the downright cack-handed to delight in the creation of wonderful dishes. There are no reductions, no highly strung sauces to split or custards to scramble, no odori ebi. There is almost no Italian recipe that cannot be reproduced as well, if not better, at home as in a restaurant.

The second virtue of Italian cookery is convenience. Although the recipe books themselves will impress upon the home cook the desirability of using the freshest and most seasonal ingredients, I have produced equally excellent results with recipes that derive all their components from the store cupboard. If your larder contains a tin of plum tomatoes, a bottle of good olive oil, an onion, a clove of garlic and a packet of dried spaghetti, you are never more than 20 minutes away from a very good lunch.

And the third and perhaps most endearing quality of the Italian kitchen is its generous and accommodating nature. Italian recipes, like Italians in general, are forgiving to a fault. It takes a lot to render inedible a tomato sauce. By contrast, 10 seconds of inattention can destroy a béarnaise and ruin your life.

“Ah ha!” says my (Italian) husband, springing on my hapless third observation like an avenging pagliaccio. “You are wrrrong! What about pasta?” And, of course, he is right. Pasta is the one exception that tolerates no accommodations. My husband can cook (all Italian men seem to imbibe this skill with their mother’s milk) and therefore has a legitimate view on the matter. He is belligerent about the proper way to prepare pasta, having endured the Anglo-Saxon mangling of his national food for decades. Strange that it should be so when it is, in fact, very simple to cook pasta as long as you follow some basic guidelines.

The first is that you must memorise this ratio and follow it religiously. The ratio is 100 to 10 to 1. What it means is that for every 100g of pasta you must use one litre of water and 10g of coarse salt. This might sound like an awful lot of salt, but it is critical to the taste of the pasta, and the anti-salt fascisti can reassure themselves that it will mean adding less salt at the end of the process when it is too late to make much difference to the taste anyway.

Your pot must be big enough and the water sufficiently plentiful to give the pasta a chance to cook at a good boil. Ensure the water is boiling before you drop in the pasta, give it a good stir a minute after to prevent sticking and then only once or twice throughout the cooking. Never break long pasta, but bend and push it down gently as it softens. If it still doesn’t fit in the pot, your pot is too small.

Pasta should be served al dente, which means that it must have some bite. Ignore all packet timings. They are invariably too long. Taste the pasta several times during cooking. When you can nearly bite through, leave to boil another 30 seconds, and drain immediately. And never cook pasta in advance, it must always be served straightaway.

Now for the sauce. Carbonara was said to have originated at the end of the Second World War when American troops, stationed in the hills around Rome, smuggled fresh eggs and, some say, bacon, to befriended locals who in return created a sauce that became as famous as the classic American breakfast itself. Romans improved on this with guanciale – smoked pork cheek – but pancetta is an acceptable substitute. Cream, on the other hand, is not an acceptable ingredient. This is another point upon which my husband will not give way. It is, he says ominously, his litmus test. If anyone uses cream in a carbonara he will never go there for dinner again. And the offender is never invited back.

- Maya Even is a food consultant for FQR

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