De-seeding tomatoes

A feature that marks out a chef's cookery book from one written with the home cook in mind is the instruction to de-seed tomatoes. People in professional kitchens may be comfortable with throwing away half the vegetable (fruit, if you like); to the home cook, it seems both fussy and wasteful.

There is a case to be made for throwing away the seeds and jelly if you are incorporating the tomato in a sandwich. You might not want the juice to dilute a salad; but in that case the better option, in my view, is to fold in the tomatoes at the last minute -- or to rest them on top. Perhaps you do not want seeds in a sauce. You might sieve them, retaining the jelly; but surely that is a ridiculous effort.

I am delighted to see that Harold McGee, the food science guru, endorses my laziness. Here, he reports on some research prompted by Heston Blumenthal: the researchers found that the jelly of the tomato contained more flavour than the flesh.

Here is an easy tomato sauce, the method for which I read about in one of Nigel Slater's books. Soften a chopped garlic clove in a tbsp of olive oil; throw in four chopped tomatoes with a little salt (if the tomatoes are unripe, you might add a tsp of sugar), and simmer until the tomatoes have broken down and the sauce has thickened. Pass the sauce through a vegetable mill. Check the seasoning. If the sauce seems thin, simmer it for a little longer.

Lasagne, part 2

Part one is here; or immediately below. For 4.

300 g lasagne, cooked as in part one.

For the ragu
Olive oil
2 onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
200 g beef mince
200 g pork mince
Bay leaf
1/2 chicken stock cube
1 tbsp tomato paste
Salt and pepper to taste

For the bechamel
About 50 g butter
2 tbsp flour
About 450 ml milk
2 tbsp double cream
Grating of nutmeg
Salt to taste
2 tbsp Parmesan

Soften the onions and garlic in a layer of olive oil in a heavy saucepan. How much oil? Start with enough to layer the bottom of the pan, warm it over a gently heat, and tip in the vegetables. If they start to catch, add a little more oil. It is impossible to give measurements. I suspect that inexperienced cooks are nervous if they need more oil than the recipy specifies; but they need not be. Cook the onion and garlic until they are golden.

When I made this lasagne, I did not brown the meat. (As I have explained before, it is very hard to start the browning process now, because it needs a high temperature that will burn the vegetables.) Over a low to medium heat, break up the mince as it cooks. Add the other ingredients, and simmer over a low heat. You may want a little water; but the stew should be thick. Give it about 30 minutes.

Melt the butter in a small, non-stick saucepan. Add the flour, and stir to make a roux the consistency of wet sand. As with the onions, add more butter if necessary. (These quantities give more bechamel than recipes usually specify, to suit my taste.) Cook the roux very gently for a minute (it helps to minimise the floury flavour), then turn up the heat a little and add the milk, several splashes at a time, incorporating each addition before making another. You want a thick sauce that will stick to the back of your wooden spoon. When you have it, stir in the cream, nutmeg and salt.

Assemble the lasagne. Lightly butter your oven dish. Put a layer of lasagne in the bottom, cutting the pieces to fit. Do not overlap them too much: the pieces will stick together and become stodgy. Try to work out how many layers you will get, and whether you want that many. Then calculate how much ragu you can put into each layer. Spread this amount over the lasagne in the dish.

Some recipes tell you to alternate layers of ragu and bechamel; others suggest spreading the bechamel on to the ragu. I chose the latter option, but I used the bechamel sparingly, because I wanted there to be plenty left over for the topping.

Put a layer of lasagne on to your ragu and bechamel; top that with more ragu and bechamel; and so on, finishing with a layer of lasagne. Spread the remaining bechamel over that, sprinkle the Parmesan on top, and bake in a gas mark 4/180 C oven for 40 minutes.

Lasagne, part 1

Apologies for splitting this post. The reason is that I want to say something about the pasta before getting to the recipe.

The "no pre-cooking required" varieties of lasagne are often the only ones available. I am not particularly keen on them. The sauces, the instructions tell you, need to be runny, in order to surround the pasta and cook it, and to compensate for absorption into the sheets; but how do you get the consistency right? Too runny, and you end up with slop; too thick, and you get a dried-out dish with crunchy pasta.

A local deli owner gave me the answer: par-boil the lasagne first, for just a minute. The process gets the cooking underway, and prevents the pasta from drying out the sauces (a ragu and a bechamel). Of course, you now have to do just as much work with this so-called labour-saving lasagne as you would with a variety that did require pre-cooking.

Get a large pan of water to the boil, salt it, and drop in four sheets of lasagne. (If you try to cook lots of sheets at once, you are likely to find them sticking together.) After a minute, fish them out with a slotted spoon, transfer them to a colander, and run cold water over them. Separate them if they have stuck together. Lay them out on a clean surface. Repeat, until you have par-boiled all the sheets the recipe requires.

I have found that if I adhere to the timing of 60 seconds and apply the cold water quickly, the lasagne does not curl up. It sometimes does, nevertheless. That is not disastrous.

Recipe to come on Friday.

Apple and plum crumble

Anna Shepard asked how to prevent crumble from sinking into a fruit filling. At her Eco Worrier blog, someone suggests cooking the fruit first: beneath the pie base, many fruits emit a lot of liquid, submerging the crumble. But, as I discovered with my plum tart, the pre-cooked fruit may become too soft. The apple and plum crumble I made yesterday was a compromise, containing pre-cooked apples (Discoveries) and raw plums (Victorias).

Some people like crunchy crumble. I am happy with a soft and buttery version.

This pudding offered modest portions for four.

100 g flour
60 g butter
2 dstsp caster sugar
4 apples, peeled, quartered, cored, sliced, and held in acidulated water
Knob butter
6 plums, quartered and stoned
Cinnamon, if liked

Cut the butter into little pieces, and return to the fridge. When chilled, rub it into the flour with your fingertips. Or whizz the flour and butter in a food processor. Stir in 1 dstsp of the sugar.

Melt the knob of butter in a saucepan, remove the apples from the water with your hands (it does not matter if they are wet), and throw them in. Cook over a low to medium heat until starting to soften.

(The Discoveries I used did not throw off much liquid. Some apples do. The liquid needs to be cooked off, either in the pan if the apples will not break up, or apart if they are fragile. Some apples become mushy; others retain their shape. Mine were somewhere in between.)

Tip the apples into a pie dish, and tuck in the quartered plums. Sprinkle with the remaining sugar, and with cinnamon if you like it.

Spread the crumble on top of the fruit, and bake at gas mark 6/200 C for 30 minutes, or until the top is browned and the filling is bubbling.

Plum tart

The plum tree in our garden here in France is shedding fruit indefatigably, like a magician from a cloak. You feel that you have to do something with it, even if you can make only a small inroad on the total.

We have bought a 28 cm tart tin with a removable base. I made a pastry with 220 g of flour, 110 g of butter, a tbsp of sugar, and enough iced water to form a dough. I prefer not to enrich pastry with egg, especially if it is to be a base for something rich and eggy. I dropped the ball of dough into the tin, and spread it out with my hands. (There is more about pastry here.)

I was not sure about whether or not to bake the pastry blind. I reasoned that the plums would not saturate it as a quiche custard would, and that putting the tin on a baking sheet would help the pastry to crisp. There were disagreements about the result. I felt that the pastry was underdone; our guests, probably out of politeness, said that they preferred it that way.

I should have measured the quantity of plums I used. There were enough, whole, generously to cover the tin -- perhaps about 700 g, unstoned. I halved and stoned them. Then I did something unnecessary: I put the plums into a saucepan with a sprinkling of sugar and a little water, covered the pan, and cooked them until soft. I overdid it; and they might have softened satisfactorily anyway. I arranged them in the tart.

Recipes differ in their instructions over custard. Some suggest that you make a custard, pour it into the pastry base, cook until set, then lay the fruit on top and cook further. Others tell you to make the custard in a saucepan, set it in the fridge, and spread it over the tart base. The third method is to pour custard over the tart towards the end of cooking. I chose the third method.

I cooked the tart for 25 minutes at gas mark 6/200 C. Meanwhile, I reduced the plum liquid to a syrup in a small saucepan, and in a bowl I beat two eggs, whisking them with a dstsp of sugar, a tsp of vanilla essence, three tbsp of creme fraiche, and a little milk -- about 75 ml of liquid altogether, I should guess. (This is a very thick custard, compensating for the liquid in the plums.)

After the 25 minutes, I poured the syrup over the plums, and baked the tart for five minutes longer. I turned down the oven to gas mark S/130 C, poured the custard over everything, and waited for another 30 minutes, by which time the custard was set. I allowed the tart to cool in the oven.

Pork and bean stew 2

My latest New Statesman column concerns dried beans. I gave a recipe for one such bean stew here.

I cook these stews often, with variations. The following, unlike the one mentioned in the column, does not include chicken stock; to add interest to the sauce, I added tomato paste. For 4.

250 g dried haricot beans, soaked for five hours or longer
4 cloves garlic, three whole and one chopped
2 onions, peeled but left whole
4 slices cooked roast pork, cut into fork-sized pieces
Handful smoked lardons
1 tbsp tomato paste
4 tbsp olive oil
Plateful breadcrumbs

Drain the beans. In a casserole, cover them with water with a few cms to spare. Bring to the boil, skim off the scum, and throw in the onions and garlic. Cover, and simmer on a low heat until tender. (Cooking times of dried beans are not predictable; it may take from one hour to three or more.) Keep checking the level of the liquid. As the beans approach softness, take the lid off the pan to allow evaporation, until you have beans in a thickened, sludgy sauce. Discard the onions; squeeze the soft garlic from the hulls, and return it to the pan.

In a small frying pan, soften the chopped garlic in the olive oil over a gentle heat. Pour it into the casserole. Stir in the pork, lardons, and tomato paste; add the salt you want. Cover the stew with breadcrumbs, and bake at gas mark 6/200 C for 20 to 30 minutes, or until the top is golden and the stew is bubbling.

Haricots verts

French green beans, so much more vibrant in flavour than the muddy Kenyan ones that dominate the supermarket shelves in Britain, are coming to the end of their season. We have been eating them whenever we can.

Some people assert that you should never steam green vegetables, or put the lid on the pan of boiling water. The science behind that theory appears to be that the atmosphere inside a closed pan has higher acidity -- and acidity causes the vegetables to lose greenness, turning an unappetising khaki. I am not sure about this effect from my own experience; but perhaps the water in North London is low in acidity. I usually steam these vegetables (unless there is an opportunity to cook them in boiling water I am about to use for pasta), because I have read that steaming retains more nutrients.

However, I boil vegetables here in France, where we do not own a steamer. I give green beans three and a half minutes from the moment I plunge them into the boiling water.

Whether or not to salt the water is another difficult question. Harold McGee says that salt speeds softening, and therefore reduces the time that the vegetables have to spend in the colour-sapping pan. But I usually leave it out.

Apple and bread pudding

This is adapted from a recipe in Simple French Food by Richard Olney. (Scroll down the Grub Street page to find it; here is a piece by me about the book.) Here in France, I have baguettes to work with; removing the crusts is far too fiddly an operation, so I whizz them up as well. I am not sure that it is necessary to cook the breadcrumbs, rather than simply tossing them in melted butter: they become thoroughly soaked by the liquid. I made more custard than he specifies.

Apples such as Granny Smith that hold their shape would work well here. I used some from my neighbour's garden; they turned to mush almost as soon as they hit the pan.

For 6.

10 apples, peeled, quartered, cored and sliced (you can hold them in acidulated water, to prevent discolouration)
Plateful breadcrumbs, crusts removed if possible
80 g butter
4 eggs
50 g sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
300 ml milk
100g creme fraiche or double cream

In a large pan, cook the apples in 40 g of the butter, tossing regularly, until soft. It may take up to 20 minutes. Melt the remaining butter, and toss the breadcrumbs in it; if you like, cook them over a very gentle heat until crisp.

Beat the eggs with the sugar and vanilla. In a small pan, warm the milk and the cream. Pour a little of the hot liquid into the eggs, stirring to disperse the heat and prevent curdling; add a little more liquid; then add the rest.

Lightly butter a gratin dish. Spread the crumbs on the bottom; lay the apples on top of them; pour over the custard mixture. Put the dish into a roasting tin, pour hot water around it to come half way up the sides (it prevents the outside of the dish from getting too hot and spoiling the custard), and bake at gas mark 3/160 C for 30 to 45 minutes, or until the custard has set. Serve hot, or warm.

Barbecued shoulder of lamb

My barbecue enthusiasm continues. I am almost a convert.

With guests staying, and with the weather encouraging us to dine outdoors, I decided that a barbecued joint would be both a treat and simple to prepare. Our local butcher created a work of art: a boned shoulder of lamb, rolled into a torpedo shape and tied. I shoved slivers of garlic and sprigs of rosemary into the folds, rubbed the meat with sunflower oil, and salted it.

I heated a good mound of charcoal, adding to it continually for about an hour and a half. The barbecue allows you to insert the rack at different heights: I started on the middle setting, but found that the heat was intense enough to allow me to raise it.

A shoulder of lamb is fatty. The fat drops on to the coals, igniting small fires. You have to manipulate the joint constantly at first, to prevent charring.

I cooked the lamb for 40 minutes, turning it regularly. Sliced, it was still slightly pink in the centre: perfect, in other words.

We ate it with gratin dauphinois and green beans.

Grilled mackerel

In spite of I had written here, I had a yearning to fire up the barbecue on the first decent day of summer. I had some vividly striped mackerel, bought at the l'Aigle market -- a cornucopia of magnificent, vibrant produce.

Our barbecue is a basic model: a large bowl on a stand. I have had trouble getting it hot enough. My clever brother-in-law found the solution: a grille that fits inside, holding the coals and allowing air to pass underneath. The heat you get now is scorching.

You need to do nothing to the mackerel apart from washing them. There are just two things to worry about. The first is that the skin will stick. At home, I have a fish-shaped basket that will contain the fish without attaching itself to them, but I did not bring it to France with me. So I had to resign myself to a messy presentation. The second issue is how long the fish will take to cook. You learn to judge how a cooker works; but the conditions on a barbecue are more variable. I gave the mackerel about two minutes on each side. That turned out to be too long; but they were delicious anyway.

Lemon jelly cheesecake

My latest New Statesman column concerns a subject I've tackled here a few times: the search for the cheesecake of my dreams. This recipe, from the messageboard on Delia Smith's website, is not it; but is good in its own way. Do not try it if the thought of wobbly, lemony condensed milk does not appeal.

I made the base in my usual way: 150 g of whizzed digestive biscuits stirred into 75 g of melted butter and compacted into a 20 cm porcelain flan dish. I put the dish in the freezer while I prepared the very simple filling.

I whipped together a tin of condensed milk and a 200 g packed of Philadelphia cheese. I put a lemon jelly into a small saucepan, poured over 150 ml of water (ie, far less than you would use if making the jelly on its own), and heated it gently until the jelly dissolved. I stirred in the zest of a lemon and the juice of half of it, and -- without waiting until the jelly had started to set -- stirred this mixture into the milk and cheese. I poured the filling into the chilled base, and put the dish into the fridge to chill. (I covered the dish with foil.)

I had worried that the runny -- at this stage -- filling would turn the base soggy. But it did not.

Pork stir-fry with rice

I do not cook stir-fries as you are supposed to, in a scorching wok with smoking oil. I do not have a wok, is one reason. The other is that I cannot believe that burning oil -- for that is what it is -- will enhance the flavour of food. Still, it would be foolhardy to argue with Ken Hom.

So here is a wimp's inauthentic stir fry. I cooked it last night for three. (I did not have ginger, but would have used it if I had, adding a tsp of it, minced, with the garlic.)

3 spare rib pork chops
Groundnut oil
2 carrots, cut into batons
2 spring onions, chopped
150 g mushrooms, sliced
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tbsp nam pla (fish sauce)
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 dstsp sesame oil
225 g basmati rice

Cut the chops into fork-sized pieces. Put a heavy frying pan over a medium to high heat, pour in a splash of groundnut oil, and fry the pork. You may need to do so in two batches: otherwise, you will lower the heat of the pan and will crowd the meat, which will sweat rather than brown. The browning process should take a couple of minutes. Remove the meat to a plate.

(You have to cook the pork separately at first. If you added the vegetables to the meat in the pan, the meat would overcook while the vegetables were softening. If you cooked the vegetables first, then the pork with them, the pork would not brown.)

Add another splash of oil to the pan, and fry the carrots for a few minutes. Add the spring onions, mushrooms and garlic. When they have softened, lower the heat, and return the pork to the pan to warm through while you boil the rice.

When the rice is drained, stir the vinegar, nam pla and soy sauce through the meat and vegetables. Fold in the rice. Serve with chilli sauce, if you like.

We're off to France. I'll start filing from there next week.

Cold curried chicken

We had a street party on Saturday. I bought a large chicken, thinking that I might make coronation chicken; but none of the books on my kitchen shelf included the recipe. As I thought about it, I realised that recipes I had seen included mango chutney -- which I did not have. So I decided to improvise something on a similar theme. People seemed to like it.

As I say, this is an improvised recipe: the brand of curry powder is not an essential detail. I mention the one I used both because it is very good and because the quantity is based on the packet advice. Your brand may work differently. I made a light stock with the neck giblet and a carrot because they were the ingredients to hand; if there had been an onion in the house, I would have used that as well.

1 chicken, 2.2 kg
Olive oil
Salt, pepper
1 lemon
1 neck giblet
1 carrot, peeled
2 cloves garlic, chopped
6 tsp Seasoned Pioneers Sri Lankan curry powder
1 200 g tub Greek yoghurt
1 200 g jar mayonnaise

Preheat the oven to gas mark 6/200 C. Rub the chicken with a little olive oil, season it, squeeze half the lemon over it, and put the hull with the other half into the cavity. Roast for 30 minutes. Turn the oven down to gas mark 1/140 C, and roast for a further hour and 30 minutes. Baste from time to time if you like; basting gives the skin an appetisingly mottled and burnished appearance. (There is more on roasting chickens here.)

Pour water over the giblet in a small saucepan, add the peeled carrot, and simmer on a very low flame for an hour.

Remove the chicken from the oven and allow to cool. It should have produced some sauce; tip this into a bowl, and deglaze the roasting pan with a little water over a medium heat, scraping up the sediments. Add this liquid to the bowl.

Fat will rise to the top of this sauce. Discard all but a tbsp of it, with a spoon at first and then by applying strips of paper towel to the surface. In a small saucepan, soften the garlic in the reserved fat over a gentle heat, and add the curry powder, stirring and cooking it for about a minute. Pour in the sauce from the chicken and the stock, simmering until the mixture has reduced to a syrupy consistency.

Tear the meat off the chicken with your hands, reserving the carcass for stock. The curry sauce may have thickened further as it cools; loosen it a little with the juices that come out of the chicken.

In a large bowl, mix the curry sauce with the yoghurt and the mayonnaise. Fold in the chicken. Test the seasoning.

Bacon and broad bean salad

For two, I used about eight pods of broad beans, a small packet of rocket, about 12 new potatoes, a clove of garlic, and four slices of unsmoked streaky bacon.

I cooked the podded beans in boiling water for about eight minutes. When they were cool, I slipped them from their grey-green sheaths.

I simmered the potatoes slowly, according to the instructions here, with the unpeeled garlic clove.

Meanwhile, the bacon was sizzling very gently on a ridged grill pan. It took about 25 minutes to crisp. Only when you have cooked bacon this slowly -- there is more about the process here -- do you appreciate how much fat it contains. I did not throw away the fat, but used it for the salad dressing, with one tbsp of red wine vinegar into which I had mashed the softened garlic clove, 1 tbsp of olive oil, and salt and pepper.

In this dressing, I tossed the potatoes (which I had sliced), the bacon cut into pieces, the rocket and the broad beans. I have to admit that I added some cubes of cheddar cheese too; but the salad would have been better without them.

Chicken and fennel

This very simple recipe is based on one in Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book. She recommends cooking the fennel for about seven minutes before baking it with the chicken. I followed that advice, but I am not sure that it was necessary: the fennel had plenty of time to soften and sweeten in the oven. Her recipe includes a spatchcocked chicken; I, cooking for three, used thighs and drumsticks. That was an advantage, because it enabled me to adjust the oven temperature without worrying about drying out breast meat.

Fennel -- 1 to 2 bulbs a person
Knob of butter
150 ml hot water or stock
A chicken thigh and drumstick for each person
Salt and pepper

Remove discoloured leaves as well as tops and fronds (you can use them to flavour the sauce in the pan) from the fennel. Slice the bulbs about 5 mm thick from the tops through the roots. Lay them in a roasting tray with the butter, pour over the hot water or stock, lay the chicken pieces on top, season, and bake in a gas mark 4/180 C oven for about an hour.

You want the chicken to brown and the liquid to reduce to create a couple of tbsps of flavoursome sauce for each person. You may have to turn the oven dial up or down to achieve those results. If the sauce dries up, add a little more liquid. If the chicken and fennel are cooked and there is too much sauce, strain it into a small saucepan and bubble it on the hob to reduce it, meanwhile keeping the roasting pan in a warm oven.

Lentil soup

My latest New Statesman column concerns cooking with miscellaneous items of food that need using up. If you have fastidious tastes, you may find it difficult to assemble meals in this way. If you are not too fussy, you can create all sorts of dishes that, while not deserving to be commemorated in recipes, will be perfectly good to eat. And the amount of food you throw in the bin will diminish.

The lentil soup builds on a template that I rely on a lot. You simmer the lentils, perhaps with a garlic clove that will later, minus the husk, be mashed into the soup; you sweat onions, garlic and possibly other vegetables in olive oil; you combine these vegetables with the lentils, and puree the soup (I mostly use a hand blender). The alternative is do it all in one pan, starting with the aromatic vegetables and adding the lentils and the stock to them. Version one takes less time. The other advantage is that you are not cooking these vegetables for so long. Simmered until the lentils have softened, they can lose their freshness of flavour.

Grilled chicken breast

Lean meat such as chicken breast toughens if cooked for too long. The breasts sold as "chicken supremes", usually with a piece of wing bone attached, are thick at the wing end; the heat of a grill chars their outsides quickly, but is slow to invade further. It is worth cutting them into three or four portions. There is a flap of meat that you can slice off; you can then slice off another portion at the rear, thinner end; and slice through the breast at the thick end to produce portions about 50 mm thick.

The amount of flavour imparted to meat by long marinating is often overrated. I usually soak the breasts for about half an hour: perhaps (for two supremes) in the juice of half a lemon, a good glug of olive oil, and a clove of garlic, crushed with a little salt.

You could simply fry the breasts in this marinade, although you would risk burning the garlic. Or you could scrape off the marinade, and cook the chicken on a ridged grill pan or on a dry frying pan. Get the pan hot over a medium heat, and turn the breasts several times as you cook, so that the outsides do not burn before the heat penetrates the centres. They should take about five minutes.

Mashed Charlottes

After quite a few helpings of crushed new potatoes, I felt that it was time for a change. We were eating grilled chicken, a plain dish that could take a rich accompaniment. I decided to cook the Charlottes in the usual way (brought slowly to a gentle simmer), in their skins, and to pass them through a vegetable mill, mashing them with cream and butter (warmed first in a small saucepan). The mill would catch the skins, I figured. I was wrong; the mash was decorated with tiny speckles. No matter.

Waxy potatoes are not ideal for mashing. They can become gluey. But sometimes a moderate glueyness -- just enough to give the mash a stiff texture -- can be pleasant, particularly if offset by buttery creaminess. I was generous with the butter and cream.

Spaghettini and courgettes

Professional food writers, if the evidence of their work is to be trusted, cook different things almost every day, keeping themselves endlessly supplied with new recipes. At the same time, they imply that their recipes are for dishes that they cook regularly ("We always have this with . . ."; "This is a favourite in our family . . ."). We home cooks tend to return to standbys. I do so particularly when I cook for myself. So: pasta again, for the second time in a week, with courgettes. There are similar recipes here and here.

Courgettes become soggy when they cook in liquid. For this reason, writers such as Richard Olney (you'll find his great work Simple French Food here if you scroll down) suggest cooking them at a high heat, so that the liquid evaporates immediately. I am not usually so punctilious.

For this dish, I put my two small courgettes, sliced into thin rounds, into a medium saucepan with a chopped clove of garlic, some dried chilli (whizzed), a little salt and a splash of olive oil, and cooked them over a medium heat, stirring regularly, for about seven minutes. You can tell when they're cooked: their white centres moisten and turn green. I added about three tbsp of double cream, bubbled it for a minute or so until thickened, and tossed this sauce into 125 g of cooked spaghettini. I sprinkled some Parmesan on top.

Spaghetti or spaghettini and sardines

This -- simply a variation on the sardines and rice I made recently -- is a store-cupboard dish. (Of course, it would be even nicer with fresh sardines, grilled or roasted.) Tinned sardines want only gentle warming. If you cook them, they melt, as do anchovies. The dried fruit/pine kernels/chilli theme is one I return to often: of North African origin, it is a feature of the food of Sicily. Parmesan is inappropriate with seafood pasta and rice dishes, the books insist.

These quantities are for each person.

1 slice white bread, whizzed into crumbs
Olive oil
125 g spaghetti or spaghettini
1 tin sardines
1 handful raisins
1 handful pine kernels
1 handful flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1 dried chilli, whizzed (I use more)

Put a thin layer of olive oil into a saucepan, warm it, and fry the breadcrumbs over a low heat until golden. You need to keep stirring them. Set aside. (The pan will carry on cooking them for a while after the heat goes off, so if you are worried about burning, tip the breadcrumbs into a bowl.)

In a small, dry saucepan, toast the pine kernels over a low heat, again stirring watchfully. Set these aside too.

Bring a pan of water to the boil. Pour a ladleful of the boiling water over the raisins in a bowl. Add a generous portion of salt (about a tsp for each litre of water) to the pan, and stir in the pasta. Use the packet instructions as a guide, but start testing the pasta for doneness at least a minute before the packet suggests it should be ready. Drain it when it is edible but retains some firmness at the centre. Remember that it will retain enough heat to carry on cooking for a while.

Meanwhile, drain the sardines of their oil, and warm them through in a saucepan over a very low heat with a dstsp or so of your own oil (which will be nicer than the stuff in the tin). Throw in the drained raisins (soaked for about 10 minutes), pine kernels, parsley and chilli. Toss this sauce with the spaghetti, breaking up the sardines. Serve with the breadcrumbs scattered on top.