Here’s one that comes from the heart. This is our signature family sugo: meatballs in tomato sauce. It’s the sauce that bubbled away quietly in the background every Sunday, filling the house with delicious anticipation; it’s the sauce that simply holds everything together. In fact, when I talk about pasta and what it means to me, this is the sugo that I think of.

These days I make all kinds of pasta with all kinds of dough, but when I was a kid there were only four types. Don’t get me wrong, we enjoyed plenty of packet pasta – secretly but unanimously excited as my nonna apologised for the rigatoni she was opening – but when we did it ourselves, our repertoire was deliberately and appropriately limited.