Ah, rigatoni. For all of the incredible shapes and fillings out there, all of the carefully handcrafted pasta that we obsess over, there’s just something indescribably special about these chewy, ridged, extruded tubes. Even as a kid, I remember secretly hanging out for the dried supermarket rigatoni, despite always having a freezer full of fresh pasta. A big bowl of rigatoni with thick tomato sauce and a huge mound of grated cheese can fix just about anything.

There was often a uniquely delicious smell filling my great aunty’s house when we’d drop by for a meal. This is in contrast to my poor nonna, whose penchant for boiled broad beans left her house more often than not smelling like sweaty feet. It was many years before I learned that the characteristic ingredients of my aunty’s famous pasta bake (and to be fair, my nonna’s equally famous prupettone) were in fact rather representative of southern Italian cooking in general: the humble hardboiled egg and a chunk of salami.

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.