We had to do it. We had to make a festive season pasta. This week’s two-tone fusilli combines tomato and spinach doughs into hand-rolled twisty goodness. Served in a light nduja-spiced sauce, with crispy basil and sage leaves and cherry bocconcini, what better way to celebrate the closing out of the year? Pignolata, that’s how! To finish our dish we’ve prepared these usually sweet Christmas treats as savoury gold-coated baubles, and used them to dress our tinsel-like pasta. Because ‘tis the season.

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.