My Ma used to whip up a great beef steak ragu every now and then, nice and simple, with tomatoes and olives. We’d often lift the steak out at the end and eat it with a salad, stirring the sauce through our pasta. I’d forgotten about this little gem of a dish for years, but it recently came to me out of the blue, and so naturally we decided to dream up a Pasta et Al version.

If there’s one pasta dish that everyone knows to mention with a wink and a nod, it’s puttanesca. This is a dish born from necessity and hard times; so keep your pantry stocked with tins and jars of long-life ingredients, and then when fresh produce is hard to find, or you can’t quite summon the will to leave the house for it, smugly whip yourself up a plate of puttanesca.