pici al ragù

Sentimental time (it had to come). I have 3 'core' food memories. The first, eating 'Farley's Rusks' with hot milk. I must have been younger than three years old. Another from around the same time during a holiday in Italy, probably summer 1973-ish. A night time family meal; deafening sounds of cicadas as we ate razor clams. The clams were probably on pasta, I don't really remember, though I do still have some of the shells today. At the end of the same meal one of my mother's cousins took me to stand in the middle of a cloud of fireflies at the bottom of the garden. He caught one, placed it in my open palm and I watched it crawl across my hand with its bottom blinking. One of my aunts still remembers that around the same time I declared in Italian one bedtime that I didn't want to kiss everyone goodnight. No. I was going to run into the garden to 'abbraciare la notte' ('hug the night'). Impressive for a 3 year old. But then they knew I was a poet.

My final core memory, a year or so later but incredibly vivid. The smell of red ragù filling our family home in Cardiff as my mother cooked to classical music on the radio. Winey, meaty, tomatoey, oniony. A little heavy on the Beethoven, but home. Safe.

For years, as children, that ragù and 'pasta al pomodoro' was the only pasta we ate. We called it simply 'red sauce'. This recipe is maybe 90% what my mother, and, I've worked out, her grandmother and great grandmother cooked at home, however It's worth noting that in Cardiff in the early 1970s there was only one type of pasta that was readily available. Spaghetti. (I remember the long blue 'Carta di Zucchero' Barilla packaging vividly).

The pici I've included in this recipe are a little bit of a sentimental nod to my family's roots in Tuscany, though as a child we'd normally eat this meal with either spaghetti or tagliatelle - and I suspect that was just down to the types of pasta available in Cardiff in the early 1970s.

I've no idea how my great great grandmother made pasta at home, but I suppose there's a good chance that it might have been by hand and it might have been in the shape of pici. Big, fat uneven ropes of fresh pasta. Nowadays in London I just buy pici dry. Pasta Morelli.

In my childhood things were even worse on the cheese front. Parmesan was an expensive luxury, IF you could find it, so my mother had to resort to grating small amounts of Welsh cheddar on each portion of pasta. I remember that it didn't taste like the more salty stuff they had in Italy, but it seemed completely normal to us at the time.

I was 14 before I started demanding parmesan, garlic and basil in her 'red sauce', which became my red sauce and which is a meal that my daughter has declared she is now sick of. But you still can't get enough of a good thing.