I’m exhausted. That’s more than enough interface with the real world for one day. I return home, put Prefab Sprout loudly on the stereo in a pre-emptive move against Caspar and head to the kitchen to start making dinner. It’s barely breakfast time, I know, but the key to making a bolognese this delicious is to start as early as possible on the day you’re going to eat it. (In an ideal world, you’d make it the day before, so that the flavours can develop overnight, but work tends to get in the way.) For best results, the sauce needs to cook for at least six hours, preferably more. If you can leave it to its own devices in the oven on a very low heat for twelve hours, you’ll have the best bolognese you’ve ever eaten in your life, and I can guarantee that or your money back.
Everyone has a recipe for bolognese that they love. And in Italy, every region has a slightly different recipe. In some areas they sweat the vegetables in butter and olive oil – they insist it makes it sweeter than olive oil alone. Some people don’t even use celery, just carrot and onion as the base. Then there’s the dairy brigade who insist on cooking out the meat in milk, to help cut through the acidity of the tomatoes. Others swear that white wine, not red, is the key to perfection. And don’t even start on the subject of tomatoes. Fresh or chopped or passata or puree? All of the above, or no tomatoes at all?
Every Italian swears that theirs is the best recipe. What’s more, if you don’t make your bolognese in the same way they do, that means your father must have been dropped on his head when he was a baby and your grandmother was probably the town slut. Naturally I use my Italian grandmother’s recipe, and I know for a fact that she wasn’t the town slut. I know this because shortly after she gave birth to my mother, my grandfather ran off with the actual town slut, a woman by the name of Lucia Mollica, which means ‘crumb’ in Italian. Which seems fitting, as my grandmother took all of his money, along with my infant mother, and left him with just a loaf of bread in the kitchen and a note saying ‘Don’t eat it all at once’. She boarded a train, then a boat, and ended up in Glasgow, where her uncle ran a successful ice cream parlour, in which one Saturday, a year later, she met my ‘real’ grandfather. Until the day she died, whenever she saw or heard the name Lucia, Nonna would curse both her first husband and his mistress in the most lurid phrases you’ve ever heard come out of the mouth of a pensioner. (My grandfather had taught her to swear like a Glaswegian navvy, so she was pretty professional.)
Nonna’s recipe isn’t difficult but it does require two ingredients you can’t buy off the shelf: love and patience. First you have to chop your vegetables into very fine dice. And of course you can’t use a food processor, because the ghost of Nonna is watching, and she wouldn’t like it. Cook the veg in olive oil for at least half an hour, on a heat so low you have to keep checking that the gas is actually on. Then add garlic, and sweat some more. In a separate pan, dry-fry some pancetta – salty pig meat being the base for so much that is good in this world. Then in the same pan, brown some beef mince, then half the amount of pork mince again. Add it to your soffrito along with a bottle of passata, fresh rosemary, salt and pepper. And then the secret ingredient that truly makes this dish: an entire bottle of red wine. Pour that in, put a lid on the casserole dish and put it in the oven for the whole day, stirring every couple of hours.
This is the perfect dish for a day like today. The weather’s miserable, I’ve got nothing better to do, and I can justify not setting foot outside again with the excuse that I have to babysit the dinner. At around 4pm I rouse myself from a mid-afternoon doze and head for my A4 files of recipes. They’re the one organised thing in my flat. I’m always fiddling with recipes, and the only way that I remember these tweaks is if I’ve scrawled them on a piece of paper. Aah, here we go: chocolate brownie cheesecake bake. It’s one of the more obscene puddings in this file, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t go back for seconds. First you make the brownies, and Lord knows there are as many brownie recipes as there are Hindu deities. Normally I’d go straight to my friend Claire’s recipe, which produces the ultimate squidgy yet chunky brownie. But the brownies in this pudding need to stay in neat squares so I use a Nigel Slater recipe that is foolproof and produces a more cake-like brownie, better fit for purpose.
While the brownies are in the oven I make the cheesecake base – full-fat Philadelphia, mascarpone and vanilla, whipped together and poured onto a base of crushed dark chocolate digestives mixed with melted better. That’s my favourite part of the whole process – spreading the biscuit base out into the tray with a spatula, like it’s wet sand. The brownies come out of the top oven and in goes the cheesecake for forty minutes, then the heat goes off and the cheesecake stays in the oven to cool and set. I give the bolognese a quick stir, then head back to the sofa for another little lie-down. I can’t wait to be an old lady when all this mid-afternoon snoozing will be deemed socially acceptable.
The girls are due at 7 p.m. so at 6.30 p.m. I open a bottle of wine and start drinking – I might as well air the wine before they get here.
Polly’s the first to arrive at 7 p.m. on the dot.
‘You look amazing!’ I say, as I open the door and give her a hug.
‘D’you think?’ she says, handing me a bottle of Prosecco.
‘You’re glowing.’
‘Really? I’ve been on the Perricone, lots of oily fish. I feel like a penguin.’
‘And your hair totally suits you longer.’
She reaches up and touches her neck. ‘I’m growing it for the wedding. You don’t think I’m too old for long hair, do you?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’re thirty-six. You didn’t drive by the way, did you?’ Polly, Dave and Maisie now live in a small village near Marlow in Buckinghamshire. It’s only forty minutes by car, but if she’s driving that means I’m drinking alone, which isn’t good for anyone.
‘My one night out and you think I’m drinking Evian? Dave gave me a lift in and I’ll get a cab back. Is that smell what I think it is?’
I nod.
‘How long has it been on for?’ she says.
I check my watch. ‘Just over eight hours.’
‘I cannot wait, I’ve been looking forward to this all week! Will you email me the recipe? I want to make it for Dave.’
‘I’ve got some copies of it, I gave one to Terry the other day,’ I say, retrieving the recipe file I’d just returned to the hall cupboard.
‘I’m so sick of eating mackerel,’ she calls out from the kitchen. ‘Shall we start this Prosecco or wait for Dalia?’
‘He who hesitates … plus, it’ll help the crisps go down more easily,’ I say, opening a packet of Kettle Chips.
And it’s just as well we don’t wait for Dalia. Because twenty minutes later she sends me a text apologising profusely saying she can’t make it, and she’ll make it up to me another time, promise, kiss kiss.
‘Look at this,’ I say to Polly, showing her my phone. ‘She doesn’t even bother making excuses any more because she knows we won’t believe them.’
‘At least she’s got the decency not to pretend she has a migraine, I suppose,’ says Polly, handing the phone back to me and shaking her head.
‘You would think she would at least pick up the phone rather than just text,’ I say. ‘It’s rude.’
‘Mark’s probably there with her and she can’t bear to drag herself away from his side for twenty seconds.’
‘Do you reckon the sex is as good as she makes out it is?’ I say. ‘I’ve always thought Mark looked like the sort of man who would be entirely about his penis and not much else.’
‘Me too!’ she says. ‘But apparently it’s so amazing she says it’s like a drug.’
‘Huh,’ I say. ‘Well none of the drugs I’ve ever taken turned round and asked me if I wanted Botox for