Also a 3kg bag of archetti, little curved remnants, reminders that before it was cut spaghetti hung over a stick.

The basis is clear: cooked chickpeas are added to some sort of soffritto (that is, the finely diced mix of onion, celery and carrot fried in oil), water or chickpea cooking liquid added, everything simmered with pasta added towards the end. Beyond this, the variations are endless and it is up to you. Pasta e ceci can be brothy or creamy; can

For the most part, peperoncini are used moderately for gentle heat and spice in Italian cooking. The most common way of cooking with them is to add a small piece (say 2.5cm) of fresh or dried peperoncino (generally whole but sometimes chopped or crumbled), along with the garlic to the olive oil, then fry both gently to coax out flavour and heat –

it is a marvellous ingredient, seasoning, binding, giving richness, bringing everything together.

Cheese is not simply an ingredient, but an enabler, bringing things together. Penne and peas are not particularly well matched, either physically or emotionally, but give them a handful of grated Parmesan or a spoonful of ricotta, or both, and the next thing you know they’ve eloped and got married.

It is the way they pleat and fold that makes them so satisfying. First on the plate and then again in your mouth. Pappardelle are typical of all the central and central-northern Italian regions, each one boasting a slightly different width, anything from 2.5 to 6cm. The Tuscans gave it the name; it comes from pappare, the colloquial, to eat. Fresh

They take their name from the onomatopoeic paccarià, Neapolitan for ‘to slap’. Which is exactly what they do when cooked, like soft sacs, they slap and flap when you toss them in the sauce, then again in your mouth. Along with rigatoni, paccheri are my preferred shape, and one of the best ways to understand good quality pasta, its porous surface,

Which brings us to cappellacci, big hats, the big brothers of cappelletti (little hats). This plump and generous shape is typical of the city of Ferrara, where the filling is a velvet purée of pumpkin and cheese, the sauce butter and sage. Just writing their name makes me want to jump on a train and spend the day in Ferrara, half red-brick

Garlic is a spring vegetable – young bulbs have white skin and tender cloves with a sweet, sunny fragrance, with which you can be careless with quantity. As garlic gets older its skin turns translucent and flaky and the cloves take on a greater pungency and power. Which is great, but you need to take care, also pull out any green shoot that has