Ricotto

Sometimes coming up with a recipe or (to put it another way) cooking dinner requires a long and hands-on process of tinkering, of adding salt here, acid there, a little cooked-out tomato puree because you didn’t use enough to begin with, constant top-ups with water or quick reductions; sometimes it just opens up like a flower. In the latter case, although it feels like you are cooking with rare grace and skill the apparent ease is usually just because you are using four or five ingredients and doing very little to them; it can require more craft and skill to fix something already broken than to make it properly in the first place. Some things – a scrambled custard, a stew made with an unsweated mirepoix – are beyond repair, while some things require not fixing but rather a little nudge to give them a new lease of life, like a cleanly diced broth of mushrooms and potatoes given a handful of pasta and a squeeze of lemon, and eaten as a late breakfast on a cold day.