Cacio e Pepe

Bring the 1.5 litres of water to the boil in a pan just wide enough to hold the spaghetti flat.

Use no more water than that, even though it looks mean. It is about half what 200g of pasta would normally get, and the point is concentration — the less water the starch dissolves into, the thicker that water gets, and it is the only thing holding this sauce together.

Stir in the 8g of fine salt.

Grate the pecorino on the finest holes you have, so it goes to a powder rather than shreds. Coarse gratings take too long to melt and sit in the sauce as rubbery threads.

Toast the ground pepper in a dry wide frying pan over medium heat for 30-60 seconds, until it smells sharp and floral rather than dusty.

Cook the spaghetti in the salted water for 1 minute less than the packet says, until it still has a firm white core when you bite a strand.

Ladle 300ml of the cooking water into a jug and set it aside before anything goes down the sink. It is an ingredient, not waste, and once it is gone there is no way back.

Add a ladle of the boiling water to the pepper pan and let it bubble down for about a minute, until it is a syrupy film across the base.

Lift the pasta straight from the pot into the pepper pan with tongs, letting it drip but not draining it dry.

Toss over the heat for 30 seconds, until the strands are coated in the peppered water.

Take the pan off the heat and wait a full minute, until it has stopped sizzling and the liquid is no longer steaming hard. This is the whole recipe. Pecorino dropped into liquid much above 70C/160F tightens on contact and seizes into stringy clumps sitting in a watery pool, and nothing brings it back.

Stir the grated pecorino with 60ml of the reserved water in a bowl to a thick, smooth paste that just falls off the spoon.

Scrape the paste into the pan.

Toss hard and continuously for 30-60 seconds, until the sauce turns glossy and coats every strand.

Loosen with the reserved water a splash at a time, until the sauce slides slowly off the pasta rather than clinging to it in a paste.

Keep tossing off the heat if it looks too thin. The pasta goes on drinking, and the sauce tightens on its own inside a minute.

Taste it. Between the salted water and the pecorino it should need nothing more.

Serve into warmed bowls straight away, since the sauce stiffens and breaks on a cold plate.

The reserved water does the same job in the slow-cooked beef ragu and the simple tomato sauce in this collection, where the sauce is also brought together with the pasta in the pan rather than poured over it.