Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

Tip the tomatoes and their juice into a bowl and crush them one at a time in your fist, keeping your hand below the surface so they do not spray.

Do not blend them, for the reason the simple tomato sauce in this collection sets out: a blender aerates the pulp and shears it too fine for the sauce ever to gain body.

Pour the olive oil into a wide pan and add the sliced garlic and the chopped anchovies while the pan is still cold.

Set the pan over medium-low heat and cook for 3-4 minutes, pressing the anchovies against the base with a wooden spoon, until they have broken down completely and no recognisable piece is left.

Watch the garlic rather than the clock here. It should go no further than pale gold; browned garlic turns bitter and the whole sauce sits in that bitterness afterwards.

Stir in the chilli flakes and cook for 20 seconds.

Pour in the crushed tomatoes, standing back as they go in.

Bring to a simmer where bubbles break slowly in two or three places rather than pattering across the whole surface.

Cook uncovered for 15-20 minutes, stirring every few minutes, until the sauce has darkened and a spoon dragged through the middle leaves a trench that holds for a second.

Bring the 3 litres of water to the boil in a large pan and stir in the 12g of fine salt.

Add the olives and capers to the sauce and cook for 5 minutes more, no longer.

Keep them out until this point. Olives and capers simmered from the start give up their salt into the sauce and go dull and leathery, and there is no way to take the salt back out.

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

Ladle 300ml of the cooking water into a jug before anything is drained.

Taste the sauce now and only now. Between the anchovy, the capers, the olives and the pasta water it will usually need no salt at all, and a pan seasoned before they went in is beyond saving.

Lift the spaghetti straight into the sauce with tongs, letting it drip but not draining it dry.

Toss over medium heat for 1-2 minutes, adding the reserved water a splash at a time, until the sauce coats every strand and slides rather than sitting still.

Stir the parsley through off the heat.

Serve into warm bowls, with no cheese.