Smell/Aroma by Peter Moni

All my life I have been involved with food and farinaceous products like pasta, bread and confectionery. I grew up with food. I remember on my 21st birthday. I was working in a bakery called Manna, and my day began at 3 a.m. and ended around midday. These were normal bakery hours. We used to produce roughly 2000 loaves of bread an hour, it, strangely enough, today I battle to make one loaf of bread in my kitchen at home. With Covid, I have a lot more time to practice and today I have mastered the art of making bread, only to find that it takes the same amount of effort to make one loaf of bread as it took to make 2000 loaves.

Now with all the time we have for home cooking, I love to make the Bolognaise sauce my mother used to make when I was a child. We start at the beginning: we purchase two boxes of tomatoes and mix them. They are salad tomatoes and plum tomatoes. You clean and remove the stalks and boil the tomatoes in a big pot for about an hour. Once they cool down you pass the tomatoes through a mouillee. This removes all the skins and the pips. From here you bottle the pasala in containers with salt and refrigerate the containers. For every sauce we make we need about 500g of pasala.

To start the sauce you fry up your chopped onions and garlic until they become translucent, just about 8-minutes add your minced beef and oil (you decide on the cooking oil - we use rough olive oil). Fry the combination until the meat loses its red colour.

Now you add the chopped mushrooms and let them soak in, if you have any intention of adding chopped chillies or dried tomatoes this is the time to add it. From here you add the pasala and all your spices. I normally add oregano, garlic salt, garlic pepperdew seasoning, paprika, mixed Italian herbs, a touch of cayenne pepper, salt and pepper to taste. At this point, you can add spices of your own choice like marjoram. But don't over spice the sauce, you can always add more later, but you cannot take anything away. Coming from an Italian family, the meat in Bolognese is not as important as a good tomato. Our preference is to have meat that is very finely ground, and in some cases, many like to add a portion of pork mince, to the beef mince. You can use the same sauce for making lasagne, the only difference being that the sauce must be slightly thicker. This source needs to simmer for anything up to 1½ hours. Many would love to add a glass of red wine to the sauce, the belief being that it enhances the smell and when the aroma of the wine disappears, the sauce is ready for the meal.

Whenever anyone mentions to me about smell and aroma my thoughts immediately drift towards food. Our smelling senses need to be trained just like our taste buds, we need to treat them as an integral part of our cooking, but there's one thing that we must always be critically aware of and that is we actually eat with our eyes.

In the meantime, you will cook 1 kg of pasta. Don't forget to add salt to the boiling water at least 2 tablespoons. Now add the spaghetti to the boiling water, but don't break the spaghetti - nothing does more harm to a good pasta dish than a short length spaghetti. In my mother's house, if you did that, you would be forced to start all over again. When cooking spaghetti you never leave the start, you get the water to boil rapidly and you stir the spaghetti to avoid it sticking. It helps if you add a bit of olive oil when you come to drain the pasta. The oil prevents any stickiness. The whole cooking process should be over within 10 minutes, the spaghetti has to be tasted whilst cooking, you want spaghetti al dente - which means it must be cooked, but still has a bite. Save a cup full of the cooking water, to be added later. Now we need to add butter and/or olive oil and 2 raw eggs, and stir, all the eggs do is add to the flavour and ensure that your pasta stays loose. Whatever happened to don't want the pasta sticking together? You are now ready for dinner, dish up the pasta and the Bolognaise sauce and some Parmesan cheese, and you now have a meal fit for a king.

© Peter Moni