An umami-packed dish for when you need a flavour hit in a hurry

Here is a simple, practical recipe that I trust will be useful to many who don’t have the time for lengthy kitchen preparations. Boil the spaghetti as usual, drain it, and toss it with a little butter and parmesan. Then, for four, take a spoonful of meat extract and dissolve it in a small saucepan with just a few drops of boiling water. Pour the meat extract over the pasta, stir and serve. You will be pleasantly surprised by the exquisite flavour the pasta acquires – achieved with such a negligible investment of time.

This is a roughly word-for-word translation of an Italian recipe for spaghetti con l’estratto di carne (spaghetti with meat extract). It is another dish from Ada Boni’s Il Talismano della Felicità (The Talisman of Happiness), which was published in English for the first time last month and, according to the food writer and editor Angela Frenda, is “still considered one of the most precise and accurate of all cookbooks”.

These highly crunchable cheesy bread balls are a great way to use up odds and ends

Sadly, I’m never going to be able to recreate the cheese and bread balls I made a few weeks ago, because, of the four cheeses used, I recognised only two of them: a bit of gorgonzola and a slice of precious Montgomery cheddar, bought from Da Corrado, a stall on Testaccio market. The other two lumps of cheese, both wrapped in white waxed paper and both quite dry, were, I think, a piece of grana padano and the end of the pecorino we brought back from Umbria. But I can’t be sure, because I didn’t really examine them. Even if I had, it would have been hard to guess; the description “heels of cheese” is appropriate here. What I do know, however, is that the combination of those four grated cheeses with two eggs and enough breadcrumbs to turn the mix into a soft, malleable dough made for fantastic deep-fried balls.

The inspiration for using up the uncertain contents of the cheese box was pallotte cacio e ova, which translates as “little cheese and egg balls”, a typical and much-loved thing in both Molise and Abruzzo, which were, in fact, one region until 1964. Pallotte are resourceful, and were surely invented as a way of using up scraps of cheese (almost certainly local pecorino) and bread. Whatever combination of cheese you use, though, the important thing is to add enough soft white breadcrumbs – anything from 80g to 120g – to turn the mixture into a soft dough that you can then mould into balls, but not so compactly that the tenderness is lost. Like meatballs, cheese balls benefit from a rest in the fridge, so they can firm up before frying. The rest in the fridge also ensures that they are cold, which is important, because the thermal shock of the cold surface meeting the hot oil helps create a crisp shell.