Gnocchi alla sorrentina

Gnocchi alla sorrentina is the dish your Italian mother makes the day you come home from a long trip. The day your girlfriend broke up with you. The day you failed an exam. The day you passed an exam. The day it rains for the third time in a row. The day it's just been a bit of a day. It is comfort food in the most fundamental sense: potato, tomato, mozzarella, basil, baked in a terracotta dish until the top turns golden and the mozzarella is bubbling and stretchy. You are supposed to eat it from a small bowl with a spoon, and you are supposed to eat too much of it, and then you are supposed to go sit on the sofa and feel marginally better about your life.

Named after Sorrento, the town on the Amalfi coast where it was probably invented by someone's nonna who had over-ordered mozzarella for a dinner party, this dish has the rare property of being equally good fresh from the oven and reheated the next day for lunch. The tomato sauce softens, the potato gnocchi swell slightly with sauce, and the mozzarella goes from stretchy to deeply melted. It is one of the only pasta dishes we can wholeheartedly recommend reheating; most baked pasta improves, most fresh pasta does not, and this dish lands gloriously in the first camp.

We will not pretend we make the gnocchi from scratch. Making potato gnocchi is, at best, a Sunday afternoon project, and more realistically a weekend-long ordeal involving flour on every surface of the kitchen and a noticeable drop in your personal morale when they turn out dense. Vacuum-packed gnocchi from the supermarket shelf works perfectly well here. This is a dish where the sauce does the talking, and the gnocchi are mostly along for the ride. Pour yourself a glass of something red and rustic, put on something cinematic, and bake. Twenty-five minutes later you will be happier than you were.