Minestra di pollo e pastina with carrots

The single best value item in a European supermarket is a whole chicken leg. Not a breast, not a fillet, not anything sold in a plastic tray with a photograph of a farm printed on the film. A leg, thigh and drumstick still attached, usually about three euros and often less.

I worked this out embarrassingly late, some time around twenty-six, standing in front of a chiller cabinet doing arithmetic on my phone like a lunatic. The leg was costing me roughly a third of what the same weight of breast cost. It also had a bone in it, which I had spent years treating as a disadvantage, and which is in fact the entire point.

Because here is what a chicken leg does that a fillet cannot. You drop it into water with a carrot, a stick of celery, half an onion and a bay leaf, and forty minutes later you take out two completely separate things: about a litre of real broth, and enough cooked meat for two meals. The broth becomes this soup, with a handful of very small pasta cooked directly in it. Half the meat goes back into the bowl. The other half becomes the shredded chicken and cannellini salad further on, which is the next thing you should make with it. One three euro purchase, two lunches, and a quiet smugness that carries you through most of the week.

Pastina is the collective name for the whole family of tiny pasta shapes: stelline, little stars, anellini, little rings, the ones made for small children and convalescents and, as it turns out, adults having a difficult February. They cook in four minutes and they cloud the broth very slightly, thickening it into something between a soup and a meal.

This is what you make when it is cold, or when you are ill, or when it is Sunday evening and the flat is too quiet. It reheats indefinitely. It costs almost nothing. It is, quite litreally, what somebody's grandmother would have made you.