Pasta al forno with aubergine and scamorza

In the south of Italy, pasta al forno is the Sunday dish. It is also the funeral dish, the christening dish, and the dish that appears when relatives arrive from far away. The reason it does all four jobs is structural: it is the only pasta on earth that can be assembled the day before, for forty people, and be better for having waited.

Every other pasta is a race. You cook it, you dress it, you carry it to the table at once, and somebody's nonna hovers in the doorway saying mangia, si fredda, eat, it is going cold, in a tone that suggests the pasta may detonate. Pasta al forno is the exact opposite. It wants to sit. It wants to be assembled, chilled, and slid into a hot oven ninety minutes later. It comes out with a crust on top, which Neapolitans call la crosta and will genuinely compete for, and that crust is the reason anybody makes it at all.

That property is why it is in this book. Almost everything else about a packed lunch is a compromise between what a dish was and what it becomes overnight. This one is not, because being reheated was always part of the design.

Aubergine and scamorza is the version from around Naples. The aubergine goes silky, the smoked scamorza melts into strings, and a plain tomato sauce holds it all together. There is deliberately no béchamel here: that is a northern habit and it makes the whole thing heavier than it needs to be.

The one rule that matters is to cook the pasta four minutes short of the packet time. It finishes in the oven, drinking sauce as it goes. Pasta that went in fully cooked comes out as wallpaper paste, and there is no recovering from it.