Pasta al tonno with olives and capers

There is a specific moment in every young man's life when he realizes that pasta al tonno is a legitimate dinner option and not a sad capitulation to circumstance. Ours came at about age twenty-two, in a kitchen the size of a telephone booth, on a night when the delivery apps were all showing queue times in the forty-minute range. We opened the cupboard, found a can of tuna, a jar of capers someone had bought for a dinner party that never happened, and the remains of a bag of spaghetti. Fifteen minutes later we were eating one of the best plates of pasta we had ever made, and we've been making it on and off for about a decade.

The trick, and this surprised us at the time, is to treat it with respect. Italians love pasta al tonno but they do not love bad pasta al tonno, and there is a version that involves dumping everything into a pan at the same time and ending up with something that tastes like the inside of a fridge. This is not that version. The olive oil from the tuna does most of the work, the capers and the olives pitch in with punch and salt, and a lazy tomato sauce holds it all together without trying too hard. The whole thing is ready in the time it takes to boil the spaghetti.

Two warnings before you start. First, use tuna packed in olive oil, not in brine. The brine version is fine for a salad but it adds nothing here, and the oil one contributes actual flavor. Second, do not, under any circumstance, add parmigiano. We know it feels right because this is pasta. It isn't. In Italy, adding cheese to tuna pasta is the kind of thing that gets you disowned. Skip the cheese, and eat this with a glass of something cold and white.