Recipe
Baked pasta with tuna, peas, and béchamel
It is Sunday at 18:00 and you are looking at the week ahead the way you might look at a hill.
There is a specific low-grade dread that arrives on a Sunday evening, and a surprising amount of it turns out not to be about work at all. It is about the five lunches. It is the knowledge that between now and Friday you will make five separate decisions about food while hungry and short of time, and that historically you have made those decisions badly, at a cost of about nine euros each.
This is the dish for that hour. Forty minutes, most of them unattended, under five euros, and what comes out is a tray you cut into squares. Four of them. Done. The decision is made, the hill is measurably smaller, and you can go back to whatever it was you were avoiding.
Tuna, peas and béchamel is a combination that turns up constantly in Italian home cooking and almost never in restaurants, because it is unglamorous and cheap and nobody would pay for it. It is nonetheless excellent. The béchamel is three ingredients and five minutes of stirring, and anybody who has told you it is difficult has an interest in you believing that.
Two things decide whether this works. Undercook the pasta by four minutes, because it keeps cooking in the oven and drinking the sauce as it goes. And make the béchamel looser than looks right, almost pourable, because the pasta will absorb a third of it while it bakes and a tight béchamel sets into cement somewhere around Wednesday.
Breadcrumbs on top rather than cheese, which gives a crust that survives four days in a fridge instead of turning to rubber.
- Prep 15 min
- Cook 35 min
- Serves 4
- Cost €
Method
- 1
Heat the oven to 200°C fan. Cook the onion in the olive oil until soft, add the frozen peas and 4 tbsp water, and cook 5 minutes. Set aside.
12 min
- 2
Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour, and cook for a minute. Add the warm milk a splash at a time, whisking, until smooth. Simmer 3 minutes, then season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
8 min
- 3
Boil the pasta 4 minutes short of the packet time and drain.
8 min
- 4
Mix the pasta, peas, flaked tuna, lemon zest and béchamel. It should look too wet. Trust it.
3 min
- 5
Tip into an oiled dish, scatter the breadcrumbs over, and bake until the top is brown and the edges are bubbling.
30 min
- 6
Rest 10 minutes before cutting, or it will not hold a square.
10 min
Variations
Add a tin of drained sweetcorn, or swap the peas for spinach squeezed dry. 100 g of grated cheese in the béchamel makes it richer and browner. Smoked mackerel or salmon in place of tuna. A spoon of Dijon in the béchamel sharpens the whole thing considerably. For a dairy-free version, make the sauce with olive oil and unsweetened oat milk, which works better than it has any right to.