Pasta with courgette, egg, and pecorino

There is no faster way to start a fight on the Italian internet than to cook a carbonara slightly wrong.

The rules, enforced by a large and tireless volunteer army, are as follows. Guanciale, never pancetta and under no circumstances bacon. Pecorino, not parmigiano. No cream, ever, and anybody who adds cream is not simply mistaken but morally compromised. No garlic. No onion. And absolutely no vegetables, because a carbonara has four ingredients and none of them is a courgette.

So this is not a carbonara and I am not going to call it one. It borrows the technique, which is the genuinely clever part and which nobody owns: eggs and hard cheese beaten together, then stirred through hot pasta off the heat, so that the residual warmth thickens them into a sauce rather than scrambling them into breakfast.

Applied to fried courgettes, that technique gives you something close to what they make on the Amalfi coast under the name pasta alla Nerano, and it is very good indeed. The courgettes go sweet and slightly caramelised at the edges, the egg and pecorino turn them into a glossy sauce that clings to every piece of pasta, and the whole plate costs about two euros.

The one unbreakable rule is temperature. Take the pan off the heat before the egg goes anywhere near it. Count to thirty. Then stir hard and continuously, adding a splash of pasta water as you go. If you can hear it sizzling, it is already too late and you are making a courgette omelette, which is also fine but is not this.

This is the one dish in the chapter that does not love a microwave, because egg sauces tighten. Half power with a spoon of water gets you most of the way back, and eating it cold is better than it sounds.