Trust is a significant part of cooking; trust in the repetition of processes, in the muscle memory of your hands, in your materials, in the science, in the author. This recipe for pappardelle with calamari, corn and mascarpone might sound slightly odd — or it might strike you as rakishly intriguing — but I suspect it’s not what you had for dinner last night already; nevertheless — trust me. As a kind of safeguarding measure this recipe serves but one person, so that at least you only have to grapple with your own response and perception. However, if it helps, as a kind of offering of collateral, this combination is directly inspired by a headily compelling dish I had at Gilt Brasserie. Theirs was simpler — I’ve added the pasta — though I suspect their method had some more flourish to it — but the tableau of flavours and textures was one I knew I had to recreate, that I yearned for, culinarily speaking, before my plate was even cleared.

This might appear to be both too much and too little — not enough seasoning and yet too palate-churningly rich — but let me assure you it works magnificently, so long as you follow a few strict instructions. Here, the corn must be of the ready-to-eat sweetcorn variety, damp kernels clinging to each other in bumpy sawn-off patches, bursting with intense, dandelion sweetness. I would sternly prefer that you use pineapple-cut calamari, with its cross-hatching echoing the honeycomb surface of the corn; rather like an ensemble, when there are minimal components suddenly texture becomes a lot more crucial. And finally, you must use mascarpone and not replace it with some other dairy product — it’s the pillow-underside coolness, the merest dream-memory of tanginess, and the buttery volupté that nothing else quite comes close to, and which links the hands of the sweet, sweet corn and the minerally, pelagic bristles of calamari.

But what of the pappardelle, my contribution to the proceedings? Glorious in its vastness, becoming more beautiful the more space it occupies, the width is, you better believe it, also crucial. Echoing the bounciness of the calamari, ribboning silkily around the corn, it’s a minimal yet broad-shouldered tangle that contextualises and grounds the dish — by which I mean, you can say “X pasta with X additional ingredients” and no matter how weird they are, people will understand your intent. In lieu of access to good, fresh pappardelle at all hours, I recommend slicing up fresh lasagne sheets — it feels like you’ve capital-D Done something and is probably cheaper. With the corn and mascarpone left coolly uncooked and the pasta and calamari barely dunked into boiling water, you also have to trust me here on the temperature — it’s not going to be piping hot, but the delicacy and freshness is best served thusly. I tried this with fried calamari and corn and it simply wasn’t the same. A parmesan-like cloud of lemon zest with its faint lilt of citrus is all it needs on top.

Although the original inspiration-source dish is no longer on the menu at Gilt — with an air of insouciant mystery that makes me wonder if it was real at all — their captivating wagyu beef tongue with salsa verde remains; I suspect they still make as good a martini as they did the night I squired myself there. All of which is to say, I’m not sure if this homage actually quite captured how they went about it but — trust me — it tastes magnificent, and it’s worth making just for yourself, to find out.

If, like me, you value pappardelle above all other pasta shapes, I recommend trying this same hand-cut method in my recipe for pappardelle with fennel and bean escabeche; or start from scratch — with surprising ease — and make this turmeric pappardelle with buttery brioche crumbs. Conversely, if the flavours appeal, you could try the recipe that — like a piece of response poetry — was in turn inspired by this dish; my corn, raspberry, and mascarpone ice cream.

Pappardelle with calamari, corn, and mascarpone

Inspired by a transcendent meal I had at Gilt Brasserie, this comes together at breakneck speed and doesn’t look like it will work but if you get it, you get it — nevertheless, I recommend just making it for yourself. If you can get hold of fresh pappardelle then I guess you should use that, but there’s something charming and artless about hand-knifing it, including that you get to use the phrase “hand-knifing”.

• 1 vacuum-packed ready-to-eat sweetcorn on the cob
• 150g fresh lasagne sheets or fresh pappardelle
• salt for the pasta water, and to taste
• 100g frozen calamari — the kind that comes cross-hatched or “pineapple cut” — defrosted (this may also be labelled squid, not calamari, both are correct)
• 125ml mascarpone, or more to taste
• zest of a large lemon

1: Bring a large saucepan of water to the boil. While this is happening, carefully slice as much of the corn from the cob — leaving the ribs of corn clinging to each other, as you can see in the photos, as opposed to separating them out into individual kernels — and set aside.

2: If using fresh lasagne sheets, slice them at inch-wide intervals to form wide lengths of pasta. Sometimes these lasagne sheets come with a thin sheet of plastic separating the layers, kindly remove this if yours includes it.

3: Once the water has come to the boil, salt it generously, then add the pasta and cook for a bare two minutes or so, or until the pasta is tender and floating on the surface. Using tongs, lift the pasta out and set aside in a covered, heatproof bowl. Very quickly, add the 100g calamari into the still-boiling water and lower the heat to a simmer, letting it cook for two minutes — no more! Drain and add the calamari to the bowl of cooked pasta.

4: Give the 125ml mascarpone a vigorous stir with your fork, to relax it somewhat, then fold it into the warm pasta and calamari, off the heat, followed by the reserved corn and finally, a generous, golden scattering of every last bit of zest that you can get off your lemon. I don’t recommend reheating this or returning it to the heat on your stove, but you could stir it all together in the now-empty saucepan off the heat, letting the residual warmth raise the temperature of your meal.

5: If you want — and I thoroughly recommend it, though it’s not evident in the photos — indiscriminately dollop over more spoonfuls of mascarpone.

Eat immediately. Serves one.

Note: If you haven’t planned ahead and put your calamari in the fridge to defrost, you can put it in a sealed sandwich bag and then submerge it completely in cold water to safely defrost it significantly quicker.

music lately:

Head On by The Jesus and Mary Chain. I got to see them in concert last week, which is not something I thought might necessarily happen to me; given that I didn’t exactly overlap, existence-wise, with their heyday, but they appeared in New Zealand like some kind of eleventh-hour miracle and they were wonderful, I cried during Just Like Honey but Head On is my very favourite of theirs and you can never be too sure of these things in live concerts but they only bloody went and played it second on the set list.

Citizens of the World by Daphne Rubin-Vega; despite being released in 2006 this has all the delicious hallmarks of a slightly earlier era: a sort of neurotic yet thoughtful introspection; a certain industrial-edged psychedelia, but most importantly, Rubin-Vega’s singularly excellent voice.

What a Lonely Way to Start the Summertime by The Bittersweets, a deeply arcane 60s girl group; my brother sent me this with the proviso that it had a proto-shoegaze energy; I have to agree, it also has a particular stressful, layered sinister franticness that seems oddly fresh yet almost pastiche-like in a way that this, being contemporaneous, couldn’t possibly have known. I love it!

Bad Religion by Frank Ocean, those organ chords still have the power to kneecap me after all these years and when the drums start — ! — WHAT a song.

PS: As I’ve said previously, ReliefAid’s Gaza Appeal is important to me. Their team, through perishingly difficult circumstances, are on the ground trying to help. It’s been a while since their last update at the end of May but if you’re looking for relief effort to support in Palestine, I suggest them as a starting point.