Fittingly for a chef whose maternal family hails from 30 miles outside Parma in the Emilio Reggio district of Italy, Hartnett has strong feelings about Parmesan. Tubs of the ready-grated hard cheese get a big pollice verso (thumbs down). “It tastes stale, like old leather shoes,” she says. “I was always brought up with Parmesan fresh, but when I went to college someone in the house just had this pre-grated stuff and it smelt like sick,” she recalls. This is one shortcut that’s best avoided, she believes – especially since “we can all grate Parmesan”.
If you’ve been breaking your spaghetti to fit the pan, that’s another black mark. Spaghetti should be cooked full length (slide it into the boiling water, Hartnett advises), “and don’t refresh it in cold water [after cooking]”, she says, “because you lose the starch that you need for the sauce.”
Speaking at the launch of her new Italian food range at Waitrose, Hartnett might not approve of cutting corners, but she is a fan of keeping things simple. “Two to three ingredients is enough” to make a sauce for that pasta – “just butter and olive oil” perhaps, and “maybe the odd herb”, keeping any fresh tomatoes for summer sauces only, as the Italians do. “You’d never go to Italy and eat tomatoes in December,” she says.
I love Hartnett for her no-nonsense, no-rubbish attitude. The panettone in her Christmas range for Waitrose last year, made by the Filippi family of Vecenza, was the only one in the supermarkets not to use palm oil and in my taste test was the best by some margin.
Hartnett’s latest range for the supermarket is mercifully free of the kind of industrial ingredients that mark foods as ultra-processed, bar a bit of citric acid used as an acidity regulator. What about ready-made sauces which often contain industrially tweaked modified starch? Hartnett is as forthright as usual. “Oh, no, you don’t need that. Just keep it normal.” But you are allowed a fork to eat it.
Dining and Cooking