In the ideal world inhabited by the chef, there may indeed be a place for the lyrical insistence on using only those ingredients that the month in hand offers up to the market place, but my kitchen, my home, the way I cook, resist such purist strictures. For much as I love the idea of wandering out to the shops, basket dangling from my arm, to gather each new season’s freshly ripened produce, I neither have the time to shop that way, nor the discipline – and, frankly, I baulk at such loftily imposed restraints. I shop and cook much as I eat, with greedy opportunism.

Seasonal cooking is anyway better suited to those who live in sunnier climates. The rest of us need to make the most of what warmth is offered, and much of the time this has to emanate from the kitchen rather than from the skies outside. Summer, then, is an idea, a memory, a hopeful projection. Sometimes when it’s grey outside and cold within, we need to conjure up the sun, some light, a lazy feeling of having all the wide-skied time in the world to sit back and eat warmly with friends. I am not talking about creating some overblown idyll of perpetual Provençal summer, but of extending that purring sense of sunny expansiveness.

Summer food, even when eaten in deepest winter, contains within it the idea of simple cooking. But the best recipes are never blueprints, only ideas hungrily mooted. The ones in this book have come to me the way they always do, plundered from friends, from family, grown out of an idea of what might go with what. As the Australian food writer Maggie Beer has written, ‘cooking is all about osmosis – a mental note made about a flavour combination or a technique, a memory of a dish’. Cooking is not just about applying heat, procedure, method, but about transformation of a more intimate kind; none of us cooks without bringing our own character to bear on the food in front of us. Just as the recipes that follow have been toyed with, changed, fiddled with to become my food, so I expect them to be remodelled in your own kitchen.

I have only one rule when I decide what to put in, what to leave out. However successful a kitchen experiment might seem to be, if I don’t feel the urge to cook something again, and soon, I ditch it. The one-off spectacular is not my style, nor ever could be. And, if at any time I’m still wondering if this or that particular recipe is worth keeping, I set myself a scene: a friend, a reader, a fellow-mother at the school gates, is coming up to me, telling me that tonight she’s going to cook my..... If I’m not filled with impatient, evangelical enthusiasm at the imagined exchange, if that recipe doesn’t inspire that same, unwavering, bossy confidence, then out it goes. I want to write only about the food I love, and I want you to love it, too.

Life has its difficulties, why add to them in the kitchen? And for all that my title archly conjures up that starlet’s gushing hope – from the première scene in
Singing in the Rain
– that ‘if I’ve brought a little cheer into your humdrum little lives, it ain’t all been in vain for nothin’’, it is not because I believe there is nothing but endless, unclouded blue sky in Nigellaland, but because I still believe the kitchen is not a place you escape from, but the place you escape to.

CONVERSION CHARTS

FIRST COURSE

Crostini del Mare

Griddled Aubergines with Feta, Mint and Chilli

Hot Salt Cod Fritters with Cold Seafood Salad

Seafood Salad

Salt Cod Fritters

Thai Crumbled Beef in Lettuce Wraps

Rice Paper Rolls

Ginger-Cured Salmon

Baby Octopus and Potato Salad

Flatbread Pizzas

Squid Salad with Lime, Coriander, Mint and Mizuna

Soups

Spiced Pink Soup

Chilled Pea and Mint Soup

Risi e Bisi

Summer Minestrone alla Genovese

Happiness Soup

Pasta

Pappardelle with Courgettes, Sultanas and Pine Nuts

Tagliolini al Pesto Amaro

Rigatoni al Pomodoro e Prezzemolo

Spaghettini al Sugo Crudo

Spaghetti Aglio Olio Peperoncino

Linguine with Chilli, Crab and Watercress

Capellini Con Cacio e Pepe

Short Pasta with Asparagus, Lemon, Garlic and Parsley

Linguine with Mussels

Linguine alle Vongole

Greekish Lamb Pasta

Baked Pasta Shells Stuffed with Spinach and Ricotta

Soba Noodles with Sesame Seeds

Salads

Old-Fashioned Tomato Salad

Raw Beetroot, Dill and Mustard Seed Salad

Baked Potato Salad

Cacik

The Rainbow Room’s Carrot and Peanut Salad

Double Courgette and Bean Salad

The Ultimate Greek Salad

Puy Lentil, Goat’s Cheese and Mint Salad

Italian Beetroot Salad

Watermelon, Feta and Black Olive Salad

Feta, Walnut and Herb Salad

CROSTINI DEL MARE

I’ve been harbouring a memory of these for eight years now, but this is the first time I’ve actually cooked them myself. I came across them while I was on holiday in Porto Ercole, at a little restaurant called Il Greco over the way in Porto Santo Stefano. I sat by the water’s edge, voluptuously savouring the menu while the waiters brought plates of lozenge-shaped toasts covered with the still warm meat of finely chopped mussels and clams, deep with garlic and sprinkled with parsley. It was when I was cooking the pasta with mussels for the book shoot that the briney, winey smell of the steaming seafood made me desperate to recreate these. And yes, they’re fiddly, but so very, very good.

You will have a little pool of marine juices left after you’ve chopped and smeared the seafood for the crostini and the best way I can think of for using this up is to dunk the remaining half of your French loaf straight into it and slurp it all up. You can of course, though, just bag it up as it is and freeze it so you have a small but concentrated stash of deep-scented fish stock to use at some later date. And once you get into the habit of crostini-production (and I find I do), you might find it easier anyway to buy a baguette, or ficelle (either will do), slice it and bag it up and keep it in the deep-freeze to be oil-dabbled and toasted whenever you want.

Half a skinny baguette (in other words, a ficelle)

approx. 4 tablespoons olive oil

2 cloves garlic minced

2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley, plus more to decorate

2 tablespoons olive oil

750g mussels

500g clams

1 tablespoon vermouth or white wine

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6. Cut the bread into slices, about half to three-quarters of a centimetre thick: in other words, neither too thick, nor too thin. You need about 25 slices for the amount of chopped seafood topping here. Using a pastry brush or your fingers, dab the bread, on both sides, with the olive oil and sit these lightly oil-brushed slices on a rack over a roasting tin and bake for about 5–10 minutes, turning once. Frankly, it’s just a matter of cooking until the slices begin to turn gold, and this takes more time the fresher the bread. In other words, if you’ve got stale bread, use it for this. When the bread is toasted and gold, remove it from the oven and leave it to cool while you get on with the mussels and clams.

Put the garlic and parsley into a large saucepan with the oil and cook, stirring, over a low heat for a couple of minutes making sure it doesn’t colour. Tip in the cleaned mussels and clams, turn the heat to high, add the tablespoon of vermouth or wine and clamp on the lid. Cook for 4–5 minutes, shaking the pan a few times to disperse the shells until they are all gaping open. Remove the lid and take off the heat so that the shellfish can cool a little, then pick out the meat with your fingers.

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