Stella Newman - The Happiness Recipe

Nonna’s recipe isn’t difficult but it does require two ingredients you can’t buy off the shelf: love and patience. First you have to chop your vegetables into very fine dice. And of course you can’t use a food processor, because the ghost of Nonna is watching, and she wouldn’t like it. Cook the veg in olive oil for at least half an hour, on a heat so low you have to keep checking that the gas is actually on. Then add garlic, and sweat some more. In a separate pan, dry-fry some pancetta – salty pig meat being the base for so much that is good in this world. Then in the same pan, brown some beef mince, then half the amount of pork mince again. Add it to your soffrito along with a bottle of passata, fresh rosemary, salt and pepper. And then the secret ingredient that truly makes this dish: an entire bottle of red wine. Pour that in, put a lid on the casserole dish and put it in the oven for the whole day, stirring every couple of hours.

This is the perfect dish for a day like today. The weather’s miserable, I’ve got nothing better to do, and I can justify not setting foot outside again with the excuse that I have to babysit the dinner. At around 4pm I rouse myself from a mid-afternoon doze and head for my A4 files of recipes. They’re the one organised thing in my flat. I’m always fiddling with recipes, and the only way that I remember these tweaks is if I’ve scrawled them on a piece of paper. Aah, here we go: chocolate brownie cheesecake bake. It’s one of the more obscene puddings in this file, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t go back for seconds. First you make the brownies, and Lord knows there are as many brownie recipes as there are Hindu deities. Normally I’d go straight to my friend Claire’s recipe, which produces the ultimate squidgy yet chunky brownie. But the brownies in this pudding need to stay in neat squares so I use a Nigel Slater recipe that is foolproof and produces a more cake-like brownie, better fit for purpose.

While the brownies are in the oven I make the cheesecake base – full-fat Philadelphia, mascarpone and vanilla, whipped together and poured onto a base of crushed dark chocolate digestives mixed with melted better. That’s my favourite part of the whole process – spreading the biscuit base out into the tray with a spatula, like it’s wet sand. The brownies come out of the top oven and in goes the cheesecake for forty minutes, then the heat goes off and the cheesecake stays in the oven to cool and set. I give the bolognese a quick stir, then head back to the sofa for another little lie-down. I can’t wait to be an old lady when all this mid-afternoon snoozing will be deemed socially acceptable.

The girls are due at 7 p.m. so at 6.30 p.m. I open a bottle of wine and start drinking – I might as well air the wine before they get here.

Polly’s the first to arrive at 7 p.m. on the dot.

‘You look amazing!’ I say, as I open the door and give her a hug.

‘D’you think?’ she says, handing me a bottle of Prosecco.

‘You’re glowing.’

‘Really? I’ve been on the Perricone, lots of oily fish. I feel like a penguin.’

‘And your hair totally suits you longer.’

She reaches up and touches her neck. ‘I’m growing it for the wedding. You don’t think I’m too old for long hair, do you?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’re thirty-six. You didn’t drive by the way, did you?’ Polly, Dave and Maisie now live in a small village near Marlow in Buckinghamshire. It’s only forty minutes by car, but if she’s driving that means I’m drinking alone, which isn’t good for anyone.

‘My one night out and you think I’m drinking Evian? Dave gave me a lift in and I’ll get a cab back. Is that smell what I think it is?’

I nod.

‘How long has it been on for?’ she says.

I check my watch. ‘Just over eight hours.’

‘I cannot wait, I’ve been looking forward to this all week! Will you email me the recipe? I want to make it for Dave.’

‘I’ve got some copies of it, I gave one to Terry the other day,’ I say, retrieving the recipe file I’d just returned to the hall cupboard.

‘I’m so sick of eating mackerel,’ she calls out from the kitchen. ‘Shall we start this Prosecco or wait for Dalia?’

‘ He who hesitates … plus, it’ll help the crisps go down more easily,’ I say, opening a packet of Kettle Chips.

And it’s just as well we don’t wait for Dalia. Because twenty minutes later she sends me a text apologising profusely saying she can’t make it, and she’ll make it up to me another time, promise, kiss kiss.

‘Look at this,’ I say to Polly, showing her my phone. ‘She doesn’t even bother making excuses any more because she knows we won’t believe them.’

‘At least she’s got the decency not to pretend she has a migraine, I suppose,’ says Polly, handing the phone back to me and shaking her head.

‘You would think she would at least pick up the phone rather than just text,’ I say. ‘It’s rude.’

‘Mark’s probably there with her and she can’t bear to drag herself away from his side for twenty seconds.’

‘Do you reckon the sex is as good as she makes out it is?’ I say. ‘I’ve always thought Mark looked like the sort of man who would be entirely about his penis and not much else.’

‘Me too!’ she says. ‘But apparently it’s so amazing she says it’s like a drug.’

‘Huh,’ I say. ‘Well none of the drugs I’ve ever taken turned round and asked me if I wanted Botox for my birthday. Did she tell you about that?’

Polly nods. ‘She’s incapable of being on her own, though,’ she says. ‘She’d rather have someone than no one. I just wish that someone wasn’t him.’

‘I keep on telling her a man isn’t the be all and end all.’

‘That man’s just the end all,’ she says.

‘Let’s not talk about it, it’ll just make me angry, and I’ve had a bad enough week as it is … Ooh, although I did meet a man.’

‘A man?’ says Polly. ‘An actual real live man?’

‘Hang on, I’ll just put the pasta on and then I can tell you all about it.’

Two bowls of pasta, two bottles of wine and two helpings of cake later, I’m trying to remember all the reasons why I think Jeff is going to be my new boyfriend.

‘And he noticed those earrings I bought in New York, the five-dollar ones from Old Navy that actually look quite expensive.’

‘The moonstone ones?’

‘Yes, and he actually knows what a moonstone is, but he’s definitely not gay because he went out with another girl called Susie … with three Is … oh, and then he said that this chocolate sponge was my namecake, like namesake, because it’s like a Suzy Q apparently. Isn’t that funny? He’s funny as well as handsome … and he used to live in New York and he’s learning Spanish, and we like the same films, and he loves food!’

‘Sounds perfect,’ she says. ‘Apart from one big thing.’

‘What?’ I say, suddenly worried that she has found a clue in something I’ve said that reveals he is not single. ‘Polly?’

‘It’s obvious what the problem is, isn’t it?’ she says, waving her wine glass in the air.

‘No,’ I say. ‘What’s obvious?’

‘The name, Suze, the name.’

I breathe a sigh of relief.

‘It’s up there with Tarquin on the list of worst men’s names ever.’

‘It’s nowhere near Tarquin,’ I say. ‘It’s a totally fine name.’

‘Jeffrey?’ she says. ‘How many sexy Jeffs or Jeffreys are there? There’s plenty of unsexy Jeffreys. Geoffrey from Rainbow. Geoff Capes, Jeffrey Dahmer. Yep, serial killer name,’ she says, shuddering. ‘Or a man in a golfing jumper. A golf-playing serial killer.’

‘Jeff Bridges. He’s a sexy Jeff. My God, have you ever seen a photo of him when he was young?’