Pelagic pasta

Here's a pasta dish that's relatively simple to prepare, looks impressive and tastes great. And it combines two major animal phyla -- molluscs and arthropods -- with the mighty fungus kingdom! The list of ingredients is more suggestion than command; feel free to experiment.

The pasta:
500 g black squid's ink linguine

The sauce:
2 tbsp olive oil
50 ml dry sherry
200 ml dry white wine
200 ml lobster or shrimp fond (you can make this yourself or buy it in a glass)
100 ml Madeira
4-6 scallions, the thinner the better
2 cloves garlic
A pinch of saffron
Small bunch of thyme
2 bay leaves
Salt and black pepper, if needed
1 tbsp cornstarch (maize starch, Mondamin)

The other stuff:
500 g cèpes (Boletus edulis Fries 1821; if there is an English word for them other than 'cèpes', I don't know it.) If you can't find them, or if the price is too shameless, you can use ordinary mushrooms instead, though it won't be quite the same.
250 g green Thai asparagus (it's small and very thin). Again, if you can't find this, just use ordinary asparagus, trying to select stalks that are as thin as possible.
24 medium prawns
A dozen or so very small cocktail tomatoes
A bit of cheese for grating (Montasio, Pecorino sarda, Parmesan)
More olive oil

(Note: you can do almost of the following in advance. This is useful when you're cooking for guests. If you've done most of the preparation ahead of time, you'll need less than a half hour in the kitchen to cook the pasta, sauté the prawns, finish the sauce and toss it all together.)

Tie the thyme and bay leaves together in a bundle using kitchen thread. Leave a good bit of thread hanging from one side of the knot. Tie the end of this hanging bit to the middle of a chopstick, satay skewer or similar. The 'leash' should be long enough to let the bundle of herbs reach the bottom of the saucepan in the next paragraph. The stick is to make it easy to take the bundle back out when you're done.

Heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a small saucepan.

Snip the roots from the scallions. Slice them into very thin discs, starting at the now-rootless end and continuing up for about 10 cm. Throw them in the oil, which should now be at low-to-medium heat.

Crush the garlic in a press; add to the oil.

Sauté the scallion and garlic until they are soft and goldenish. Make sure they do not scorch.

Rub the saffron threads to a powder between your fingers, or use a mortar if you are fastidious. Add the powdered saffron to the oil.

Turn the heat up high, and add the sherry; let it cook almost all away (stirring the whole time), then add the white wine and fond. Bring to the boil, drop in the tied bundle of herbs (resting the stick on the rim of the pot), then reduce to a low simmer.

Chop off about a centimetre from the stem end of the asparagus. What's left should be roughly 10 cm long. Plunge them into lots of salted boiling water. Keep them in only until the water returns to the boil, them shock them under cold running water. (One good way to do all this is to put the asparagus into a sieve small enough to fit in the pot of boiling water.) Drain and put to the side. Note: If you are using ordinary rather than Thai asparagus, you will need to keep them in the boiling water a bit longer unless you have been lucky enough to find very thin stalks. Also, the stalks are likely to be longer then you want; if so, just cut them in half before boiling.

Cut each cèpe in half. You'll want to be a bit careful about this, to minimise separation of caps and stems. Sauté in olive oil over medium-high heat in a big cast-iron pan. It's best to put the cèpes into the oil cut-side-down, then stir-fry them a bit when they're almost done; and they're done when they're lightly browned and roasty-looking. If necessary, do this in shifts rather than crowd the pan; mushrooms in a crowded pan will steam rather than sauté. Take the cèpes out of the pan and drain them on paper towelling or brown kitchen paper.

If the prawns still have their heads on, pull them off. (You can simmer the heads in white wine with shallots, black pepper and bay leaf to make a fond for the next time you prepare this dish.) Using a knife with a short, very sharp blade, carefully make a slit along the back of each prawn's exoskeleton, stopping just before reaching the tail. You are likely to see a thin dark tube running along the animal's back just below the shell. Flick it out. (This is called the 'vein', but it is in fact the gut, and the dark stuff that gives it its colouring is what you'd expect it to be. That's why we're getting rid of it. If you don't see a vein, it's there but empty.) Rinse under running water and place between layers of paper toweling to dry. We're leaving the shells on and the tails untouched because that preserves the flavour better. We're making those slits to make it easier to get at the meat, and also to get rid of the vein.

You've now gone about as far as you can if you're trying to do most of the cooking in advance. If that is what you're doing, be sure to turn off the heat under the sauce (and discard the bundle of herbs while you're at it) and to put the prawns (in a dish covered with plastic foil) in the refrigerator until you're ready to finish. If you're doing this all in one go, ignore this paragraph and keep barreling on.

Bring a big pot of water to boil. Add salt and, to keep the pasta from sticking, a dollop of oil. Throw in the pasta, give it a stir, and cook till al dente.

Meanwhile, sauté the prawns in hot oil. Unless you've ignored the ingredients list and bought mambo-jambo mega goliath prawns, this won't take long at all.

At the same time, bring the sauce to a boil. (Discard the herb bundle at this point, if you haven't already.) Dissolve the cornstarch in the Madeira, then pour it into the boiling sauce, stirring all the while. Add salt and pepper to taste, if you think you need to.

If you've done this right, the sauce and the pasta and the prawns will all be finished at the same time.

Drain the pasta. Put it back in the pot it cooked in, pour the sauce over it and toss. Throw some grated cheese (not very much) into the pot and toss again. Put everything else into the pot (including the tomatoes -- did you think I'd forgotten them?) and toss some more, gently.

Dump the whole into an attractive pasta bowl. You can get a bit decorative if you like, arranging things on the top of the bowl. If you're really ambitious, you can add a few extra sautéed prawns, these ones with head attached, in a fetching pattern.

This should serve four as a main dish, or eight as a first course. If you're serving it as a first course, I should think you'd want something very simple afterwards (a grilled fish with lemon, for example). In any case, you'll want to serve a good inexpensive white wine with this (try Salaparuta's Corvo).