My friends insisting they enjoy my pasta surprise is the dish’s real secret sauceEveryone has a go-to dish that comes with its own collection of memories. Photograph: Alamy/PA Quentin FottrellSun May 24 2026 - 06:00 • 7 MIN READI’ve been cooking my pasta surprise for more years than I care to remember. In fact, I do care to remember. They were good years, tough years and ain’t-life-great years. This vegetarian dish – spinach and feta with a tomato base – has stayed fresh through different cities, friend groups and romantic partners. In New York, in the 2010s, a former boyfriend, unbidden, added extra spice moments before I served it. He used up the last bit of spice from our relationship. He didn’t trust me to do it my way. He had a good heart but, unlike my pasta surprise, there was not enough to go around.If a romantic partner could interfere with this recipe at the 11th hour, what else could be on the chopping block? My friends? The way I gave my waistband on my joggers a theatrical twang before and after tucking into a hearty meal? (“Honestly, Quentin, some of your moves …”) Okay, I’ll give him that last one. The “surprise” is that something so simple can taste so good. To mess with it is to mess with history. Cooking is about timing, agility, creativity and patience. I can produce those qualities on occasion, but all at the same time? What am I – a magician? I sometimes feel like one when I put the “surprise” into pasta surprise.The responsibility for being so shamelessly uninterested in rustling up alternatives lies firmly at my own oven door. Friends with kids have had to learn quick-smart whether they liked it or not. The other reason I’m a horrible cook: I leave everything to the last minute and I’m usually so starving that I could chew somebody’s arm off. I’m at risk of turning my dinner party into The Donner Party. During the pandemic, I was forced to try. I regularly visited Zabar’s and Fairway Market, where I once saw Yoko Ono rummaging through the vegetables. But even then I could order a portion of beef bourguignon or sushi at the deli.My friend Cathy, an American, introduced me to pasta surprise at the University of Galway when we were in our early 20s. In addition to making cooking look easy, she was born with that rare gift of turning an ordinary story into a gem. I guess storytelling and cooking require similar panache. During our tipsy university days on the cobbled streets of Galway in the 1990s, Cathy, with her finely-drawn arched eyebrows and Charlie’s Angels hair, often deflected the unwanted attention of farmers three times her age in Neachtáin’s, our favourite pub. “What is it about me?” she would despair. “It’s your Hollywood glamour,” I’d reply. “They love it.”We had an appetite for the secret to life, too. One time, in my apartment in Corrib Village, then a newly minted student residence, Cathy was cooking up a storm and our campus buddy Fergal stuck his head in the open window. He was the most cheerful person we’d ever met. “Why are you so happy?” we asked Fergal one day. “Sure, why would I want to be sad?” Fergal replied, beaming. We looked at each other like we’d both been hit on the heads with a giant spatula. For years, Cathy and I, two angst-ridden bunnies, often encouraged each other with that profound, rhetorical question: “Sure, why would I want to be sad?”Why, indeed. Pasta surprise makes everyone happy. It’s simple. It’s delicious. It’s served with garlic bread and wine. By giving the dish an ironic sobriquet, I had leaned into the embarrassment of being a one-dish-wonder. By the time I was still serving it up in my 40s in New York, I was trapped by my own twisted time warp of culinary ineptitude. I was trying to revive a long-running gag with people who did not understand its history. So why do I keep cooking it? To preserve the last remnants of my youthful naivete? If Father Time was going to reclaim my hairline, maybe this was one way of maintaining an illusion of youth.Obviously, I can boil an egg and I have made efforts to elevate my cooking. About 25 years ago, my friend Jonny read about free cooking classes for men sponsored by Dublin City Council. I figured this could be my way out of culinary limbo. There had been too many humiliations along the way, chief among them was a dinner guest in the mid-2000s who knew that my chicken gorkhali was too tasty. I was acting odd, even odder than usual. The guilt was written all over my face. So while everyone else was tucking into their ice cream and jelly, he snuck into my kitchen and unceremoniously pulled the Montys of Kathmandu cartons from my bin.Is it any wonder I signed up to the men’s cookery class with Jonny? The other blokes were mostly widowers. Jonny and I were eager 30-somethings. Every week, we diligently cooked Shepherd’s Pie and other staples. On our last evening, we were gobsmacked as our teacher wrapped bacon around white batch bread and smothered it in butter. It was the unwanted love child of a pig-in-a-blanket and bacon butty. A kale salad it was not. But it was delicious. None of them made it into my kitchen, but that course was a formative moment in my friendship with Jonny, who kept all of the recipes.From Dublin to New York’s Upper West Side 20 years later, sitting pretty in my doorman building next to Central Park like the cat that got the cream, I had achieved everything I thought I wanted. I was also still cooking my old favourite. Only it was a disaster. It was dry and overdone. Nancy, my friend, an estate agent and a former supermodel who had been on the cover of Vogue more times than I’d had hot dinners, insisted it was delicious. Fate, not school or college, had brought this group of New Yorkers together. The sweetness of my guests to insist they were enjoying every bite as they pushed it around their plate was the real secret sauce.“The only surprise is that you’re still cooking it,” my friend Sarah says every couple of years. I recently mulled the idea of adding lobster from Caviston’s in Glasthule, but that would be like adding truffle oil to Burdock’s chips. You don’t mess with a classic. Plus, it tastes a little different every time I scoop it out of the pot. A similar version went viral when the New York Times published it during the pandemic: “One-Pan Feta Pasta With Cherry Tomatoes.” The implication being that any idiot could manage it.Quentin Fottrell as a little boy with his mum There were plenty of opportunities for me to learn how to cook, one recipe at a time. I grew up in a traditional Dublin household with stew, steak, and salmon and cod with parsley sauce. The first night my mother tried out her new pressure cooker – the 1980s precursor to the Instant Pot – the valve made an almighty whistle, and sent us screaming for our lives as we ran from the kitchen. We had no idea what was about to happen. We thought the pressure cooker was going to explode. Our next-door neighbours had a “get busy with the fizzy” Soda Stream, which I still regard as impossibly extravagant.Cathy, the New Yorker I met in Galway who first cooked me pasta surprise, had many cookery-adjacent talents. She could create a magic wonderland in her livingroom from the tattered leftovers of a garage sale. A graduate of Alfred University, a liberal arts college in western New York, she was also a poet and painter. One of her pictures depicts a woman in a moss-green hat with big eyes. It’s called Tea Without You. That woman has been giving me side-eye for 30 years. Cathy died unexpectedly four years ago. She left behind three children, a beautiful legacy teaching art to senior citizens and a world so much richer and funnier because she was in it.I may not believe in an afterlife, but I do believe in Cathy’s ability to bring friends together and, hopefully, I too can pass it on to someone else. It’s the number one dish of my life. My go-to. We all have one. And it comes with its own collection of memories. My mother has her own fettuccine vegetarian number. After she serves up a modest portion – “that’s plenty,” I tell her – she gives me side-eye, like the woman in Tea Without You, when I go back to the pan for seconds. We all have our version of pasta surprise, our comfort food, the meal that reminds us of old friends and remains a rite of passage for new ones.[ Quentin Fottrell: ‘One day I was playing tennis, the next I was having open-heart surgery’Opens in new window ]I will tell you this. If I ever cook you pasta surprise, you’re not nobody. You’re somebody. By the time you twirl that last string of spaghetti, you too will be a passenger on this wayward bus. The “surprise” is that despite everything – relationships, ageing, illness, triumphs, tragedies and near-misses – here we are, boiling that saucepan of water. Aren’t we lucky? Yes, there will be more adventures ahead. When I’m in Tesco, reaching for the spaghetti, it’s not for no one, and when you hear me huffing and puffing in the kitchen as I chop those onions, you, my dinner guest and fellow traveller, will always know that something good is about to happen.IN THIS SECTION