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Defining Dishes is an IndyEats column that explores the significance of food at key moments in our lives. From recipes that have been passed down for generations, to flavours that hold a special place in our hearts, food shapes every part of our lives in ways we might not have ever imagined. I was very young when I started working in a local pizzeria in Caserta, the city near Naples where I grew up. I was 11 years old when I started working there, and stayed on for about eight years before moving to London to start my own business. But during my teenage years, one of the best memories I have is waking up to the smell of my mother’s ragu on Sundays. Neapolitan ragu is a specialty in the region, and we are very proud of it. It’s one of the two most famous varieties of ragu, the other being ragu bolognese, and uses whole chunks of beef and pork rather than ground meat. It must be cooked for a long time over a low heat, for at least eight hours, preferably 10 hours. My mother would get up at 5am to start making hers and it would continue to simmer slowly until the family is ready to eat in the afternoon. Sundays are special because it’s a time for the whole family, including our extended family, to come together and eat at the same table. My family comprised of my parents, my three siblings and myself, and we would usually be joined by my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. We usually had anywhere between 15 to 20 people gathering on Sunday afternoons. It didn’t matter what commitments you had – on Sunday, you have to sit at the table with family. It’s the most important day of the week for us. The ragu is the dish that, for me, brings everything together: passion, love, happiness and strong ties with family. Because I worked late shifts often, I would wake up really late on Sundays, around 11am or 12pm. So by the time I wake up, the beautiful aroma of the ragu that has been cooking since 5am will have filled the whole house. I would wake up so hungry. My breakfast on these days would simply be a hunk of bread, torn and dipped straight into the still-simmering sauce, with some parmigiano reggiano sprinkled on top to help cool it down. Every family has their own way of eating ragu. You can dip bread in it, like I did for breakfast, but it is most commonly eaten with pasta. Some people have it with gnocchi while others might use a short pasta or spaghetti. But it does have to be a robust pasta shape, you can’t have ragu with a really small pasta, or it won’t stand up to the sauce. No one makes ragu like my mother’s. I could go to any restaurant, even those with Michelin stars, and it wouldn’t come anywhere close to hers. I strongly believe her secret ingredient is just her love for cooking for her children, as the dish needs that passion to make it taste so good. I never woke up at 5am to try and make it with her, it was so hard when I was a teenager! But when I did start to learn how to make it, it was very difficult to get up that early. I don’t know how she did it for so many years. In my restaurant, Napoli on the Road, I make a pizza with the slow-cooked ragu as a topping, along with a parmigiano reggiano cream. I call it Ricordi D’infanzia, which translates to “childhood memories” because it holds such strong nostalgia for me. But I still can’t make it like my mother does. When I go home to Caserta to see my family, I do try to wake up at 5am to make it with her. I’m less stressed about work when I’m there so I can usually do it, but when I’m back in London it’s hard to get up at that hour when you finish at midnight at the restaurant. Like most mothers who pass down their recipes, there are no accurate measurements to my mother’s ragu. Sometimes they put some sort of secret ingredient inside and won’t tell you. But I have learnt that you need to be flexible about it, depending on what ingredients are available to you. For example, maybe the tomatoes you buy from the market are too acidic. My mother fixes this by putting a whole potato in the sauce, because its starchiness will help to remove the acidity from the tomatoes. Or, she might add sugar to the sauce to mellow it out. It can be tricky to get it right, so I can only try my best to do better than my mother, but it is hard. I think I will be 80 or 90 years old before I perfect my own version! I’ve lived in London for almost 20 years, but I still miss those Sunday afternoons spent with my family at my uncle’s or grandfather’s house. In London, things are very fast-paced and rushed, you don’t really have time to sit down with people. I try to go back every couple of months, and I really look forward to it. My mother still makes her ragu. Even though nowadays it’s harder to get everyone together, we do our best to keep everyone united. I don’t have any family in London, so it’s important to me to keep that tradition alive when I go home. My dad has never visited me here because he is afraid of flying, but my mother comes fairly often and I’ll make ragu for her when she does. She never says anything bad about it – although, she will tell people: “It’s good… but it can be improved.” Still, I’m glad I have the opportunity to make it for her sometimes and it keeps me connected to home. Michele Pascarella is the chef-owner of Napoli on the Road. Read More The dish that defines me: Evelin Eros’s rum cake The dish that defines me: Mallini Kannan’s baked honey-soy salmon The dish that defines me: Frank Yeung’s prawn wontons

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Unborn babies are in a perpetual nutritional tug-of-war with their mothers due to a “greedy” gene inherited from their fathers, a new study suggests. Scientists from the University of Cambridge have found that foetuses use the gene to “remote-control” their mother into feeding them extra food and control her metabolism. While the mother’s body wants the baby to survive, it needs to keep enough glucose and fats circulating in her system for her own health in order to be able to deliver the child, breastfeed, and reproduce again. Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri, professor in Foetal and Placental Physiology, a Fellow of St John’s College and co-senior author of the paper, said: “It’s the first direct evidence that a gene inherited from the father is signalling to the mother to divert nutrients to the foetus.” Dr Miguel Constancia, MRC investigator based at the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science and co-senior author of the paper, said: “The baby’s remote control system is operated by genes that can be switched on or off depending on whether they are a ‘dad’s’ or ‘mum’s’ gene’, the so-called imprinted genes. “Genes controlled by the father are ‘greedy’ and ‘selfish’ and will tend to manipulate maternal resources for the benefit of the foetuses, so to grow them big and fittest. “Although pregnancy is largely cooperative, there is a big arena for potential conflict between the mother and the baby, with imprinted genes and the placenta thought to play key roles.” The new study looked at how the placenta communicates with the mother through the release of hormones so she can accommodate her baby’s growth. In pregnant mice, scientists selectively altered the signalling cells in the placenta that tell mothers to allocate nutrients to her developing foetuses. The baby’s genes controlled by the father tend to promote foetal growth and those controlled by the mother tend to limit foetal growth, experts say. Professor Sferruzzi-Perri explained: “Those genes from the mother that limit foetal growth are thought to be a mother’s way of ensuring her survival, so she doesn’t have a baby that takes all the nutrients and is too big and challenging to birth. “The mother also has a chance of having subsequent pregnancies potentially with different males in the future to pass on her genes more widely.” In the study researchers deleted the expression of an important gene called Igf2, which provides instructions for making a protein called “Insulin Like Growth Factor Two”. Similar to the hormone insulin, which is responsible for making glucose and controlling its levels in our circulation, the gene promotes foetal growth and plays a key part in the development of tissues including the placenta, liver, and brain. Dr Jorge Lopez-Tello, a lead author of the study based at Cambridge’s department of physiology, development and neuroscience, said: “If the function of Igf2 from the father is switched off in signalling cells, the mother doesn’t make enough amounts of glucose and lipids – fats – available in her circulation. “These nutrients, therefore, reach the foetus in insufficient amounts and the foetus doesn’t grow properly.” The scientists found that deleting the gene also affects production of other hormones that modulate the way the mother’s pancreas produces insulin, and how her liver and other metabolic organs respond. Babies with Igf2 gene defects can be overgrown or growth-stunted. And the researchers say that until now, it was not known that part of the gene’s role is to regulate signalling to the mother to allocate nutrients to the unborn child. The mice studied were smaller at birth and their offspring showed early signs of diabetes and obesity in later life. Professor Sferruzzi-Perri said: “Our research highlights how important the controlled allocation of nutrients to the foetus is for the lifelong health of the offspring, and the direct role the placenta plays. “The placenta is an amazing organ. At the end of pregnancy, the placenta is delivered by the mother, but the memories of how the placenta was functioning leaves a lasting legacy on the way those foetal organs have developed and then how they’re going to function through life.” The findings are published in the Cell Metabolism journal. Reporting by PA Read More It took until my thirties to realise I might not be white Carrie Johnson announces birth of third child with Boris Johnson: ‘Guess which name my husband chose’ How many children does Boris Johnson have? The meaning behind the name of Carrie and Boris Johnson’s third child Emilia Clarke’s brain haemorrhage ‘profoundly changed our lives’, says star’s mother How many children does Boris Johnson have?

The next time you eat something with your hands, take a moment to notice how it feels on your fingertips before taking a bite. If it’s a burger, are the buns smooth or covered in a smattering of sesame seeds? When you put pressure on them with your fingers, does the bread squish down or is it more of a crumby affair? Then, when you finally take a bite, notice how satisfying it is to sink your teeth through its layers; soft bun giving way to crunchy lettuce or onion, to oozy cheese to, finally, juicy patty. Now think about how different it would be if you had used a knife and fork. Eating with one’s hands is an immensely pleasurable experience. While in the West, the act is usually confined to foods encased in bread or pastry, Indian, African and some other Asian cultures are more adept at using their fingers for dishes that might seem too “messy” or “sticky” on this side of the world. One of my favourite dishes is banana leaf rice, which at its core comprises of rice, vegetables and curry. I mix each element of the dish and use a pinching motion with all five fingers to construct the perfect bite, before sweeping it up in a quick motion and delivering the food to my mouth. I find that it forces me to really consider each bite, from what flavours and textures I want it to contain, to how large a portion I can manage. Up until a few months ago, I never really thought about how often I eat with my hands. Like many people, I associated it closely with Indian meals and always thought that Western culture was too obsessed with polite society to really dig their fingers in. This is still true, to an extent – many South Asians who grew up eating with their hands report being looked at with horror when they attempted to do the same in public here. But, after witnessing my very white British husband happily dig into banana leaf rice when we began dating, and having conversations with friends about the topic, I’ve come to realise that eating with our hands is a much more universal act than I thought. For example, burgers, pizzas, hot dogs and chips are all eaten by hand – unless you’re eating one of those beastly burgers that tower too high and need to be deconstructed. Then there’s things like fried chicken or shellfish, which are simply easier to pick up, pull apart and pry open using your fingers. Foods like Mexican burritos and tacos or Japanese sushi are commonly picked up by hand and devoured. Some people enjoy eating salads by hand, finding it easier to use pieces of lettuce filled with dressing and other ingredients like edible spoons. A surprising proponent of this was Sylvia Plath, who wrote in the third chapter of her 1963 novel The Bell Jar that she observed a poet eating a salad “with his fingers, leaf by leaf”, making it “seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do”. The more I think about it, the more I realise that my hands are my favourite utensil. No one is delicately picking up crisps with chopsticks or forking a French fry. All manner of flat breads – from parathas and naans to injeras – beg to be torn apart by hands and used to mop up dhal and curry. I would never think of eating a sandwich with a fork and knife, any more than I would for a Taiwanese bao. It just seems wrong. On this side of the world, cutlery has reigned supreme until very recently. Primitive humans have been carving knife and spoon-like implements for centuries, while the fork is a surprisingly modern invention. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, a Byzantine princess debuted a golden fork at her wedding feast in Venice 1006, which disgusted locals who ate using their fingers and knives. One Venetian apparently condemned such a tool and said: “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks – his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.” There’s perhaps also an aspect of self-consciousness being thrown out the window when we eat with our hands. It banishes the concept of formality and Anglocentric ‘table manners’ Surekha Ragavan Despite the initial rejection, forks became a mainstay across Europe after 1533 when Catherine De Medici, wife of Henry II, hauled a collection of silver forks from Italy to France in 1533. Three hundred years later, the full set of silverware as we know it had integrated itself into everyday life in Europe. Manners-obsessed Victorians then made up all sorts of etiquette rules, from how to hold a fork, to the myriad of different-sized cutleries with very specific purposes – like fish knives and dessert spoons. These became class markers, separating the upper echelons of society with their dinky utensils from the lower classes, who worked too much to care about which spoon went where. But one thing could be agreed upon – eating with one’s hands was considered impolite and vulgar in almost all culinary situations. That is, until about a decade ago when DeBrett’s, the British authority on etiquette and behaviour, declared in their 2012 guide that “table manners are no longer about adhering to a rigid, and outdated, code of conduct”. The experts named foods like pizza and calzone as “acceptable” foods to be eaten using your hands. It also advised such adventurous eaters to create “as little mess as possible”, sit up straight and ensure you “never put your elbows on the table”, proving that some old habits die hard. Bristol-based restaurateur Rashintha Rodrigo, one of the five founders of Sri Lankan restaurant group The Coconut Tree, says he eats almost anything with his hands – even a roast dinner. “I start with a fork and knife but always find myself picking pieces of chicken or potato off my plate with my fingers towards the end of the meal,” he laughs. He also grew up eating rice and curry with his hands in Sri Lanka, and felt self-conscious about doing the same when he moved to Britain. But these days, he finds it liberating. “It’s become more accepted in the past five or six years and more people are curious about it,” Rodrigo says. Surekha Ragavan, founder of Periuk, a digital archive of heritage Malaysian recipes, also finds freedom in the act. “There’s perhaps also an aspect of self-consciousness being thrown out the window when we eat with our hands. It banishes the concept of formality and Anglocentric ‘table manners’,” she says, reminding me of another observation by Plath in The Bell Jar. The author’s liberation is slightly different, though, as she wrote: “I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at a table with a certain arrogance… nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.” Those who advocate eating with hands often also say it makes the food taste better, but no one seems to be able to pinpoint why. Jose Pizzaro, the acclaimed Spanish owner and founder of the Pizarro group of restaurants, describes it as “the best way to eat”. “It’s a visceral pleasure that’s really hard to beat,” he says. “It creates a sort of magical connection between you and the food. If you’ve never eaten a big, fat, juicy prawn covered with garlic and lemon with your hands, and then go through the ritual of pulling off the legs and the shell and then sucking the brains out – you haven’t lived!” But why is the tactile sensation of touching food so delightful? Some opine that touching your food is beneficial because you can gauge food temperature better with your fingers, and so run a lower risk of burning your tongue. Others claim that your fingers have “healthy bacteria” on them that get transferred into your digestive system when you eat with your hands, but these are difficult to quantify. However, Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, believes the pleasure lies in our perception of food, as opposed to any other physical benefits. In his review of how the experience of eating changes when people eat with their hands instead of cutlery, Spence found that having more direct, tactile contact with food appears to “enhance the experience” of eating and drinking. “There’s a lot of sensory input that happens even before we put the food in our mouth,” he says. “Just by using our sensitive finger pads, we almost anticipate how tasty something is going to be before it reaches our tongue.” There’s practicality in using our hands to eat, too. We can determine how ripe a fruit is by squeezing it gently, or figure out if something is going to be soft or crunchy before biting into it. Of course, there are some dishes that are simply not hand-friendly. Noodles, pasta and soups obviously require cutlery to eat, but there’s nothing to stop us from taking more joy in the foods we can eat with our hands. If you’ve never tried handling anything beyond a sandwich or a pasty, I fully encourage you to try something new. Take a leaf out of Plath’s book with your next salad, perhaps, or take the plunge into some rice and curry. It will require practice to develop the skill of eating without dropping rice absolutely everywhere, but I promise you, it’s worth it. Read More Adorable, cuddly… evil? How the Furby took over the world ‘You think it’s going to be a money making machine’: How modern life killed the hobby The dish that defines me: Mallini Kannan’s baked honey-soy salmon 30-minute summer recipes for all the family to enjoy What to cook this week: Tomato tart, sweetcorn pasta and other summery suppers The dish that defines me: Mallini Kannan’s baked honey-soy salmon

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