Rachel Roddy’s recipe for pasta with courgette, onion and raw tomato salsa | A kitchen in Rome

Hot summer days call for a pasta dish that’s treated like salad leaves – tossed gently through a fresh, room-temperature sauce

In her encyclopaedic but not at all stuffy book about Neapolitan food, Jeanne Caròla Francesconi provides half a dozen recipes for pasta with raw tomato sauces suitable for hot days. The one I always notice is vermicelli all’insalata, because of the arrangement of the words. Not the familiar insalata di pasta (pasta salad), but all’insalata (like a salad), which serves as a reminder that, as with salad, the important thing with this family of recipes is that the pasta is treated like leaves of salad and tossed gently but thoroughly with plenty of tasty and suitably cut condiments and dressing.

The dressing in this instance is the result of mixing two recipes that we used to make during cooking lessons on hot days at the old Latteria Studio: pasta with courgette, and pasta with double tomato sauce. The courgette softened in plenty of olive oil with spring onion is the warm part of the recipe, while a raw and juicy salsa of tomato, garlic and herbs provides the room-temperature element.