Silvia Colloca's broccoli cooked down with anchovy, garlic and chilli until the florets break into the sauce, tossed through caserecce with lemon zest and good oil. A Calabrian-style pasta that turns one vegetable into the whole dish. Pasta water does the binding.

This sits in the broader southern Italian pasta-with-broccoli family that includes the Sicilian pasta con i broccoli arriminati (with toasted breadcrumbs and saffron) and the Apulian orecchiette con cime di rapa (with bitter rapini greens). The defining cooking move is the same across the region: cook the broccoli hard in the pan with anchovy and garlic until it breaks down into a soft, savoury, almost-paste that coats every strand of pasta.

Anchovy melted into the olive oil at the start is the structural seasoning. Six fillets dissolved in the oil contribute deep umami salt that no one will be able to identify; the fish flavour disappears completely into the pasta but the savoury foundation it provides is what makes the dish read as Calabrian rather than generically Mediterranean.

Caserecce (the short, twisted pasta shape that looks like a rolled-up sheet of paper) is the right pasta. The twists catch the broken-down broccoli in their folds in a way smoother shapes cannot; substitute fusilli, casarecce or trofie if caserecce is unavailable. The starch-rich pasta water (a generous half-cup reserved before draining) emulsifies with the olive oil into a glossy coat. Lemon zest, black pepper, more good olive oil at the end. Parmigiano grated over the top. A glass of cold Greco di Tufo.