When Sophie McIntyre started Club Sup in March 2021, it was a way of bringing people together. “Coming out of the 2020 lockdowns, everyone was very lonely and really displaced in their relationships and their friendships,” says McIntyre. “I started hosting dinners and getting strangers to come. I would cook for everyone and we would have big share plates and everyone would get to know each other.”

For McIntyre, cooking and sharing food creates comfort that is hard to find elsewhere. “I used to do a lot of schnitzels and tasty, hearty things that have a lot of nostalgia to them,” says McIntyre. “Things that feel like you’d have them at home or your mum would cook them for you.” It’s the same approach McIntyre has taken with this pasta recipe, which has grown from a childhood favourite into a Friday night dinner in. “It’s a recipe for an old Jamie Oliver pasta, but it’s kind of been adapted,” says McIntyre. “My mum used to make it for me when I was a kid and over the years I’ve tweaked it to make it saucier and heartier.”

McIntyre’s philosophy is that with a few ingredients on hand (and a couple of extras ordered from
DoorDash if you need), a filling meal is only ever a few minutes away. “There definitely has to always be parmesan,” says McIntyre. “I think a jar of anchovies and good bread. And pasta, obviously. You can do so much with pasta and a punnet of tomatoes or a tin of them.”

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McIntyre’s take on the recipe includes a simple but often overlooked shortcut to flavour: fennel seeds. “There aren’t many recipes that I use in life that use fennel seeds all the time, and I just think it’s such a beautiful flavour,” says McIntyre. The fennel flavours also come through in the Italian sausage.

The beauty of this dish is that whatever style of pasta you have on hand will work. “I used to make it with spirals but recently I’ve loved it with rigatoni because I feel that it has the most flavour,” says McIntyre. “It picks up the most sauce and I love that the sausage tunnels its way into the rigatoni.”

Sophie McIntyre’s Italian sausage pasta
Serves 4
Preparation time: 10 mins
Cooking time: 30 mins

Ingredients:
4 pork and fennel sausages
100g butter
¼ cup chicken stock
1 tbsp fennel seeds
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried chilli
Salt
Pepper

Oil
500g pasta
½ cup white wine
150g parmesan

Method:
Heat pot of salted water. While it boils, remove sausage from casings and break up with your hands.

Add oil to pan and fry sausage, breaking it up with a wooden spoon. While it fries, crush fennel, oregano and chilli in a pestle and mortar.

Add pasta to boiling water.

When sausage is golden brown, add white wine, scraping off all bits from bottom of pan. Reduce until all dry. Add chicken stock and spices. Reduce chicken stock by half. Turn off pan, wait for pasta to reach al dente. Strain pasta, reserving a cup of pasta water.

Put sausage back on medium heat. Add water and butter and stir for a few minutes. Add in pasta and stir to coat. Add more butter if needed.

Remove from pan and place on platter and grate parmesan all over before serving.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with DoorDash.