Wouldn't you have liked to be a fly on the wall when the Venetian Marco Polo first was offered a dish of pasta during his travels in China?

Remember this was a man whose mouth was up till then only used to chewing meat and other carnivorous stuff - a bit like being on the Atkins diet, come to think of it.

Do you ever wonder how he must have reacted when the delicious pasta hit his taste buds? One has to presume that he was simply rendered speechless, left uttering little moans of utter bliss, otherwise he would've never have packed it in his rucksack to take back home.

Fast forward today: The reaction is still pretty much the same. We all know the Italian pasta advert where an entire Italian family, plus neighbours, plus any passer-by, crowd round an enormous kitchen table eating platefuls of steaming freshly cooked pasta ... in silence.

And who can blame them? The process of lunching on a pasta dish calls for the quietness of appreciation. Which brings us neatly to today's recipe: Imqarrun il-Forn - a perfectly baked dish of macaroni which is scrumptious crunchy on the outside and moist inside.

This is a traditional Maltese recipe inherited from neighbouring Sicily, and which, with a few tweaks here and there we went on to adopt as our own. It might take some time to prepare but the good news is that this dish improves with keeping, so you can lunch on delicious leftovers for the rest of the week.

Ingredients:

1000g macaroni

2 medium onions

4 medium carrots

800 grams minced beef

curry powder

nutmeg

red wine

tomato paste

tomato puree

bay leaves

6 eggs

frozen small peas

grated cheese

Method:

Serves 4

Preparation time: 50 min

Cooking time: 30 min

Heat the oil and fry the onions gently until golden, add the peas, carrots and minced beef and salt and pepper. Stir well and cook for 15 minutes. Add a glass of wine and a bay leaf and then the tomato paste and puree. Grate some nutmeg. Simmer, covered for about 30 min, then uncovered for another half an hour.

Boil the macaroni in plenty of salted water until al dente. Do not over cook it otherwise it will lose shape and texture by the end. Pour a cup of cold water into the pan as soon as the pasta is cooked. Drain. Mix the meat and the tomato into the macaroni, add the eggs and season. Mix well together in a large dish. Sprinkle grated cheese on top.

Bake at 200C for 30 min.