When Lotte Brundle’s parents got divorced, her dad had to update his culinary repertoire. His signature dish, though, will always have a seat at her table.

“Meat and two veg.”

This is what my dad tells me he grew up eating. He is from Cantley, a Norfolk village, which has a sugar beet factory, a train station, and not much else. It’s brilliant if you like walking through fields endlessly. Growing up, working for my grandfather, who was the farm manager on the local farm, my dad spent his childhood feeding the chickens and planting rows and rows of wheat, barley, potatoes, and sugar beet. Meals, growing up, for Dad, were simple and repetitive – basic country fare for hard-working country folk.

When he moved away from home for the first time to study at an agricultural college in Devon, he ate dinner in a communal canteen each night for four years. Later, when he finally moved to Kent for his first job, his culinary talents had not much progressed past the “meat and two veg” approach, with two notable exceptions. The first, the humble microwave meal, without which I truly believe my father would have starved to death sometime in the mid-80s. The second, his culinary calling card: tuna pasta bake. 

“It’s a very easy dish to make,” Dad says. “I learned to make it in college. It was a staple in the early days but I’ve moved on since then to more exotic dishes like risotto, steak and chips, and boiled egg on toast.”

Although he’s a dab hand in the kitchen now, these glory days of boiled egg on toast were nowhere to be seen when I was a child. Growing up, Dad never cooked for us. He worked full-time as a regional manager for an arable business. His daily trade was very much still in crops and food produce, but that did not translate to the kitchen. As my mum worked part-time, the cooking fell to her. She was also very good at it, whereas he was rubbish.

I suspect it isn’t the packet sauce and tinned fish imbuing the dish with flavour.

This pattern remained for many years until my mum moved out, when I was 15. Suddenly, my dad had two children to cook for, with cooking skills not much progressed beyond those of his 15-year-old daughter. 

“It was a learning experience,” says my dad of this time. “I’ve never liked cooking at all; never had any desire to cook, and so I never really did. But I had to learn to cook the basics quickly when life changed, and tuna pasta bake was one of the easiest things to make.” 

We ate a lot of tuna pasta bake at the start. But as time went on and we adjusted to this new way of life, Dad learnt to cook more and more. After a few years, he began dating again. He started making seafood risotto, creamy salmon pasta, and brilliant Sunday roasts.

We hardly eat tuna pasta bake anymore. Sometimes my dad cooks at home, or his girlfriend will. Occasionally I do (poorly), or we get a takeaway. But the dish still holds a special place in my heart.

We made it together yesterday, for nostalgia’s sake. Dad taught me how. Tuna from a tin. Sweetcorn, also canned. Penne pasta (he pronounces this as just ‘pen’), and the pièce de résistance: sauce from a Coleman’s packet. It was, and is always, hearty, warming, and delicious. Crunchy, cheesy, savoury, and golden. But I suspect it isn’t the packet sauce and tinned fish imbuing the dish with flavour. My dad may have learnt to cook a bit, but his culinary skills are still fairly basic. The reason that I always find his tuna pasta bake delicious is because it’s his. The fact that he really has never been able to cook, or even liked cooking, but learnt how to do it for us, his children, makes it all that more special to me. It’s not only a dish but a symbol of how far he and we, as a family, have come.