If you've ever had pasta with mushrooms before, I'm prepared to bet that it wasn't great. The problem with turning any vegetable into a sauce is getting the right consistency. With tomatoes you simply boil them. With artichokes you use cream and parmesan. But with a mushroom sauce we introduce another piece of the jigsaw which I learnt from my good friend Antonio Breschi the pianist and composer, whose culinary skills are on a par with his musical ones.

Autumn is the time for parasols which make the best version of this sauce, but cultivated flats (rather than button) with an addition of shitake or oysters for flavour makes a very acceptable substitute.

The first step is to chop the mushrooms very finely, or if you prefer, use a food processor to do the chopping. For 500 grammes of pasta you'll need a pound and a half of mushrooms.

Cover the bottom of a large frying pan with oil and let the oil heat. Add the chopped mushrooms and stir quickly until all the mushrooms have had a coating of oil. Turn down the heat, add a glass of wine, and put a lid on the pan. Let the mushrooms sweat for half an hour, stirring occasionally to ensure that they're not burning. If they go dry looking, add a little more wine. After half an hour they should be a uniformly slate grey, verging on the black.

Before the half-hour is up, put the water for the pasta on to boil. If you can arrange it so that the water is boiling at the end of half an hour so much the better. Put on the pasta - fusilli or twists work well with this - and remember to stir from time to time.

Back to the sauce; it's time to add the cream. Depending on how much wine you've used, and the original water content of the mushrooms, the amount of cream will be variable. Add enough cream to make the sauce liquid. This time we won't reduce the cream, instead we're going to use Antonio's trick - a bland cheese. He uses cacciotta, but we're going to use a bland white cheddar. This will not affect the taste of the sauce in any way, but it will give it a wonderful consistency which will coat the pasta to perfection. You can use a lot of cheese, 4 - 6 ounces, but don't forget to turn the heat down to minimum as cheese will burn at very low temperatures. Grate it onto the mushrooms and stir until it's melted in. If it makes the sauce too thick, just add a little more cream. Lastly it's my experience that mushrooms soak up salt. Add what you believe to be a lot of salt and taste the sauce. My bet is that it will still taste under-salted.

As usual, drain the pasta, return it to the pot and add the sauce, stirring it in well. This, too, is served with no parmesan.