The duchess’s skillet spaghetti outraged purists, but there’s no shortage of single-pot pasta dishes to try. Here are some that make the grade, and others that most certainly don’t

Sadly, we cannot return to a more innocent age before the first episode of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix cookery show, with its recipe for one-pan pasta. This was a time when typing the words “skillet spaghetti controversy” into Google produced no significant matches. Now those three words are inextricably linked.

To recap: Meghan piled uncooked spaghetti and other raw ingredients into a shallow pan, poured boiling water from a kettle over them and cooked them with a lid on. Some of the attendant controversies were: the dish was unforgivably bland; the recipe may not have been Meghan’s alone; Italians, inevitably, consider skillet spaghetti to be a heresy. Subsequently a lot of people recreated Meghan’s version and, in a backlash against the backlash, pronounced it pretty good.