The wildest thing about this dish is that it was made for dancing.

Nobody quite agrees on whose recipe it is, or precisely when it started being served, but there is broad agreement that its popularity came from the Italian discotheques that thrived in America in the 1980s. You can see it now: tight shirts and mirrored surfaces and little stains of red sauce down the front.

My favourite history of vodka sauce involves the actor Ugo Tognazzi, who some claim invented the dish in his 1974 food memoir L’Abbuffone. This seems ridiculous, but why not? Tognazzi was a wry, almost mocking figure on screen, a handsome man who seemed to make fun of the masculinity around him, and off screen he loved to cook. He was famous for his parties, for cooking at his own premieres, for asking friends to score his food in secret ballots. When it was finally released in English, L’Abbuffone was titled The Injester.

Alternative histories place the development of the dish as far back as the 1960s, in either Rome or Bologna. A more depressing story has it being developed by a vodka company trying to break into the Italian market. Either way, it has become a staple of the Italian–American kitchen.

My interest in vodka sauce probably started at Carbone, the upscale pasta restaurant in Greenwich Village. Pretty much every table in the place orders the rigatoni vodka. It’s silky – a result of the lusciousness of the vodka – with a little stab of heat from the chilli. When I started experimenting, I decided to bake the dish, to add a little crust to that softness.

There’s nothing too tricky here. The dish is for nightclub dancers after all. The best tip is to not be afraid to darken the tomato paste in the pan. Giving it a little colour will deepen the complexity of the whole dish, adding a richness to the slipperiness of the vodka and cream.