Mirepoix is a poncey French word for onions, carrots and celery chopped up together (odori in Italian – “the odours” or smells; sofrito once it’s cooked). It’s all the same. In Spain it would have peppers instead of celery; you can do a Chinese version without the celery but with ginger and lovely aniseed-y 5 spice; Thai with lemongrass and coriander stalks; odori with chopped parsley or basil stalks; and Indian with cumin seeds, ginger, coriander stalks and garlic.

The principle is the same though – get some flavour as a base and then go for your life with the other stuff. I think this is best sweated rather than fried but I guess it depends on the recipe. I almost never brown mirepoix but it sort of makes sense for gravy. If you brown it then sugar comes out and makes a (to my taste) bitter caramel crust on the outside, if you sweat it, it just draws out the sugar which makes it all lovely and sweet and soft. Dried herbs release their flavour this way too – the heat releases the oils they contain (drying them got rid of the water not the oil)

Battuto falls into this category too and is just chopped much smaller. My favourite battuto is garlic and sage. For a fabulous Italian starter for pretty much any dish do the Panch Phoran thing for 30 seconds with just fennel seeds and onion seeds if you have them, then add the sage and garlic battuto (30 more seconds) then add odori and sweat for 5-10 minutes