Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way

121 Pages·2013·3.4 MB·English

by  Oretta Zanini De Vita

ORETTA ZANINI DE VITA
MAUREEN B. FANT
SAUCES
&
SHAPES
Pasta the Italian Way
Illustrations by LUCIANA MARINI
Photography by GENTL & HYERS/EDGE
W. W. Norton & Company
New York London
DEDICATION
To the memory of my mother-in-law,
Mamma Viola, and her ferricelli
—O.Z.D.V.
Sororibus optimis
For my sisters-in-law, Patience, Daniela, and Leda
—M.B.F.
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF
ITALIAN PASTA
SAUCES
SOUPS
PASTA
EPILOGUE: THE DAY AFTER
GLOSSARY OF PASTA SHAPES AND OTHER TERMS
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ONLINE SOURCES OF INGREDIENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
PHOTO INSERT
COPYRIGHT
OTHER WORKS
INTRODUCTION
T
HINK OF THE chewy resistance of al dente penne, pasta quills, sauced
spicily all’arrabbiata with tomatoes, garlic, and chile; the voluptuous
feel of tender, freshly made tagliatelle, flat egg noodles, with hearty
Bolognese ragù; the black mystery of spaghetti con nero di seppia, squid ink;
the complex fragrance of trofiette, little pasta twists, with potatoes, green beans,
and freshly made pesto alla genovese; or orecchiette, pasta “ears,” smothered in
peppery, nutritious greens. Think of pillowy handmade ravioli filled with
sheep’s milk ricotta, coated only with melted butter, fresh sage leaves, and
grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese. For that matter, think of parmigiano-
reggiano cheese. Think of “priest stranglers,” “husband blinders,” “strings,”
“worms,” and all the other funny names.
Are you smiling yet? Italian pasta is the ultimate feel-good food. The savage
breast calms right down when you put a bowl of tonnarelli cacio e pepe in front
of it. The ravelled sleave of care? Knit it up with homely spaghetti al tonno, tuna
fish. A broken heart is no match for a perfect carbonara. And temper tantrums
quail before pappardelle, broad noodles, with rich ragù di cinghiale, wild boar.
Pasta can stick its pinky out or put its elbows halfway across the table. Its
shapes may be familiar or wild, its sauces piquant or mild. The weak take
strength from delicate pastina in brodo, while the bold thrill to the challenge of
bucatini all’amatriciana—to keep it on the fork and off the shirt.
This book is for cooks of all levels of expertise who want to know more
about how pasta is traditionally prepared in Italian homes. It’s for all the people
who write to ask us for the definitive recipe for ragù bolognese or carbonara,
for those who believe that generations of Italian families have got it right. It’s for
the visitors to Italy who honor us by wanting to cook with Oretta and me, our
way, in our own kitchens in Rome. It’s not for people who think it doesn’t
matter what you do as long as you enjoy it. Let us give the people who gave the
world the Divine Comedy, the Sistine Chapel, and the Ferrari car some credit for
having devised, over generations, the best way to handle their favorite food.
And that it most certainly is. The Italian love of pasta is visceral. Pasta is
synonymous with family, with hearth and home, with grandmother’s kitchen and
the genuine flavors of days gone by. It’s still the centerpiece of the meal and
practically synonymous with nourishment. Even working people who want a
quick bite will often choose a ready-made pasta at a cafeteria rather than a
sandwich.
But it’s more than food. The many shapes and names contain history,
politics, religion, irony, beauty, inventiveness, and fantasy and embody all the
characteristics that make Italians, all Italians, what they are. Maltagliati, “badly
cut,” and strascinati, “dragged,” suggest that pasta is just a homely, humble
thing. Strozzapreti (page 344), “priest stranglers,” recall a time of papal
domination and resistance by sarcasm. Fusilli (page 354) take their name from
the spindle, symbol of traditional womanhood since ancient times. Lagane (page
334) have a name straight from the Latin and recall an ancient Roman precursor
of modern pasta. Cappelletti are jaunty little hats, cappellacci big old ones.
Volarelle fly, and so do farfalle. Pizzicotti, little pinches, recall the less-than-
gentlemanly way Italian boys used to demand the attention of foreign girls.
Pasta is a unifier of families. For special family occasions or religious
holidays, there are special pastas, and for every day there’s the ubiquitous
tomato sauce. It takes careful timing to get the pasta al dente and properly
sauced to the table. Everyone has to be seated and waiting for it at the same time.
Stragglers and individualists who don’t grace the family table risk eating cold
mush later, and no Italian alive would choose that.
What Is in This Book?
THIS BOOK was conceived to continue and complement Oretta’s 2009
Encyclopedia of Pasta, which I translated. That book told the story of more than
300 shapes of Italian pastas, with full “biographical” information and
description, to say nothing of their 1,300-plus variant names. It told how each
shape is, or was, made and what sauces or soups it was customarily served with,
but stopped short of giving recipes. Professional chefs told us they cooked from
the descriptions, even without instructions, but home cooks asked for a proper
cookbook.
Thus we began to think about a book that would explain how to make the
handmade shapes—not so much tagliatelle, already well served by many books
in English, but strozzapreti, strascinati, fusilli, farfalle, and other shapes that
could be fashioned by hand in modern kitchens and that would make a change
from spaghetti, linguine, and rigatoni. We omitted such bizarre and difficult
forms as the Sardinian filindeu, a pasta gauze, or the pi.fasacc of Lombardia,
which look like tiny swaddled infants, and others best learned from one’s great-
grandmother.
Our selection of pastas needed sauces and soups to match, but many of the
very traditional ones are impractical for the modern kitchen, especially outside
their area of origin. They depend on a local fresh cheese or an herb that grows
wild on a certain hillside. Thus instead of sticking closely to the pairings of
shape and sauce in Encyclopedia of Pasta, we decided to give recipes for about a
hundred traditional sauces and soups still being made in home kitchens
throughout Italy and to suggest matches with both homemade and store-bought
pasta shapes. This approach, we felt, would both respect tradition and make life
easier for modern home cooks, especially those cooking outside Italy.
Soon we had twice as many sauces and soups as shapes. We added a sort of
user’s manual for pasta—all the large and small concepts, precepts, habits, rules,
laws, and misconceptions that surround the preparation and consumption of the
greatest of Italy’s many great gifts to humankind. The result is this book.
Here is what you will find:
•Advice for: cooking, serving, and eating pasta; stocking a pantry and choosing
ingredients; and generally approaching pasta as much like an Italian as anyone
outside Italy can.
•Recipes for sauces and suggestions for what shapes go best with them. These
are grouped as “last-minute” sauces (made with the staples you ran out and
bought after reading chapter one), fresh vegetable sauces, fish and seafood
sauces, and meat sauces.
•Recipes for traditional soups that contain pasta, again with suggested shapes.
•Recipes for making pasta from scratch. This section begins with the two basic
doughs and la sfoglia, the pasta sheet from which so many shapes derive. Then
come techniques for shaping a number of traditional formats, including some
suitable for beginners and others that are trickier. Where the pastas are
inseparable from their sauces (for example, the lasagne), the complete recipe is
given, while most are meant to be paired with the sauces or soups in their
respective sections.
•A bibliography, a glossary of pasta shapes mentioned in the book, and advice
for online shopping for ingredients.
Why Us?
ONE OF the ways that this book differs from other pasta books, in English or in
Italian, is that the recipes are, at their heart, written by Italians for Italians, but
have been adapted, with restraint, for North American kitchens and expectations.
Anyone who has ever consulted an Italian cookbook understands that no speaker
of English would have the patience to cook from a book of truly Italian recipes,
with their refusal to take positions (Q: How long? A: How should I know? It’s
your stove! Q: How much salt? A: Taste the capers!), to say nothing of their
assumption that you already know how to cook the dish and just need to be
reminded—preferably in the future perfect tense (“which you will have . . .”).
And yet there is an elegance to the formal, elliptical Italian recipe style, which
Oretta represents. There is something seductive about cooking without a safety
net of numbers, and there is considerable logic to the refusal to give
temperatures and timing for somebody else’s equipment or for quantities of salt
without first tasting the salty ingredients. Are we all cooking in identical
laboratories? Certainly not.
The first time I wrote Italian recipes for an American publisher, I was
shocked to realize how far over to the Italian side I’d slid in my thirty years in
Italy. I didn’t own an instant-read thermometer and hadn’t touched my
measuring spoons in decades. I knew when my garlic was golden by looking at it
—no idea how long it took to get there. And yet, when you get right down to it, I
still have my U.S. passport, and I still want a recipe to tell me what to do.
Two more different experiences of Italian food than Oretta’s and mine would
be hard to imagine.
Oretta became an expert pasta maker as a child in convent school in
Bologna, and went on to become a distinguished Italian food historian, food
writer, teacher, and, not least, pasta authority. Her mentor was the famous Sister
Attilia, whom the Communist mayor of Bologna used to borrow for his
ceremonial dinners. I’m not even Italian, except by marriage. I started coming to
Rome as an archaeology student, but eventually became a fair Roman home
cook and discovered a knack for explaining the local food culture to other
foreigners. I began translating some of Oretta’s work, and, twenty-some years
and a few hundred thousand words later, here we are, filtering her scholarship
and expertise through my experience of the two worlds.
Sources of the Recipes
NEARLY ALL the recipes are drawn from Oretta’s collection of traditional
home recipes, compiled over decades of research and travel throughout the
Italian peninsula and islands since the 1950s. We have adapted them to include
the missing steps that Italian cooks think any idiot knows but that American
cooks like to have spelled out as long as they’ve gone to the trouble of
consulting a recipe.