MAKES 4 SERVINGS
1 recipe Basic Egg Noodles (page 23) rolled to the 3 setting of your pasta machine (between 
- and ⅛-inch thick)
2 pounds boneless chicken thighs and/or breasts, cut in strips
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
6 cups water
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped carrot
1 cup chopped potato
1 cup green peas (frozen are okay)
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
How did Amish-Style Chicken Pot Pie get from the dish presented here to that frozen-in-a-foil-pan thing we’ve all come to know and (sometimes) love? The supermarket item is so ubiquitous, it may have hijacked the name, but this is the authentic Amish classic.
1. Cut the dough into 1 x 3-inch strips, place them on parchment or other nonstick paper, and let them dry a bit while you cook the chicken stew.
2. Put the chicken, salt, pepper, and water in a pot over high heat and bring to a boil. When the water boils, reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, covered, until the chicken is cooked, about 20 minutes.
3. Bring the chicken back to a boil over high heat and add the celery, onion, carrot, and potato. Let boil, uncovered, for 1 minute. Then reduce the heat back down to medium-low and simmer uncovered until the potatoes are tender and the liquid has evaporated by at least a third, about 30 minutes.
4. Mix in the green peas, parsley, and noodles, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the peas are tender and the noodles are done, about 5 minutes.
Serve hot.
MAKES 2 SERVINGS
4 cups chicken broth
2 cups water
2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 cup chopped Spam
1 cup sliced carrot
½ cup green peas (frozen are okay)
¼ cup chopped scallions
8 ounces fresh ramen or lo mein noodles (find these at Asian grocery stores), cooked, rinsed, and drained
If you’re not a Pacific Islander, you might not share the region’s respect for Spam, the canned pork product that’s stable enough to last though a typhoon and adds a bit of unctuous porkyness to anything you cook it with.
1. Put the chicken broth in a large pot along with the water, the ginger, and the soy sauce and bring to a boil over high heat.
2. When the broth is boiling add the Spam and carrot, reduce the heat to medium-low, and simmer covered, stirring occasionally, until the carrot becomes tender, about 15 minutes.
3. Mix in the green peas and scallions, give the mixture a few stirs, remove from the heat, and set aside.
4. To assemble, put a portion of the noodles at the bottom of a large soup bowl and ladle half the broth/Spam mixture over it. Use the rest for a second serving. Separate the noodles with a fork to help coat them with broth.
Serve right away.
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
½ cup unsalted butter + butter for the baking dish
1 teaspoon dried oregano
½ teaspoon dried chile flakes
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
½ cup all-purpose flour
3 cups whole milk
8 ounces cheddar cheese, cut in small pieces (about 2 cups)
4 ounces mozzarella cheese, cut in small pieces (about 1 cup)
¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 pound macaroni, cooked for half the recommended time and drained*
¼ cup unseasoned dry breadcrumbs
Baked? Yes, not packaged and then cooked in a saucepan, but baked. Macaroni and cheese began as a casserole. Even though most of us know the boxed variety as an American cousin of instant ramen (page 98), macaroni and cheese wasn’t always instant. Indeed, back in the day, when macaroni itself had not yet been bent into elbows and cheddar cheese wasn’t bright orange, this was a real home-cooked dish.
1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and have a wire whisk ready.
2. Melt the butter in a large pot over medium heat and mix in the oregano, chile flakes, salt, and pepper. Stir until all are coated with the melted butter, about 1 minute.
3. With continuous whisking, slowly add the flour. It will quickly turn into a paste. Keep cooking the paste, stirring frequently, until it begins to turn tan, about 5 minutes.
4. Whisk in the milk, 1 tablespoon at a time. It must be added slowly enough to be absorbed by the flour. Wait until the flour expands and absorbs the liquid milk in the pot before adding more. Expect this step to take about 15 minutes.
5. Mix in the cheddar, mozzarella, and Parmesan, remove the pot from the heat, and mix in the cooked macaroni. Set aside.
6. Butter a 9 x 13-inch baking dish and add the macaroni and cheese mixture. Cover with an even layer of breadcrumbs and bake until the breadcrumbs are deeply browned and the cheese is bubbling, about 60 minutes.
Let rest for 15 minutes and serve warm.
I AM VERY SUSPICIOUS OF PEOPLE who live in the modern world, have modest incomes, yet claim never to eat any convenience foods, ever. I’ll try not to stare and ask something like, No coffee to go? No instant noodles? No fast food? The rest of us need to share notes, though. Haven’t we all come face to face with prepackaged macaroni and cheese, America’s most iconic poverty food? Surely you’ve downed it at one time or another, on a camping trip or in a dorm room. Instant mac and cheese is a great American unifier. Here are some improvements.
1. The luxury move. Add truffle oil—the cheaper the better—to a batch of instant mac. Mix in 2 tablespoons of truffle oil at the same time you’re adding the cheese powder. Truffle oil has a way of giving a woodsy, foresty aroma to whatever you put it on; either that or it makes the dish taste like old sneakers. Sometimes it’s both; the scent of the forest and the essence of gym shoe combine in a good way.
2. Far more sensible are carrots and peas. Measure out a cup from those bags of bulk frozen. You keep them around for moments like this, don’t you? Add them along with the cheese powder while you’re cooking.
3. How about the most fashionable poverty food of them all, bacon? Never add raw; instead, mix in 1 cup of chopped, cooked bacon as the last step before serving. While I don’t endorse it myself, precooked chopped bacon would work nicely, although frying some real bacon in a skillet gives a much better result.
4. A small can of tuna will add a nice touch and a bit of badly needed protein. Canned salmon works here too. In either case, just drain the can and add the contents to the macaroni and cheese mixture when it’s just about finished cooking. Will this work with other kinds of canned meat and fish? A definite no for sardines or oysters, and a double no if they’re smoked. Spam chopped into little pieces and browned in a skillet can work, although you’d be left with the same problem you have with bacon: two dirty pots to make a cheap, instant meal.
5. Other vegetables can be good too. Once again, though, you have to be certain you’re not doing more work than you would to make a far more complicated and satisfying dish. A cup of frozen chopped spinach added at the same time as the cheese powder can be great. Sliced fresh mushrooms (you can buy them prepped this way in the supermarket) added at that same moment will also do the trick.
Can you mix things up? Sure; carrots, peas, and bacon work well together, as do bacon and mushrooms. Be forewarned: truffle oil doesn’t really go with any of the other add-ins. And canned tuna is pretty limited too. Okay, maybe canned tuna and peas. Maybe.
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
1 cup mayonnaise
¼ cup spicy brown mustard
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
¼ cup white sugar
½ cup chopped red onion
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped red bell pepper
½ cup grated carrot
1 pound elbow macaroni, cooked for 2 minutes less than called for, rinsed, and drained
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground white pepper
OPTIONAL ADDITIONS
½ cup chopped dill or sweet pickle (one or the other, not both!)
1 cup chopped cooked bacon and/or ham
Some of us know this dish only as a side in delis, airline lunches, or mass-feeding emporiums. If that’s the case for you, I’m sorry to hear it. It’s much better than you might think.
1. Combine the mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar, and sugar in a small bowl and mix well. Make sure the sugar hasn’t lumped; it should be properly dissolved. Set aside.
2. Combine the onion, celery, pepper, carrot, cooked macaroni, and any optional additions you’ve chosen in a large bowl and toss a few times.
3. Mix in the mayonnaise and mustard mixture and season with the salt and pepper. The macaroni and vegetables must be evenly coated; this takes a bit of work. Let the mixture sit in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour before serving.
Serve chilled and store in the refrigerator.
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
¼ cup butter
¼ cup olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground white pepper
5 cloves garlic, crushed but not chopped
2 tablespoons finely chopped Italian parsley
1 pound spaghetti, cooked and drained
Spaghetti Bordelaise is a New Orleans classic. It has nothing to do with Bordeaux at all and somehow references Italian with its use of spaghetti and olive oil. In the end, though, it becomes its own unique self.
1. Melt the butter in a large skillet over low heat. Mix in the olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic. Cook, stirring frequently, until the garlic has become tender, about 15 minutes. Discard the garlic pieces.†
2. Remove the oil mixture from the heat and mix in the parsley.
Toss with the cooked spaghetti and serve right away.
MAKES 8 SERVINGS
¼ cup olive oil
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 large chicken, cut in pieces (about 2–3 pounds)
2 cups chopped onion
1 cup chopped carrot
1 cup chopped potato
1 cup chopped celery
4 quarts water
3 bay leaves
1 cup green peas (frozen are okay)
8 ounces egg noodles, dry
Tyler Cowen, the noted Washington, DC, area food blogger, has written that “all food is ethnic food,” and every time I see that quote I nod enthusiastically in agreement. That is, until it comes to chicken noodle soup. Sure, people have been putting chicken and noodles together in soup for a very long time; it’s just that the soup as we Americans know it today was invented by canning companies less than a hundred years ago. Not as a new food, but as a sort of averaging of the various ethnic varieties out there.
The result is predictable. Chicken noodle soup took hold in our national psyche, became a favorite, and with no traditional or official version, went off in way too many directions. I have seen chicken noodle soups that seem more suited to horror anthologies than cookbooks. If you’ve wound up opening a can once too often in search of the old-fashioned stuff, your remedy is right here: chicken noodle soup made from scratch.
1. Put the olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano, and thyme in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat and cook and stir until the spices are coated with the oil, about 1 minute.
2. Add the chicken parts and cook, stirring occasionally, until they’re browned on both sides, about 15 minutes. Remove and set aside.
3. Without cleaning or even wiping out the Dutch oven, reduce the heat to medium-low and mix in the onion. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onion has turned translucent, about 15 minutes.
4. Mix in the carrot, potato, and celery and cook, stirring occasionally, until they start to become tender, about 15 minutes.
5. Raise the heat to high, add the water and bay leaves, and bring to a boil. Let boil for 1 minute. Reduce the heat to medium-low and return the browned chicken to the pot. Simmer covered, stirring occasionally, until the meat is very tender and falling off the bone, about 60 minutes. Once again, remove the chicken from the pot and set aside.
6. Pick the meat off the chicken bones and return meat to the pot, discarding the bones. Then mix in the peas and noodles and cook, stirring occasionally, until the noodles are tender, about 5 minutes.
Serve hot and right away.
Note: If you’re making this—or any—noodle soup ahead of time, don’t add the noodles themselves until you’re about ready to serve it. Otherwise, they’ll keep on absorbing liquid and you’ll wind up with a soggy noodle stew.
*Most people will use elbow macaroni, but the traditional tube shape is an interesting variation. You can really surprise people by using pasta not normally associated with this dish, like shells or spirals.
†Better yet, spread the softened garlic on toast for an incredible treat.
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons crushed and finely chopped fresh garlic
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
½ cup red bell pepper strips
1 cup chopped broccoli
1 cup chopped yellow zucchini
1 cup snow peas
1 cup chopped fresh tomato
½ cup peas (frozen is fine)
½ cup heavy or whipping cream
¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese
¼ cup fresh basil leaves
1 pound pasta, cooked and drained*
Imagine you’re back in the 1970s and fancy restaurants in places like Manhattan and Beverly Hills suddenly have to serve their very fussy and not very gastronomically informed clientele something with loads of vegetables. Somehow, they created a classic—gave it a snazzy Italian name—and it trickled down from those star-studded places to local Italian restaurants to diners. And since this was decades before the local-foods movement, sharp-eyed readers will notice that the dish has nothing at all to do with primavera—Italian for spring.
1. Put the butter, garlic, salt, and pepper in a skillet over medium heat and cook and stir until the butter melts and the garlic starts to turn translucent, about 10 minutes.
2. Mix in the pepper strips, broccoli, zucchini, snow peas, and tomato, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables become tender, about 15 minutes.
3. Add the peas and cream and stir until the vegetables are well-coated, about 1 minute.
4. Mix in the Parmesan and basil and stir until the leaves are well coated and the cheese is evenly distributed, about 1 minute. Remove from heat.
5. Toss with the cooked pasta and serve right away.
WE AMERICANS ARE DEEPLY IN LOVE with the notion of a romantic immigrant experience. This is the picture that comes to mind: those 19th-century Italians hopped off the boat, were thrilled by the cheap meat, and cooked up big pots of spaghetti and meatballs to celebrate. It’s a scene that’s been depicted in a thousand movies. It sure wasn’t reality, though.
Instead, when those immigrants set foot on American soil, they began to work almost immediately. In the cities, sweatshop conditions made the notion of a lunch break impossible. Factory bosses would wash the work tables with gasoline in order to make sure that nobody ate on the job. In the mines and mills of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, lunch was whatever could be carried in a tin box during a twelve-hour shift.
No wonder they wanted huge meals at home!
Domenica Marchetti, an author whose work often takes her right up to the fine line between Italian and Italian American cuisine, told me that she saw Italian American cooking as “a cuisine of memory.” In other words, dishes prepared not as they’d been taught, but rather, as people who weren’t likely cooks themselves remembered them.
How could this be?
Imagine being sent alone by boat to America, arriving eventually in rural West Virginia. Your trip began in an equally rural Italian hill town where you were too poor to go to school and unable to find work. Were you ten? Twelve? Certainly no older! Could you read? Did the small-town dialect of Italian you spoke even exist in written form?
Things weren’t any better for the girls who were sent over—almost always alone—to marry those boys. In a typical scenario, the guys would be working from dawn until dusk in the mines or factories while their wives struggled to cook, clean, and parent. The girls may have known how to make their hometown favorites, but could they describe the key ingredients to shopkeepers? Or read the labels on packages? It wasn’t that easy.
As time wore on, these families created a cuisine. Some ingredients like salt fish and capers were shelf-stable enough to buy as imports. And there were vegetables like peppers and eggplants that thrived in American soil. Pork didn’t exactly taste the same as it did back in Italy, but it was cheap in America. Residents of the tenements of New York or Boston could get away for a day to dig clams. Soon, more items became available. Olive oil, for one. Maybe not the pure stuff we buy today, but a blend with a distinct flavor. Then espresso coffee, sea salt, and dried pasta. Immigrants created a cuisine using Italian ingredients, but not exactly Italian. Maybe their memories weren’t that clear, and cooking techniques didn’t easily transfer from Italian to American climes, but oh, did they cook!
Whatever could be incorporated into meals was. Shannon Tinnell, a food and folkways writer from West Virginia, tells of Appalachian favorites like poke and ramps making their way into traditional Italian soups and sauces. Immigrants converted La Vigilia, the simple meal of fish on Christmas Eve, into the Feast of the Seven Fishes, almost a holiday in its own right.
By the mid-20th century, children of Italian ancestry on both sides of the Atlantic were receiving better educations than a century before and were able to correspond with each other in standardized Italian. (Just before World War I, there were more than 40 Italian-language newspapers in West Virginia alone.) What both cultures shared was a near-worship of Grandma’s cooking and the painful memory that preindustrial Italy had not been able to feed itself sufficiently.
Cooking in Italy is perhaps more a cuisine of dreams than of memories. It’s what the great-grandparents of fourth-generation Italian Americans ate on the rare occasions when there was enough food to prepare whole meals. A fistful of pasta with a couple of stalks of broccoli might have been a typical meal for the Italian country folk who sent their sons and daughters to America, but after Italy had its own industrial revolution and everybody could afford to eat, they did things a bit differently.
For Italians who had suffered through deprivation, every meal became a wedding banquet. A weeknight dinner at home might have four or five courses. Sunday lunches would go on for hours, and no meal was so informal that it could be served on paper plates. In Italy, eating was a ritual and a religion rolled into one. When Italy joined the Common Market and its own industries began to boom, everybody started consuming veal, artichokes, even truffles.
In the modern era—a time when Italian farmers and factory workers visit Florida’s Disney World and American descendants of immigrant coal miners vacation in Tuscan hill towns—all of us have dreams and memories when it comes to food. Immigrant cuisines all seem to tell a familiar story—about hardworking people pulling themselves out of poverty and fixing themselves something good to eat.
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
1 pound dry pasta (big shapes like rigatoni and ziti work best)
2 tablespoons salt
1 pound broccoli florets
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
There might not have been much else, but there was usually dry pasta, a bit of vegetable, some oil, and a few scrapings of cheese. For decades, Italian immigrants in coal country would call this a meal. Indeed, a shake of dried chile flakes would have been seen as a luxury.
1. Add the dry pasta and salt to 6 quarts of boiling water. Reduce the heat to medium-low and let the pasta simmer until it’s barely soft and about one-third cooked, about 3 minutes.
2. Mix in the broccoli and continue to cook until both the pasta and broccoli are tender, about 6 minutes. Drain and put in a large bowl.
3. Toss the pasta and broccoli with the oil, pepper, and Parmesan cheese and make sure that all are well-distributed in the bowl.
Serve with a shake of dried chile flakes on the side.
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon dried oregano
2 teaspoons dried thyme
¼ teaspoon dried rosemary
1 teaspoon dried chile flakes
1 tablespoon salt
2 teaspoons freshly ground pepper
3 cups chopped onion
3 tablespoons crushed and chopped fresh garlic
1 pound ground pork†
2 cups red, yellow, and/orgreen bell pepper strips†
6 cups canned crushed tomato
2 cups ricotta cheese
1 pound ziti pasta, cooked for half the recommended time and drained
2 cups shredded mozzarella
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese
½ cup grated pecorino Romano cheese
Oil or oil spray for the baking dish
What would an informal dinner party be without a tray of baked ziti? Red sauce, gooey cheese, and of course those big pieces of pasta, the ziti. You better get started though; whipping up a batch of baked ziti means that hungry people must already be waiting for you.
1. Put the oil in a large skillet over high heat and mix in the oregano, thyme, rosemary, chile flakes, salt, and pepper. Cook and stir until the spices are coated with oil, about 2 minutes.
2. Reduce the heat to medium and mix in the onion and garlic. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onion is translucent, about 15 minutes.
3. Mix in the ground pork and cook, continuing to stir frequently, until the meat is browned, about 30 minutes. Use a wooden spoon to break the pieces of pork into the smallest possible size.
4. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
5. Mix the bell pepper strips and tomato into the meat mixture and cook, stirring occasionally, until the pepper strips are tender, about 10 minutes.
6. Mix in the ricotta and stir frequently until the cheese is combined with the sauce, about 5 minutes. You may have to use a wooden spoon to break it up a bit. Remove from the heat.
7. Oil a 9 x 13-inch baking dish and spread a thin layer of the tomato sauce on the bottom of it, cover with a layer of ziti, and cover that with a layer of mozzarella, Parmesan, and pecorino.
8. Repeat step 7 until you have filled the pan. Usually, this is three layers.
9. Sprinkle any remaining mozzarella, Parmesan, and pecorino on top of the ziti and sauce mixture.
10. Bake until the cheeses melt and fully combine, about 60 minutes.
Remove from the oven and let stand for at least 15 minutes before serving.
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
½ teaspoon dried chile flakes
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 pound ground beef
3 cups canned crushed tomato
1½ pounds spaghetti or other pasta, cooked and drained
It’s the sauce you got at school lunch and it’s the sauce your friend’s mom made. Its roots are Italian, the meat is beef, and the spirit? Give it a taste and see for yourself. And it doesn’t have to be spaghetti; feel free to substitute any pasta shape you might have around the house.
1. Put the olive oil, oregano, thyme, salt, pepper, chile, and cinnamon in a large skillet over medium heat. Cook and stir until all the spices are coated with oil and there are no clumps, about 1 minute.
2. Add the beef and cook, stirring frequently, until the meat is browned, about 15 minutes. Use the back of a wooden spoon to make sure it breaks down into small pieces. Big lumps might not brown or cook properly.
3. Mix the crushed tomato into the beef and spice mixture, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook, stirring occasionally, until about a quarter of the liquid has evaporated and the raw tomato taste is gone, about 20 minutes. If at any point the sauce bubbles and splatters, reduce the heat to low.
Serve hot over the cooked pasta and top with grated Parmesan cheese.
I have seen whole cookbooks and restaurants devoted to meatballs. Indeed, they’re a universal dish genre in themselves. Yes, I agree that meatballs are crucial to the Italian American cooking experience, and no, I don’t feel the need to put a full recipe for them in this book. Instead, if you want meatballs with any of these dishes—or even by themselves—just buy mild Italian sausage meat, form it into balls, add it to your basic (page 101) or not exactly basic (page 61) tomato sauce, and simmer, stirring occasionally, over medium-low heat until they’re cooked through, about 30 minutes; rare meatballs are never a hit. If the flavor of sausage meat is too strong for you by itself, mix it half and half with ground beef.
You want a separate serving of meatballs? Instead of simmering them in sauce, put them on a baking sheet and brush or spray them with olive oil. Then bake them at 400 degrees until they’re nicely browned, about 30 minutes.
That’s it.
MAKES 2 SERVINGS
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 anchovy fillets
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 tablespoons crushed and chopped fresh garlic
1 cup canned crushed tomato
1 can tuna (about 5 ounces) packed in water, drained
½ pound pappardelle pasta, cooked and drained
Today, the broad, flat noodles known as pappardelle are a luxury ingredient often found in fancy packaging. Long ago, though, they were made at home with flour from a big sack, and eggs laid by your own chickens. Add some canned tomato and cheap fish—canned tuna and anchovies—and you have the meal of choice for poor Italian American coal miners of a century ago.
1. Put the oil, anchovies, and oregano in a large skillet over medium heat and cook and stir until the anchovies have dissolved, about 3 minutes.
2. Add the garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until the garlic browns at the edges, about 5 minutes.
3. Mix in the tomato and tuna, reduce the heat to medium-low, and use the back of a wooden spoon to break the tuna up into small pieces. Then simmer until the raw tomato taste is gone and the volume has reduced by a quarter, about 15 minutes.
4. Add the cooked pasta, toss until it’s evenly coated with sauce, and remove from the heat.
Serve right away.
Note: The sauce can be made in advance or prepared while the pasta water is coming to a boil.
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
¼ cup olive oil
10 anchovy fillets
½ teaspoon dried chile flakes
4 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped
2 tablespoons capers, rinsed and drained
1 cup unflavored dry breadcrumbs
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 pound spaghetti, perciatelli or other long, thick pasta, cooked and drained
With or without capers, this is a classic frugal, southern Italian dish. A few anchovies and a pinch of dried chile flakes bring enough flavor to season an entire pound of dry pasta and breadcrumbs too. It’s a bit of magic.
1. Put the oil and anchovies in a large skillet or sauté pan over medium-low heat. Cook and stir until the anchovies have broken up and dissolved, about 3 minutes.
2. Mix in the chile flakes and garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until the garlic has turned translucent, about 8 minutes.
3. Mix in the capers, breadcrumbs, salt, and black pepper and cook and stir until all the breadcrumbs are coated with the oil mixture and begin to toast, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat.
4. Add the cooked pasta to the pan and toss until all pasta is evenly coated.
Serve right away.
MAKES 6 CUPS
¼ cup olive oil
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon dried thyme
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped carrot
3 tablespoons crushed and chopped garlic
6 cups canned crushed tomato
2 tablespoons grated pecorino Romano cheese
Basic tomato sauce (page 101) may be authentically Italian, but this American version takes things a step further. It’s the jazzed-up vegetarian tomato sauce that finds its way onto pasta all over the Italian food universe. Some Americans would call this marinara sauce, though more than a few Italian-food fanatics would dispute the name. I’ll step away from that debate and do some cooking and eating.
1. Put the oil, oregano, thyme, bay leaves, salt, and pepper in a large pot over medium heat and cook, stirring, until the spices are coated with the oil, about 1 minute.
2. Mix in the onion, carrot, and garlic, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is translucent and the carrot is very tender, about 30 minutes. Make sure you stir often enough to prevent the garlic from burning.
3. Mix in the tomato and grated cheese and continue to cook with occasional stirring until the raw taste is gone from the tomato and the flavors have combined, about 20 minutes.
Serve by spooning over any good cooked dried pasta. Don’t overdo it—a few tablespoons of sauce per person is enough, trust me!
Note: This sauce freezes well and makes a great afternoon cook-ahead project.
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
3 tablespoons butter
8 cups sliced onion (Wait till you see how little is left in the end)
1 cup shredded carrot
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 pound spaghetti, cooked and drained‡
Smothered and caramelized onion sauces are popular in Italy, but almost never show up in the United States. The recipe here began its life as an authentic Italian dish, and after many experiments, became this: basic, slow-cooked caramelized onions in all their deliciousness. It will also teach you what happens to onions when they cook for a long time—they shrink. You start with an awful lot, and in the end there’s not much at all.
1. Put the butter in a large skillet over medium heat and cook, stirring, until it melts, about 2 minutes.
2. Reduce the heat to low, then add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion becomes limp, about 90 minutes. Remember, time is your friend here! Any attempt to speed things up will leave you with a sauce that’s burnt and bitter.
3. Mix in the carrot, salt, and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions have turned a deep golden brown, about 2 more hours. If a pool of liquid forms at the bottom of the pan, increase the heat slightly to medium-low until it evaporates—then return it to low.
4. Toss with the cooked pasta.
Serve right away with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.
*Spaghetti or linguine aretraditional, but larger shapes work fine too. For an ultra-fancy touch, use fresh egg noodles; for the health-conscious crowd, use whole wheat pasta.
†Ground pork and bell pepper strips, my secret weapons! A tip: You can find precut bell pepper strips in the freezer section of the supermarket.
‡This sauce works well with larger pasta shapes like rigatoni or candele too.
MAKES 2 SERVINGS
8 ounces boneless chicken thighs, cut into strips
1 teaspoon sugar + 2 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
1 tablespoon Chinese cooking wine
¼ cup soy sauce + 1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon cornstarch
½ cup chicken broth
1 tablespoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1 tablespoon crushed and chopped garlic
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
1 cup sliced fresh shiitake mushroom caps
½ cup shredded carrot
8 ounces dried lo mein noodles, or 12 ounces fresh, cooked and drained
¼ cup chopped scallion greens
1 teaspoon ground white pepper
How much chicken lo mein have you consumed in your life? For me, the question would be easier to answer if I replied in tons rather than portions. Fifteen or twenty in airport terminals, a couple more at small-town Chinese American restaurants that were walking distance from roadside motels. Then there’s all the chicken lo mein I had during lunch breaks back in the days I was employed in Manhattan. It could well be that this is America’s most widely consumed noodle dish.
And why make it at home? Um … because it will almost certainly taste better than at the airport.
1. Combine the chicken, teaspoon of sugar, vinegar, wine, ¼ cup soy sauce, and cornstarch in a bowl. Mix well and let marinate in your refrigerator for at least 1 hour.
2. In a separate container, combine the 2 teaspoons of sugar, tablespoon of soy sauce, chicken broth, and sesame oil and mix well. Set aside.
3. Drain the chicken, discard the marinating liquid, and put a wok or very large skillet on high heat. Stir-fry the chicken until it’s barely cooked through, about 2 minutes. Remove it from the pan and set aside.
4. With the wok (and the oil in it) still over high heat, stir-fry the garlic and ginger until the pieces start browning at the edges, about 2 minutes.
5. Mix in the mushrooms and carrot and stir-fry until the mushrooms are cooked through, about 3 minutes.
6. Mix in the cooked chicken, cooked noodles, and broth and soy sauce mixture. Toss until all the ingredients have combined, about 3 minutes.
7. Add the scallions and pepper and stir-fry until the scallions are tender, about 1 minute.
Serve right away.
AS A COOKING TECHNIQUE, stir-frying is so common today, you might think it needs no more discussion. Like boiling, everybody knows what it is and has a sense of how it’s done. This hasn’t always been the case. Before World War II, there were no English-language terms for Asian cooking techniques at all. There were certainly Chinese cooks in America with a desire to write down their techniques and traditions in English, but not really much of an audience. American home cooks made what their moms taught them, and restaurant kitchens executed their chefs’ instructions.
By the 1950s, though, things began to change. Soldiers returning from war told tales of foods that were as bizarre as they were delicious. Pizza, sushi, and who knows how many versions of fried noodles were suddenly a topic of conversation.
This was the audience that Dr. Buwei Yang Chao faced when she sat down to write How to Cook and Eat in Chinese. Stuck in Boston with a husband at Harvard and a world war cutting her off from her home in Taiwan, she was unable to practice medicine and looking for something to do. The result was her book; published in 1945, it was the first to accurately describe Chinese cooking techniques in English.
Before that time, the term stir-fry didn’t exist, and the only people who knew what braise and sauté meant were graduates of French cooking schools or their staffs. Chao explains that “stir-frying is the most characteristic method of cooking in Chinese. This is when you really have to cook in Chinese, since the Chinese term ch’ao with its aspiration, lo-rising tone and all cannot be translated into English. Roughly speaking, ch’ao may be defined as a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying of cut-up material with wet seasoning. We shall call it ‘stir-fry.’”
The first time I cracked open a copy of this book—in a study room at the New York Public Library—and read this passage, I felt chills running up my spine. This was the beginning of Asian home cooking in America. It would eventually lead to thirty-minute infomercials for hand-hammered woks, Asian sections in local supermarkets, and a whole subcategory of cooking literature devoted to this part of the world. No longer would American home cooks be limited to the food of Europeans. With this now-ubiquitous term, stir-fry, Chinese food—already the most cooked cuisine in American restaurants—could be made at home.
Chao’s definition of stir-frying remains the best I’ve seen. Indeed, her reminder that “noodles should not be wound around your chopsticks like spaghetti on a fork” tells us about another long-forgotten American eating habit.
Let’s take a look at the two main issues I’ve found with stir-frying at home: You need heat and lots of it. Experts try for a temperature of over 700 degrees, which can rarely be reached on home stoves. Five hundred degrees will do the job most of the time, though, and if you wait an extra minute before you start adding solid ingredients, most modern ranges will get you there.
The proper pan for stir-frying is the second point. Of course, purists will call for a wok. Fanatics will quarrel about the type of metal and the texture of the surface of the wok. For our purposes, though, the most important thing is having a pan big enough to hold all the ingredients without overloading. You should be able to keep the food inside in constant motion without spills or splashing. Woks are great for this. A skillet is fine, too, though, as long as you have one that’s large enough.
Have I spilled all the secrets? I don’t know … what I’m sure of is that you’ll get real stir-fry if you start with a hot pan and keep the food moving. If there isn’t actual stirring and frying, it’s not really a stir-fry.
