(Pasta alla Carrettiera)
Serves 6
6 ripe tomatoes (about 675 g/1½ lb)
4 or 5 garlic cloves
Large bunch fresh basil, leaves only
A few flakes of crushed red pepper
Salt
5-6 tablespoons olive oil
675 g/1½ lb spaghetti
125 g/4 oz grated salted ricotta or pecorino cheese
Peel and chop the tomatoes, being careful to conserve their juice.
Chop very fine or—better still—pound in a mortar the garlic, basil, red pepper, and a pinch of salt. Add the oil to the mortar little by little. When you have reduced these to a fairly smooth paste (it needn’t be as creamy as a pesto), pour it into the tomatoes and mix well.
Cook the spaghetti in boiling salted water until al dente, drain, and place in a serving bowl. Sprinkle with 50 g/2 oz of the grated cheese, mix well, add the tomatoes and mix again. Serve accompanied by additional cheese.
I assume this recipe is attributed to the cart drivers because of its simplicity, the idea being that they could whip it up at the side of the cart track while their pasta was cooking over the campfire. Good as it is made in this fashion, it is even better if you make the sauce a few hours beforehand, so that the flavours have time to amalgamate.
If you add a little more oil to this sauce you have ammogghiu, presiding muse of every Sicilian cookout, to spoon over grilled meat and fish, or onto slices of grilled aubergine, or simply to spread on bruschette, slices of day-old Sicilian bread toasted on the coals.
The bulk of the tomato crop is, however, conserved for the winter, either as ’strattu, or halved, salted, and dried in the sun on woven cane mats and then preserved in olive oil (these, I believe, have recently become a fashionable antipasto in America), or boiled into sauce. Every rural household in Sicily and many an urban one as well is equipped with outsized copper cauldrons and colanders, with gargantuan ladles and slotted spoons for sauce making. This elaborate and exhausting ritual takes place each summer and produces crate after crate of beer and soda-pop bottles filled with tomato sauce to keep the family going through the winter.
Although there are various methods, each espoused with passion by its adherents, the greater part of this sauce is merely a purée of tomatoes that have been briefly boiled, drained thoroughly, and then passed through a food mill, with no seasoning other than that furnished by a sprig of fresh basil tucked into each bottle before it is filled. The sauce is either bottled and then sterilised by boiling, to be kept for future months when it will taste of summer even on the most wintry day, or it is consumed immediately. This plain tomato sauce can if necessary be replaced by commercially canned tomato purée: either one needs only a little tinkering, as in the variations below, to be ready for pasta.