I WAS LIVING IN ROME some years ago when an editor at the International Herald-Tribune in Paris rang looking for story ideas. Did I ever make pasta at home? he asked. Of course, I said. Well, then, why not write about it for the newspaper? I loved to cook, but I’d never written about it.
Gradually as we talked, I realized with a frisson of anxiety that the editor meant making pasta from scratch at home, something no one did in Rome, where there’s a pastificio making fresh pasta in every piazza as well as shops full of first-rate dried pasta from all the best commercial pasta makers throughout Italy. By then, however, vanity and ambition had won an easy victory over veracity, and I vowed that, if anyone could learn to make pasta, surely I could—and write about it to boot.
So I got out Marcella Hazan’s first book, The Classic Italian Cookbook, truly a bible for me in those days and still a source of great comfort when the going gets tough, and I read—and weighed and measured and kneaded and rolled and cut and then hung the frangible strips of pasta to dry. Not content with ordinary egg pasta, I made green-colored pasta with spinach as well. We had a very large dining room at the Palazzo Taverna with twelve chairs around the massive table. By the time the children came home from school, all the chairs were draped, backs and seats alike, with ribbons of pasta, and so was the table. Enchantment! “Is it a birthday party?” Nicholas asked.
Fortunately I had a stalwart assistant at the time, Giulia d’Amurri, who kept my fantasies focused and even showed me how to use my thumb to push out orecchiette, or little ears, of pasta—they come, like Giulia’s husband, Premio, from Puglia.
For lunch, of course, we had pasta. But how long to cook it fresca-fresca like this, so fresh you could almost eat it out of hand? Giulia knew. She brought an enormous quantity of water to a boil, dumped in a handful of salt and a huge quantity of pasta, gave it a stir with a long wooden ladle, and said: “Basta dire un Ave Maria.” It took a little longer than a Hail Mary, but not much.
That was the only time I ever made pasta from scratch by hand, and I see no reason ever to do it again. Imported Italian pasta, like Barilla, De Cecco, and Delverde, to name just a few of the many good imported brands available, is much better than most commercially available “fresh” pasta, which is simply machine-made, machine-extruded pasta that is sold before it is dried. A number of artisanally made dried pastas imported from Italy are available in specialty food shops and in some well-stocked supermarkets. Artisanal production means the pasta has been made the old-fashioned way, extruded through bronze dies and dried slowly at relatively low temperatures, which makes pasta with a slightly rougher surface (to marry better with the sauce) and more of the nutty flavor of wheat. Some of my favorite artisanal pasta brands, available in North America, include Benedetto Cavalieri from Puglia, Rustichella d’Abruzzo, Latini from the Marche, and Setaro from south of Naples.
Making pasta truly by hand is an effort that only the dedicated and gifted can really enjoy as something more than an occasional counter to rainy-day boredom. It is a wonderful product, however, and for those who would like to try, I heartily recommend Marcella Hazan’s brilliant first book, now incorporated with her second and published as Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Knopf, 1992). For the rest of us I offer a bit more than a baker’s dozen of quick, easy pasta recipes, ones that require little or no forethought and that prove, if proof be necessary, that pasta—macaroni, spaghetti, vermicelli, tagliolini, whatever—is the original fast food.
Pasta has had something of a bad rap in recent years, after all the low-carb/no-carb fervor and gabble about the Atkins diet. Many good cooks have given up pasta altogether, while others have switched to various types of whole-grain pasta or proprietary products made with a heavy infusion of ground legumes—Barilla in particular makes a product called Pasta PLUS, that my doctor friend David Eisenberg, who is a type 1 diabetic, swears by.
For many reasons I don’t agree with this course, except for people like Dr. Eisenberg who have been diagnosed with diabetes. Why? Well, first of all, because millions and millions of Italians eat pasta at least once and often twice a day all year long (annual national consumption is on the order of 60 pounds per person and if each pound of pasta makes five servings, that’s a good 300 plates of pasta per person per year). Yet diabetes and obesity are not the problems in Italy that they have become in the United States.
Furthermore, to look at pasta’s glycemic load in isolation, without considering how and when pasta is served, gives a very misleading picture. Pasta served with a tomato sauce, made with olive oil, onions, garlic, perhaps some carrot and celery and a few fresh herbs, with a sprinkling of grated cheese over the top gives a very different nutritional picture. And if the pasta portion is a mere 100 grams (about 4 ounces), as is recommended by Italian and other Mediterranean cooks, and is followed by an equally modest secondo of meat, fish, or vegetables, it once again shifts the nutritional analysis in a very positive direction.
As far as whole-wheat pasta is concerned, I don’t use it simply because, apart from any nutritional boost, it doesn’t add anything and in fact detracts from the satisfaction of the pasta experience. No cook that I have ever met in Italy, Greece, or Spain (the latter two countries also major pasta consumers) would consider using whole-wheat pasta. Italian law requires that all commercial pasta be made from hard durum wheat (in the Italian south even homemade pasta traditionally uses durum semolina) and be high in protein, B vitamins such as folate, and minerals.
For American appetites, especially when pasta is the main course offered (that’s not a bad idea, either), I count on a pound of pasta for six people. Each pound of pasta, no matter what shape it takes, needs about 5 quarts of very rapidly boiling salted water (a couple of tablespoons of sea salt for this quantity). When the water is boiling furiously, plunge the pasta in and immediately stir with a long wooden spoon. Cover the pan until the water is once again boiling furiously. Then remove the lid and let it cook very briskly, giving it a stir from time to time, until it is done to your pleasure—more or less al dente, which is a very relative term. Of course different shapes and sizes of pasta cook at different rates—only by testing, biting into a strand or a piece, will you know for sure when it is done.
Have a colander ready and a warm bowl in which to put the drained pasta (warm the bowl by adding a couple of ladles of boiling pasta water as it finishes cooking). A moment before the pasta reaches perfection, drain it into the colander and then turn it into the warm bowl (first emptying the bowl of pasta water) to be sauced.
Another method that can be useful for certain recipes is to drain the pasta two or three minutes before perfection and then turn it into the sauce on the stove. Let the pasta heat in the sauce that extra two or three minutes: the pasta will absorb the flavor of the sauce, and the whole will be more homogeneous. In either case, unless the recipe specifically states otherwise, dress the pasta as soon as it is done. Never run water over the pasta after it has been drained—that myth about rinsing starch away doesn’t hold up. Then serve the pasta immediately.
One other caution: we Americans tend to serve too much sauce for the pasta, almost as if the pasta were there only to eke out the sauce, sort of a Mediterranean-style Hamburger Helper. The reverse, in fact, is true: the sauce is there simply to garnish the pasta. In the recipes that follow, proportions have been calculated Italian style, and it would be a mistake to change them. One of the great cornerstones of the Mediterranean diet is the importance of carbohydrates (pasta, bread, grains, beans) and the role played by savory sauces in lending pleasure and excitement to these essentially rather bland parts of the meal. To reverse that would be to increase the amount of fat, and often the amount of meat, at the expense of those valuable carbohydrates. Besides, it wouldn’t taste good.
Pay attention to ingredients. The best-quality canned whole tomatoes are better than fresh tomatoes in many parts of the country and at many times of the year. Garlic should be plump and firm, each individual clove properly swollen to fill its papery husk. Herbs for the most part are better fresh than dried—and staples like parsley are always available fresh—although dried oregano, fennel seeds, and bay leaves are exceptions.