Pasta

Serve this cold or at room temperature—perfect for a picnic or barbecue.

Thick slices of pancetta are cubed and fried for the tastiest croutons ever.

Soba are buckwheat noodles and cook very quickly.

Our Australia correspondent, Pat Nourse, attended the Sydney Seafood School. The combination of flavors here is quintessentially Australian, inspired by far-flung sources and joined together in a unique way. The brininess of preserved lemons brings out the sweetness of the king crab you'll find in each twirl of pasta.

For this pasta dough, we used a mixture of cake and all-purpose flours. It's too delicate when you're making noodles, but it's great for filled, double-edged pastas like ravioli.

This is a soup that really benefits from homemade stock.

The secret to making this dish so stunningly delicious is duck fat. Puréeing the sauce emulsifies the fat, which, along with the moist duck meat, adds an irreplaceable element of richness.

What happens when you take the tomato sauce out of a lasagne? The delicacy of the noodles (egg-enriched lasagne sheets are a must here) and cheese really comes through. "My very good friend Claudio from Perugia gave me his family recipe for this dish many years ago, and I was delighted by its lightness," says Ferrigno.

Pasta made with matzo cake meal is extremely light in texture and is no fuss to prepare when it's rolled and cut by hand into thin strips. The vegetables, in shades of green, provide a range of spring color.

The addition of the sweet vermouth here punctuates the natural sweetness of the canned tomatoes, making this quick sauce taste as if it's been simmered for hours.

You'll want to break out the red-checkered tablecloth when you make this spicy, briny, and superbly balanced version of the Italian-American staple at home.

These "hats" are a classic dish in Ferrara, where you'll find them filled with a range of different things, from meat to vegetables. In this version, the toasted flavor of the butter and the herbal quality of the sage in the sauce really bring out the nuttiness of the parmesan and butternut squash in the filling.

Even if anchovies aren't part of your culinary heritage, the way the sweetness of the onions and the saltiness of the fish interact, combined with the tactile pleasure of the crunchy bread crumbs, will have you missing your nonna no matter what your nationality.

You can barely take a step in Puglia without encountering homemade orecchiette, which have an unusual hybrid flavor somewhere between dried and fresh pasta (they're made from semolina and contain no eggs). They happen to be the ideal shape to pair with chickpeas, since many orecchiette will naturally cradle a pea along with the perfect amount of sauce. Though homemade pasta is intensely gratifying (and delicious), this sauce also goes very well with fine-quality store-bought orecchiette (see cooks' note, below).

Greens are paired with salty olives and feta—to great effect. The greens cook in the pasta water, making this an efficient one-pot meal.