Pasta

Both lentils and pasta absorb liquid from the soup base, so add water from the beginning and more during cooking to get the consistency you like.

Though it cooks for only 15 minutes, this tomato sauce gets loads of flavor from both the tonno and the olio of your marinated tuna. But you don’t want just to boil the tuna and tomatoes together: it is essential to add the fish, the oil, and all the other ingredients to the big skillet at the right time. The technique of skillet sauces, and how to finish pasta and sauce together, is explained in depth on pages 89 to 93. For this chunky sauce, I recommend a short dried pasta with lots of nooks and crannies, like cavatelli or campanelle or conchiglie. These will catch some tuna for you with each bite, so you don’t end up with all the tuna swimming in the bottom of your bowl.

A great way to enjoy baccalà mantecato, before you eat it all as a spread or dip, is as a dressing for cooked pasta; 1 cup is enough to make a flavorful sauce for a pound of spaghetti, other long dry pasta, or fresh maltagliati pasta, which my father always liked. It is also good to dress potato gnocchi. Transforming the baccalà mantecato into a pasta sauce is best done in a big skillet—14 inches in diameter—into which you can drop all the pasta, straight from the cooking pot, and dress it—see the first part of chapter 3 for the basics of skillet sauces and how pasta and sauce are finished together.

Antichi Sapori, a family-run restaurant in Montegrosso, a few kilometers south of Andria, is where I had some of the best local products and traditional dishes. Pietro Zito, the chef and owner, is tied to the land and works with local seasonal products. One of several memorable dishes I enjoyed there was ceci e tria, this dense soup of chickpeas with the textural interplay of cooked and fried pasta. It’s a flavorful simple dish, very rustic and yet mellow.

This is one of those elemental yet marvelous pastas made from almost nothing but a cook’s inventiveness. If you lived in Puglia and all you had in the pantry was oil, garlic, a handful of pasta, a hunk of bread, and a sheaf of dried oregano, this is what you would make for your family. And they would be happy. Don’t wait for an empty refrigerator to make this. Just have some good country bread—a couple of days old is best—and some bucatini. The contrasting textures of those thick, hollow strands, perfect for slurping, and the hand-torn crumbs of bread, crisp and crackling, is just great. (And if you happen to have some Canestrato Pugliese, grate some on top. It will take you straight to Puglia.)

In Puglia, cavatelli or strascinate would be the star of this delightful dish, dressed with ripe cherry tomatoes quickly softened in the skillet, and a heap of tangy arugula, tossed into the pot to cook with the pasta. Artisan-made pasta from Puglia is my preference, but any good-quality cavatelli or orecchiette would be a fine substitute. In summer, when ripe sweet tomatoes and tender arugula are plentiful, this dish will always be delicious.

This dish is finished in an unusual manner that at first surprised me. But it is so practical, and the results are so delectable, that it is one of my treasured discoveries from Puglia. The dressing is essentially completed in advance—fresh plum tomatoes roasted with seasoned bread crumbs. When you are ready to eat, just slide these intensely savory tomatoes on top of the fusilli in a big bowl and toss; the steaming pasta, just out of the pot, does the final cooking all by itself.

The beauty and delight of this dish is that it is so fresh and clean—and it is a cinch to make. It’s important to make the pesto with the best ingredients, then just toss in the hot cooked spaghetti to coat it, and enjoy.

Anna Cornino Santoro’s memorable couscous with scorpion-fish brodetto inspired me to create this version when I got home. I use grouper, a delicious fish, widely available and easy to work with (and certainly with fewer bones than scorpion fish!). Making couscous by hand, as Anna does, is not feasible for most of us, I realize. Fortunately, good-quality packaged couscous is in every supermarket these days. Almost all commercial couscous is precooked, so it takes barely 5 minutes to make a flavorful, fluffy base for the brodetto.

This is traditionally made with swordfish, but you can substitute tuna, bass, or other firm-fleshed fish in the recipe. You don’t need to buy expensive swordfish or tuna steaks—end pieces or chunks sold for skewered grilling are perfect for the sauce. Bavette is a long, flat dry pasta, like a narrow fettuccine. If you can’t find it, use good-quality dry fettuccine.

Cauliflower is delicious cooked with anchovy. At Trattoria Ferdinando III they add distinctively Sicilian touches like raisins, pine nuts, and saffron to make a marvelous cauliflower dressing for pasta.

Sicilians are passionate about both food and opera, so it is no surprise that one of the island’s most celebrated dishes is pasta alla Norma. What better way to honor the composer Vincenzo Bellini, a native son of Catania (on Sicily’s eastern coast), than to name a delicious pasta for Norma, one of the great operatic masterworks of all time? I love both the opera and the dish, and, I can assure you, aside from their name, they’re quite different. Those of you familiar with opera know that the title role of Norma is so difficult that only the greatest sopranos ever sing it. On the other hand, this recipe is simple and easily made.

The 200-year-old L’Europeo, one of the best restaurants in Naples, serves the most delicious rendition of a favorite Neapolitan dish—pasta, patate, e provola. You can probably translate this yourself: pasta, potatoes, and provola cheese—the kind of cheese we usually call “provolone.” All varieties of provola (there are many) are pulled-curd cheeses, like mozzarella, but after they are formed into pear shapes they are hung to dry, and sometimes smoked. Neapolitans have strong opinions on what makes a good dish of pasta, patate, e provola. As prepared by my Neapolitan friend Bruno di Rosa’s mother, Rita, it is considered a soup and eaten with a spoon. At L’Europeo it was definitely a pasta, dense and cheesy and full of flavor—with all the comforts of baked macaroni and cheese.

With thin vermicelli and tender small clams, this is a very quick-cooking (and very delicious) pasta. To yield their most intense flavor, though, the clams should be freshly shucked and totally raw when they go into the sauce, rather than being steamed in the shell. The method given here—freezing the clams briefly before shucking—makes this task easier than you can imagine, even if you are not a skilled shellfish shucker.

Maltagliati means “badly cut” and is usually applied to fresh homemade pasta. Here I give you a shortcut way to enjoy the shape by breaking up dry lasagna sheets. If you want to make fresh maltagliati, follow the recipe for pasutice on page 20—the regional names vary, but the shape is the same. When using fresh pasta, remember you need more cooking water and you must stir maltagliati frequently, as the flat pieces have a tendency to stick. And if you don’t have lasagna, a long dry pasta such as fusilli lunghi or spaghetti will also be delicious with this sauce.

Here is a delicious pasta recipe, another example of the Roman affinity for offal. Whether tripe (trippa) or paiata (pasta sauce made with the stomach of a suckling lamb); or oxtails braised with tomatoes, celery and carrots (coda alla vaccinara), a true Roman meal is bound to include one of them. So what’s a little chicken liver with pasta, as in this dish? The Romans love it and have been enjoying it for centuries, so why shouldn’t you?

Here is a classic pasta, as delicious as it is simple and fast. But because it is such a minimalist creation, every ingredient is of utmost importance. Use a very good authentic pecorino, one produced in Lazio (the Italian region where Rome is located), Tuscany, or Sardinia. The cheese is at its best when aged only 8 to 10 months. And grind the black peppercorns just before making the dish—I like to crush the black pepper by hand in a mortar, into coarse bits that explode with flavor as I enjoy the pasta.