LET me propose
that you start cooking pasta in a way that might make you the laughingstock of
your foodie friends: make more sauce, and serve it on
top of less pasta. Do exactly what you’ve learned not to do.
Instead of a
pound of pasta for two to four people, make a half, or even a third of a pound.
Instead of a cup or two of sauce, make it four cups, or more. Turn the
proportions around.
What do you wind
up with? Pasta more or less overwhelmed by sauce, which you can view as a
cardinal sin or as a moist, flavorful one-dish meal of vegetables with the
distinctive, lovable chewiness of pasta. (There is,
of course, a tradition of this kind of pasta dish in
Obviously this won’t work with every sauce — you don’t
want to pull this trick
with creamy or cheesy ones, or those based on meat — but it works with just about every vegetable you can
think of, and with many fish preparations as well.
To understand why
this may get you branded as a heretic, think back to the 1970s, when Americans
needed even more help cooking than we do now.
Thanks to
Marcella Hazan, Giuliano Bugialli and others, we discovered how to cook Italian food
at home. And for the first time, many of us were venturing to
What we found was
exactly what Ms. Hazan had been telling us:
Americans, even Italian-Americans, drowned their pasta. We poured on ladlefuls
of thick tomato sauce and tossed two or three quarter-pound meatballs on top
for good measure. We made the pasta itself irrelevant.
We also learned
we overcooked it, undersalted the water and often
used the wrong shape. But as much as I owe Ms. Hazan
and her peers, for the first 20 years that I cooked pasta, I always felt as if
I was about to be arrested for violating some canonical law.
In the old
country, the sauce was used to barely moisten and flavor the pasta. There are a
couple of possible explanations for this. One is that Italians were neat. “For centuries, most people ate pasta with their hands,” said Kevin Wells, who translated and annotated the
1570 cookbook “Opera dell’arte
Another is that
there were not always other options. “Poor
people dressed pasta with little or nothing,” said
Andrea Graziosi, a
When some of
those Italians immigrated to the
“The consequences are the incredible
distortions — to the Italian eye — of Italian-American cuisine,” he said. You want meat sauce, with meat on top? You’ve got it, in spades.
As the years went
by, though, a kind of “if it’s Italian, it must be good” mentality developed here, and
home cooks began enjoying pasta with a minimum of sauce. (We also began
undercooking it, just to show that we could take al dente one ridiculous step
further.)
But today, barely
moistened pasta often doesn’t make sense. Even setting aside the extreme recommendations of
the Atkins diet, it’s widely agreed that highly refined grains — a group
that includes the semolina flour from which the best-tasting dry pasta is made
— do us little nutritional good. From the point of view of the body, there’s little difference between pasta and white bread (and,
for that matter, biscotti); neither has much in the way of protein, vitamins,
micronutrients or fiber, and all are digested quickly and may ultimately be
stored as fat.
I am not
suggesting that we return to oversauced baked ziti
with sausages, mozzarella-laden lasagna or spaghetti under three handball-size
meatballs. Rather, I’m recommending that we exploit our astonishing supply
of vegetables (still evident at this time of year), augmented if you like with a bit
of meat for seasoning.
There are recipes
here, but many people won’t need them. The other day, I arrived at a friend’s house in time to cook lunch. We had chickpeas,
broccoli rabe and garden tomatoes. I parboiled the
broccoli rabe, just until it became bright green; I then
chopped and sautéed it in olive oil with garlic, dried chili flakes and a
couple of cups of chickpeas. I added two or three chopped tomatoes. Meanwhile,
I half-cooked about a third of a box of farfalle
(undoubtedly a more legitimate cook would tell me I was using the “wrong” shape) in the water I had used for the greens.
When the tomatoes
broke down and the broccoli rabe was tender, I dumped
in the drained pasta, after saving some cooking water. I added a little of the
liquid and simmered the mixture until the pasta was done. I garnished it with
basil and a little more olive oil. Although it was not soupy, we used spoons
because the broth was so good. Total working time was about half an hour, and a
better one-dish lunch I could not imagine.
I’ve been
playing with this style of pasta for months: a load of briefly sautéed spinach
with garlic, raisins, pine nuts and a bit of stock; well-roasted mixed
vegetables, mashed or puréed, with lots of olive oil; braised endive and onion; bok choy with black beans and soy
sauce (with fresh Chinese egg noodles, naturally). The list is long.
Give it a shot.
There is no downside — except maybe a bit
of mockery from the pasta police (who I’m sure will
arrive, in my case, later this morning).