For 2 servings
3 ounces black truffles, preferably fresh
1 or 2 garlic cloves
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus a little more oil for the pasta
1 flat anchovy fillet (preferably the kind prepared at home), chopped very fine
Salt
½ pound pasta
Recommended pasta Thin spaghetti, spaghettini.
1. If using fresh truffles: Clean them with a stiff brush, wipe them with a moist cloth, and pat thoroughly dry.
If using canned truffles: Drain them and pat them dry. Save their liquid to use in a risotto, or a meat sauce.
2. Grate the truffles to a very fine-grained consistency, using the smallest holes of a flat-sided grater. Some Japanese stores sell a very sharp metal grater that does the job extremely well.
3. Mash the garlic lightly with a knife handle, enough to split it and loosen the skin, which you will remove and discard.
4. Put water in a narrow saucepan and bring it to a lively simmer.
5. Put the olive oil and the garlic in another small saucepan, earthenware if possible, turn on the heat to medium, and cook until the garlic becomes colored a light nut brown.
6. Discard the garlic, remove the pan from the burner, and place it, double-boiler fashion, over the pan with simmering water. Add the chopped anchovy, and stir it with a wooden spoon, using the back of it to mash it against the sides of the pan. After a minute or two, place the pan over the burner again, turning the heat on to low, and stir constantly, for a few minutes, until the anchovy is almost entirely dissolved into paste.
7. Add the grated truffles, stir thoroughly once or twice, taste and, if necessary, correct for salt. Stir quickly once more and turn the heat off.
8. Toss cooked and drained spaghettini with the entire contents of the pan. Drizzle a few drops of raw olive oil over the pasta and serve at once.
Tuna Sauce with Tomatoes and Garlic
For 4 to 6 servings
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon garlic chopped very fine
1½ cups canned imported Italian plum tomatoes, cut up, with their juice
12 ounces imported Italian tuna packed in olive oil, see Tuna
Salt
Black pepper, ground fresh from the mill
1 tablespoon butter
1 to 1½ pounds pasta
3 tablespoons chopped parsley
Recommended pasta Spaghetti or short, tubular macaroni, such as penne or rigatoni.
1. In a saucepan or small sauté pan put the olive oil and the chopped garlic, turn on the heat to medium, and cook until the garlic becomes colored a pale gold. Add the cut-up tomatoes with their juice, stir to coat the tomatoes well, and adjust heat to cook at a gentle, but steady simmer for about 25 minutes, until the oil floats free from the tomatoes.
2. Drain the tuna and crumble it with a fork. Turn off the heat under the tomatoes, and add the tuna, mixing thoroughly to distribute it evenly. Taste and, if necessary, correct for salt. Add a few grindings of pepper, the 1 tablespoon of butter, and mix well once again.
3. Toss with cooked drained pasta. Add the chopped parsley, toss again, and serve at once.
Ahead-of-time note The sauce can be prepared up to this point several hours or even a day or two in advance. When ready to use, reheat gently.
Clam Sauce with Tomatoes
ITALIAN CLAMS, particularly the common, small round ones from the Adriatic are very savory, and little or nothing needs to be done to build up their flavor. Clams from other seas are blander, and you must look for help from external sources to approximate the natural spiciness of a clam sauce you’d be likely to experience in Italy. That explains the presence in the recipe that follows of anchovies and chili pepper.
For 4 servings
1 dozen small littleneck clams
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus a little more for the pasta
1½ teaspoons garlic chopped fine
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
2 cups canned imported Italian plum tomatoes, cut up, with their juice, OR fresh, ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1 flat anchovy fillet (preferably the kind prepared at home), chopped very fine
Salt
Chopped hot red chili pepper, to taste
1 pound pasta
Recommended pasta Spaghettini thin spaghetti, takes to clam sauces more successfully than other shapes. A close enough second is spaghetti.
1. Wash and scrub the clams. Discard those that stay open when handled. Put them in a pan broad enough so that the clams don’t need to be piled up more than 3 deep, cover the pan, and turn on the heat to high. Check the clams frequently, turning them over, and remove them from the pan as they open their shells.
2. When all the clams have opened up, detach their meat from the shells, and gently swish each clam in its own juices in the pan to rinse off any sand. Unless they are exceptionally small, cut them up in 2 or even 3 pieces. Put them aside in a small bowl.
3. Line a strainer with paper towels, and filter the clam juices in the pan through the paper into a bowl. Spoon some of the filtered juice over the clam meat to keep it moist.
4. Put the olive oil and garlic in a saucepan, turn on the heat to medium, and cook until the garlic has become colored a pale gold. Add the parsley, stir once or twice, then add the cut up tomatoes, their juice, the chopped anchovy, and the filtered clam juices. Stir thoroughly for a minute or two, then adjust heat to cook at a gentle, but steady simmer for 25 minutes, or until the oil floats free from the tomatoes.
5. Taste and correct for salt, add the chopped chili pepper, stir two or three times, then remove the pan from heat. Add the cut-up clams, stirring them into the sauce to coat them well. Toss thoroughly with cooked, drained spaghettini or spaghetti. Drizzle a few drops of raw olive oil over the pasta and serve at once.
Ahead-of-time note The sauce may be prepared several hours in advance up to this point. Reheat gently when preparing to toss it with pasta.
White Clam Sauce
EVERYWHERE in Venice—or in Italy for that matter—one can eat spaghetti with clams, but none tastes like the dish Cesare Benelli makes at Al Covo, the restaurant he owns with his Texan wife, Diane. Cesare’s genial variation on this timeless theme consists of holding back the natural juices of the just-opened clams, draining the pasta while it is still underdone, then finishing the cooking of it in a skillet together with the clam juice. The pasta, by the time it becomes fully cooked, drinks up all the fresh clam juices, achieving a density and richness of flavor no other version of the dish can match.
For 4 servings
1½ dozen littleneck clams
5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 large garlic cloves, peeled and sliced paper thin
1½ tablespoons chopped parsley
Chopped fresh hot chili pepper, 2 teaspoons, or to taste
1 fresh, ripe, firm plum tomato, cut into ½-inch dice with its skin on, but drained of juice and all seeds removed
½ cup dry white wine
1 pound dry pasta
6 fresh basil leaves, torn into 2 or 3 pieces
Recommended pasta The recommendations for Clam Sauce with Tomatoes are equally valid here. If you should want to use fresh, homemade fettuccine instead of the recommended spaghettini, bear in mind that it will cook much faster than boxed, dry factory pasta. Before cooking it, put the clam juice in the skillet and boil away half of it, so that when you will be adding the fettuccine to the pan it will take less time to cook down all the juice.
1. Wash and scrub the clams, discarding those that stay open when handled. Heat up the clams to open them, following the directions in the preceding recipe in Step 1 for Clam Sauce with Tomatoes.
2. When all the clams have opened up, take them out of the pan, using a slotted spoon. Try not to stir up the juices in the pan any more than you must. Detach the clam meat from its shell, and gently swish each clam in the pan juices to
rinse off any sand. Unless they are exceptionally small, cut them up in 2 or even 3 pieces. Put them in a small bowl, pour 2 tablespoons olive oil over them, cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap, and set it aside for later. Do not refrigerate.
3. Line a strainer with paper towels, and filter the clam juices in the pan through the paper and into another bowl. Set aside for later.
4. Choose a skillet or sauté pan broad enough to contain the pasta later. Put in 3 tablespoons olive oil and the sliced garlic, and turn on the heat to medium high. Cook the garlic, stirring it, for just a few seconds, without letting it become colored, then add the parsley and the chili pepper. Stir once or twice, and add the diced tomato. Cook the tomato for 1 to 2 minutes, stirring it from time to time, then add the wine. Simmer the wine for about 20 to 30 seconds, letting it reduce, then turn off the heat.
5. Cook the pasta in abundant boiling salted water until it is very firm to the bite, barely short of being fully cooked. When you bite a piece off, it should feel slightly stiff and the narrowest of chalk-white cores should be showing in the center of the strand.
6. Turn the heat on to high under the skillet or sauté pan, drain the pasta and transfer it immediately to the pan. Add all the filtered clam juice, and cook, tossing and turning the pasta, until all the juice has evaporated.
If the pasta was not too underdone when you drained it, it should now be perfectly cooked. Taste it and, in the unlikely event it needs more cooking after the clam juices have evaporated and been absorbed, add a small amount of water.
7. As soon as the pasta is done, before you turn the heat off, add the cut-up clams with all the oil in the bowl and the torn basil leaves, toss in the pan 2 or 3 times, then transfer to a warm platter and serve at once.
Sardinian Bottarga Sauce
THE FLAVORS of Sardinia, like its landscape and the features of its people, are unlike anything you may find on mainland Italy. Intensity and force are some of the qualities that come to mind. The provocatively musky taste of bottarga di muggine—dried mullet roe—is consistent with the sensations, so titillating for the palate, that after a sojourn on the island we begin to recognize as distinctively Sardinian.
There are two main schools of thought on how to use bottarga. One maintains that, as with all fish products, olive oil should be used exclusively. Others feel that butter softens and sweetens the roe’s vigorous flavor. My friend Daniel Berger of the Metropolitan Museum, a long-time devotee and dazzling practitioner of Italian cooking, uses oil to make the sauce and butter to toss it. After working with several approaches, I have found butter alone satisfies me best. Danny’s suggestion of scallions I fully endorse, although strict fidelity to traditional practice would suggest onions.
Note Because fine mullet bottarga is expensive, I have scaled the recipe to produce enough for two. I don’t think of bottarga as a condiment for a crowd, but you can easily double or triple the recipe to serve four or six.
For 2 servings
1 ounce mullet bottarga, sliced, then chopped, following directions given below, to produce ¼ loosely packed cup
⅔ cup scallions, both leaves and bulbs cut into very thin rounds, OR chopped onion
Salt
Butter, 1½ tablespoons for cooking onion, plus 1 tablespoon to toss the pasta
½ pound pasta
1 tablespoon parsley chopped fine
¼ teaspoon lemon peel grated without digging into the white pith
OPTIONAL: a tiny amount of chopped hot red chili pepper, to taste
Recommended pasta Sardinia, it would be malloreddus, a small, gnocchi-shaped pasta made from hard, semolina flour. You can successfully replace malloreddus with spaghettini, thin spaghetti, preferably of high-quality, imported Italian pasta. If you would like to have the sauce with homemade pasta, it would be very good with tonnarelli, the thick, square noodle.
1. Weigh the bottarga roe and cut off 1 ounce of it. Strip away the membrane enveloping it. Use a swiveling-blade peeler to slice it paper thin, then chop it as fine as you are able with a knife. If you hold the tip of the blade down on the cutting board, and rock the knife up and down over the bottarga, you will be able in seconds to grind it down to very fine soft grains. (If you are making more than this recipe calls for, you can use the food processor.)
2. Put the scallions or onion in a small saucepan together with a large pinch of salt and 1½ tablespoons butter. Turn on the heat to medium and cook, stirring from time to time, until the scallions or onion become lightly colored.
3. As soon as the pasta is cooked, drain it and put it in a warm serving bowl together with 1 tablespoon of butter. Add all the contents of the saucepan, toss 2 or 3 times, then add the parsley, the grated lemon peel, the optional chili pepper, and the ground bottarga, and toss again thoroughly to coat the pasta strands with an even distribution of sauce. Serve at once.
Note The chili pepper is, to my mind, unnecessary and competes with the flavor of bottarga. Many people do enjoy it, however, so it is up to you to decide.
Scallop Sauce with Olive Oil, Garlic, and Hot Pepper
THE SMALLEST—and perhaps the tastiest—of several varieties of scallop found in Italian waters is called canestrelli, smaller, when shelled, than the nail of a child’s little finger. When fresh, North American scallops are exceptionally good too, particularly the sweet ones known as bay scallops, but they are larger than canestrelli, and should be cut up so that, like canestrelli, there will be more little pieces available to carry the seasoning.
For 6 servings
1 pound fresh bay OR deep sea scallops
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon garlic chopped very fine
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
Chopped hot red chili pepper, to taste
Salt
1 to 1½ pounds pasta
½ cup dry, unflavored bread crumbs, lightly toasted in the oven or in a skillet
Recommended pasta As in so many other seafood sauces, spaghettini, thin spaghetti, is the most congenial shape, but spaghetti is an equally valid choice.
1. Wash the scallops in cold water, pat thoroughly dry with a cloth towel, and cut up into pieces about ⅜ inch thick.
2. Put the olive oil and garlic in a saucepan, turn on the heat to medium, and cook, stirring, until the garlic becomes colored a light gold. Add the parsley and hot pepper. Stir once or twice, then add the scallops and one or two large pinches of salt. Turn the heat up to high, and cook for about 1½ minutes, stirring frequently, until the scallops lose their shine and turn a flat white. Do not overcook the scallops or they will become tough. Taste and correct for salt and hot pepper. If the scallops should shed a lot of liquid, remove them from the pan with a slotted spoon, and boil down the watery juices. Return the scallops to the pan, turn them over quickly, then turn off the heat.
3. Toss thoroughly with cooked drained spaghettini, add the bread crumbs, toss again, and serve at once.
Fish Sauce
THIS SAUCE is based on the observation that the sweetest, most flavorful morsels in a fish are trapped within its head and that all that stands in the way of one’s enjoyment of that savory meat is the bony matter that surrounds it. When the heads are mashed through a food mill, all their flavor is extracted, and the pesky, little bones are left behind. It’s the same technique used to heighten the flavor of fish soup.
Most markets dealing in whole, fresh fish have available the heads they usually take off when preparing fish for their customers. If you stand high in the dealer’s esteem, he may let you have a few heads for nothing, but even if you must pay for them, the cost should be quite modest.
For 8 servings
1½ to 2 pounds assorted fresh fish heads, from such fish as sea bass, red snapper, or porgie
⅔ cup extra virgin olive oil
⅓ cup chopped onion
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
¼ cup chopped parsley
⅓ cup dry white wine
1½ cups canned imported Ita
lian plum tomatoes, cut up, with their juice
Salt
Black pepper, ground fresh from the mill
1½ pounds pasta
2 tablespoons butter
Recommended pasta Spaghetti is an ideal carrier for the full flavor of the sauce, but other very good choices are short, tube-shaped macaroni, such as penne and rigatoni.
1. Wash all the fish heads in cold water, then set aside to drain in a colander.
2. Choose a sauté pan that can subsequently accommodate all the fish heads without stacking or overlapping them. Put in the olive oil and the chopped onion, turn on the heat to medium, and cook the onion, stirring, until it is translucent. Add the garlic and sauté until it becomes colored a pale gold. Add half the chopped parsley (2 tablespoons), stir once or twice, then put in the fish heads.
3. Turn the heads over to coat them well, then add the wine, letting it come to a lively simmer. When it has bubbled away for a minute or less, add the cut-up tomatoes with their juice, salt, and black pepper, and stir, turning over all the ingredients in the pan. Adjust heat to cook at a gentle simmer for 15 minutes.
4. Remove the heads from the pan. With a small spoon, scoop out as much of the meat as comes away easily, particularly at the cheeks and the throat, putting it aside in a small bowl or saucer for later.
5. Loosen and discard all the larger bones. Fit the food mill with the disk with the largest holes and mash the remainder of the heads through it, letting the pulp drop into the sauté pan.
6. Turn the heat on again, adjusting it to cook at a very gentle simmer. Cook for about 20 minutes, stirring frequently, until the sauce thickens to a dense, creamy consistency. Add the small pieces of meat you had scooped out of the heads, stir, and cook for 5 minutes more.
7. Toss cooked drained pasta with the entire contents of the pan, add the remaining chopped parsley and the butter, toss again, and serve at once.
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking Page 21
