We’re Back! Our weekly newsletter resumes with a title that will be familiar to fanatics of the Italian Movie industry (Vittorio De Sica and Gina Lollobrigida at their most seductive?). We’ve substituted Pasta for the Pane of the original (translated for Anglo audiences as Bread, Love and Dreams), and why not? What could be more dream-like than a perfect plate of pasta?
In 1969, a good friend named Robbie dropped out of New York University and vanished from the East Coast social scene. Nothing unusual about that in those rootless, peripatetic days—except for the shocker two years later, when we ran into him sitting in a café in the Communist quarter of Florence, Italy, reading a book and sipping on a glass of Chianti. Such were the vagaries of travel in the modern age—or so it felt.
As it happened, Robbie had just started the first Montessori school in Italy north of Rome. His Open House for parents and friends was scheduled for that evening. Did we want to come? Well, obviously. So we went and, as usual at such parties, ended up in the kitchen, where the real action always is. That night, the action was a petite, attractive Florentine sous-chef, graduated that year from Le Cordon Bleu Paris, who offered to teach us how to make an authentic Tuscan spaghetti sauce.
Decades later, we befriended a purchasing agent at one of the major Hollywood studios. Joe had frittered away his youth on the rougher edges of society, losing himself to drugs and violence with the Hells Angels. Yet no matter how trying his circumstances, on the first Thursday of each month, Sam showed up for a Neapolitan feast his father, a first-generation Italian, cooked for the first eighteen relatives to reserve a seat. When Papa passed on, a more mature and settled Sam found a job and took over the family and this serious responsibility.
The heart of Sam's feast was a classic Neapolitan spaghetti sauce based strictly on tomatoes grown in the ashes of Mount Vesuvius, the brooding volcano across the harbor from downtown Naples. When we told Sam about our own family connection to that ancient, unstable neighborhood, he broke with the firmest of family traditions and handed over the secret recipe.
Some people eat to live, and some people live to eat. Some people can't stop wandering, and some people never leave home. But it's impossible to separate food from travel. Think of that every time you twirl a fork-load of spaghetti—a food we associate with a distant land like Italy, that actually arrived there in 1493 from a much farther China, in the luggage of Marco Polo. Even if you never leave your kitchen, the foods you cook and eat have traveled since the dawn of civilization.
The Tuscan Sauce:
If you order pasta Bolognese anywhere from Siena north to Bologna, this is more or less what you'll be eating. Keep that in mind, if your twelve-year-old has grown up on American restaurant spaghetti—this sauce won't taste the same to them. We don't use the name "Bolognese" here, because in America, that sauce has evolved to mean just about any meat-tomato-based sauce with Italian seasonings. Surprisingly enough, this Tuscan sauce is the quickest and simplest of our two favorites.
2 lbs. beef, 1 lb. pork, 1 lb. veal, separately ground or (even better, if you have the time) hand-chopped.
Equal parts beef stock (1 can approx.), red wine, and chopped fresh Roma tomatoes.
1 large onion, 1 bell pepper, 1 box mushrooms, 1 head (not a misprint!) garlic, all chopped.
Start the liquids and tomatoes in a large Le Creuset with too much oregano, basil, bay leaves, salt, sugar (a dash to mitigate acids), and black pepper. This gives the sauce time to start evaporating and thickening.
Chop, sauté (in olive oil), and add everything else, one ingredient at a time. Cook until the thickened sauce tastes perfect, at most an hour. Add more herbs if needed. Top with Parmigiana Reggiano (no substitute). Freeze in apportioned baggies for future feasts.
The Neapolitan Sauce:
When you order any pasta al Sugo south of Rome, you'll be eating whatever the owner feels like serving you. But usually, it will taste something like this one. Americans will generally recognize this sauce as something like the version they've ordered in a better Italian or Sicilian restaurant. Sicilian-Americans might even call it "gravy".
True San Marzano tomatoes are grown only on the ashy slopes of Mount Vesuvius and are absolutely unique and non-negotiable. Beware of "SM type" or other fakes. We buy the whole ones and hand-squish them—yes, that will freak out some people, but it ensures that actual pieces of tomato survive in the sauce.
2-3 large cans, along with 1 small can of tomato paste.
Equal parts red wine and beef stock (1 can), plus 4 anchovies.
1 onion, 1 bell pepper, 1 box mushrooms, 1 head of garlic.
1-2 lbs. top round or chuck steak, hand chopped.
6 hot/sweet Italian sausages, sautéed or grilled (but not pricked), and sliced on the thin side.
Parmigiana Reggiano (no substitute).
As with our Tuscan sauce, start the liquids and tomatoes in a large Le Creuset with too much basil, bay leaves, salt, sugar (a dash to mitigate acids), and black pepper. This gives the sauce time to start evaporating and thickening. Meantime, chop, sauté, and add everything else, one ingredient at a time. Add more herbs as needed. Fugetabout the oregano, or else the Sicilians will come looking for you.
Le Creuset loves to burn tomato paste, so your options are medium heat, constantly watching for 2 hours, or low heat forever. We sometimes make the sauce at night, cooking on low heat for 3 hours, then leave it on the stove and cook the next AM for another hour. A spoon should stand up in it.
On Oils:
Never use any oil except olive, preferably Italian, and too expensive. If you can't taste the difference, you're not using enough of it.
On Pastas:
Don't waste a good sauce on cheap or fast pasta. The quicker it cooks (anything less than 10 minutes), the lower the quality (if any) of durum wheat semolina. Check the package. In the USA, we only buy the Italian product Rustichella 'd Abruzzo (on Amazon as a last resort). Here too, if you can't taste the difference, you might want to cut back on the sauce.
On Preparation:
It might sound obvious, but the main ingredient in any pasta dish is the pasta. The sauce is meant to flavor, not drown it. That's the reason we never, ever skimp on pasta (but don't necessarily mind repeating ourselves). We rarely use more than a cup or two of sauce and pre-mix it with the pasta on the stove, then give it a minute for absorption. If the restaurant's sauce splatters all over your pristine white blouse, they're disguising cheap ingredients.
On Cheese:
You can't add too much grated cheese. Seriously. There has to be a law somewhere.
On Twirling:
Spaghetti is twirled on the fork in the base of your plate. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again (to quote that inveterate pasta lover, the Scot Robert the Bruce from the 1314 Battle of Bannockburn). In Italy, if the server offers you a spoon, it's because the owners expect Americans to ask for one. If you're older than ten years and chop your spaghetti, we might have to disown you. Your Italian friends certainly will.
And BTW…
You might have noticed that we play rather fast and loose with quantities of ingredients. This isn’t out of laziness. Any Italian dish has to be cooked to your (not our) taste and adjusted on the fly to suit your whim. Sometimes it all works beautifully, sometimes not so much. And that's what makes Italian cooking such a fascinating ride.
I shared this post with my son who is a sous chef at a highly-regarded European restaurant in Charleston, SC. He really liked it.
Thanks, you two! I've long thought the marriage of garlic and tomato is a match made in heaven. Further, I heartily endorse your approach to the art of cooking, instead of focusing on the scientific use of precise measurements. If one doesn't like what they cook, what difference does the scrupulous observance of a recipe make? Good to see you back and warmest wishes for the warmest of Holiday Seasons.