Pasta Dishes

Italy

Paglia e fieno

Paparele e bisi is a traditional pasta dish originating from Veneto. The name is a Venetian term for tagliatelle and peas. Other ingredients used in the dish include butter, pancetta, onions, parsley, chicken stock, salt, pepper, and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. The pancetta and onions are saut&eacute;ed in butter, then mixed with the stock, seasonings, peas, and parsley. The combination is cooked until the peas become tender and the sauce remains thin, and it's then mixed with cooked tagliatelle and finished off with grated cheese.

Paparele e bisi

Paparele e figadini

Pappardelle al ragù bianco di anatra

Croatia

Parenci

Pasta alla caprese

Pasta alla Carlofortina is a traditional pasta dish from the town of Carloforte on the island of San Pietro, off the southern coast of Sardinia. The dish reflects the local history and geography, combining pesto Genovese with sweet local tomatoes and tuna fished from the surrounding waters. The pasta used is usually homemade trofie, a Ligurian specialty. The dish is known for its distinctive mix of flavors: the meaty tuna stands up to the strong flavors of basil, garlic, and cheese found in the pesto, while the tomatoes provide a sweet and acidic balance.

Pasta alla Carlofortina

Pasta alla crudaiola

Gricia is the least famous of Rome's four pasta sauces and the one the other three are built from. Guanciale, pecorino romano, black pepper, pasta water. No tomato, no egg, no garlic, no oil beyond what the pork gives up. Add tomato and you get amatriciana; add egg and you get carbonara; take away the guanciale and you are left with cacio e pepe. Two explanations circulate for the name, one pointing at Grisciano, a hamlet near Amatrice, the other at the gricio, the term used in Rome for the bread and grocery sellers who came down from the Grisons and the Valtellina. Neither is settled, and both are older than the dish's current fame.

Because there are only three ingredients, the ratios are the recipe. Guanciale is cut thicker here than for carbonara, closer to a centimetre, so the pieces stay meaty rather than crisping to nothing, and it renders slowly in a dry pan until the fat is clear and the edges have coloured. The rendered fat stays in the pan and becomes the sauce base along with a ladle of pasta water. The cheese is the difficult part: pecorino romano is high in salt and low in fat, and it will seize into strings if it meets direct heat or boiling water. Grate it fine, mix it into a paste with a little cool pasta water first, and stir it into the pan off the flame. Rigatoni and mezze maniche are the standard shapes, with spaghetti as the alternative.

The finished plate should be pale ivory shading to grey-brown from the pepper, with a sauce that clings and looks slightly opaque. Stringy cheese knotted around the pasta is the most common failure and means the pan was hot. A dry plate, where the pasta looks dressed in fat and cheese but has no body to it, means not enough starchy water went in. Salt is worth checking: between the guanciale and the pecorino the dish is salty by construction, so the water should have been salted lightly. The pepper is not garnish here. It should be toasted briefly in the pan or ground coarse and used generously, because with tomato and egg both absent it is the only thing supplying aromatic lift.

Pasta alla gricia

Pasta alla jonica is a traditional dish originating from Calabria. The dish is usually made with a combination of tomatoes, sweet or hot peppers, garlic, guanciale, spaghetti, basil, olive oil, salt, and pecorino. The garlic and guanciale are saut&eacute;ed in olive oil, then mixed with the basil and cooked tomatoes and peppers. The spaghetti are cooked in boiling water, drained, then tossed with the sauce. Before serving, this pasta dish is sprinkled with grated pecorino cheese.

Pasta alla jonica

Pasta alla Norcina

Catania's signature pasta puts fried aubergine and tomato together and finishes with ricotta salata, the pressed and salted sheep's milk cheese that is grated rather than spooned. The name is usually traced to Bellini's opera Norma; Bellini was Catanese, and the attribution most often repeated credits the playwright Nino Martoglio with calling a plate of it a real Norma, ranking it with the opera. The story is unverifiable but the association is old enough to have stuck. Rigatoni, maccheroni and sedani are the usual shapes, all of them ridged or tubular, because the sauce is chunky and needs somewhere to lodge.

The aubergine is the variable that decides everything. It has to be fried in oil, not roasted or grilled, because frying collapses the flesh into something creamy while leaving the skin intact, and a baked substitute reads as dry and fibrous by comparison. Slices or cubes both work; slice thickness around a centimetre gives you a centre that softens before the outside darkens. Whether to salt the aubergine first is an old argument, and with modern cultivars there is little bitterness to draw out, so the real reason to do it is that a drained aubergine takes on less oil. The tomato sauce alongside is deliberately plain: olive oil, garlic or a little onion, peeled tomatoes, basil, cooked down only until it thickens. The fried aubergine is folded in at the end so it keeps its shape.

On the plate, look for aubergine you can still identify. If it has dissolved into the tomato you are eating a purée, and the contrast of textures that defines the dish is gone. Oil pooling underneath means the aubergine went into oil that was not hot enough and soaked it up. The ricotta salata should be grated coarsely over the top at the pass, in enough quantity to taste as salt and sheep, and substituting parmesan or fresh ricotta changes the dish entirely: fresh ricotta is sweet and wet where the salted kind is firm and sharp. Basil belongs in leaves, added late, not chopped through the sauce. A version served without the cheese is incomplete rather than a variant.

Pasta alla Norma

Pasta alla pecorara or shepherd's pasta is a traditional pasta dish originating from the region of Abruzzo. The dish is prepared with thick and chewy rings of fresh pasta that are combined with a sauce consisting of red bell peppers, eggplants, zucchinis, carrots, onions, tomatoes, and olive oil. Ricotta cheese is crumbled on top of the dish along with a sprinkle of Pecorino. For the most authentic version, it's recommended to look for the dish in the area around Elice and Atri.

Pasta alla pecorara

Pasta alla zozzona is a traditional pasta dish originating from Rome. The dish is made with a combination of short pasta such as penne or rigatoni, pork sausage, tomatoes, red wine, olive oil, and grated Pecorino Romano. The sauce is made with all of the ingredients except for the pasta. Once the pasta has been cooked, it&rsquo;s mixed with the sauce, and the dish is then served with grated Pecorino cheese on top. The word zozzona in the name of the dish means that something is full of everything and it&rsquo;s hard to describe, referring to the richness of the dish itself.

Pasta alla zozzona

Pasta al limone

Pasta al mascarpone is an Italian dish hailing from Lombardia. It's a specialty of the Lodi area. The dish is made with maltagliati pasta, egg yolks, nutmeg, mascarpone, and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. The mascarpone is whisked with egg yolks, salt, and nutmeg into a homogenous mixture. Some pasta water is added to the mix, if needed. The maltagliati pasta is tossed with the mascarpone mixture, with added grated cheese to taste. It's recommended to serve pasta al mascarpone in heated plates.

Pasta al mascarpone

Pasta al pesto di pistacchi

Pasta al pomodoro is a traditional dish that's usually made with a combination of pasta (most commonly spaghetti, although any type of pasta can be used), fresh tomatoes, basil, salt, olive oil, and onions or garlic. Some say the key to making a great pasta al pomodoro lies in the addition of pasta water to the dish in its finishing stages. The dish is a simple, light, quick meal that can be prepared by anyone, and that is supposedly the key to its huge popularity. For the best results, it is recommended to serve it with some grated cheese on top.

Pasta al pomodoro

Pasta chî sàrdi is the Palermitan name for pasta with sardines, and it is the clearest surviving record of Arab cooking in Sicilian food. Fresh sardines and wild fennel supply the base; saffron, sultanas and pine nuts supply the layer that arrived from North Africa during the ninth-century emirate. A widely repeated story credits the invention to a cook feeding the general Euphemius after a landing at Mazara, though the tale is folklore rather than documentation. What is verifiable is the season: finocchietto selvatico, the wild fennel fronds that carry the dish, grow on Sicilian hillsides in spring, and a version made with cultivated fennel bulb or seeds in October is a different and thinner thing.

Fennel goes into boiling salted water first, then comes out chopped while the water stays behind to cook the pasta. That water is the point; it carries the fennel through the whole dish. Onion softens slowly in olive oil, anchovy fillets dissolve into it, and the sultanas and pine nuts go in with saffron loosened in a little of the fennel water. The sardines are cleaned, boned and butterflied, and they are added last and barely stirred, because a sardine broken up too early disappears into paste. Bucatini is the standard shape. The topping is mollica atturrata, breadcrumbs toasted in oil until they smell nutty, standing in for grated cheese, which never appears on this plate. The Palermo habit is to let the assembled dish rest before serving, sometimes finishing it briefly in the oven.

The balance to judge is sweet against salt. The sultanas and the saffron push one way, the anchovy and the sardine push the other, and a good plate holds both without either winning. Look for whole recognisable pieces of sardine rather than a uniform brown sauce; the second usually means tinned fish or an over-stirred pan. The breadcrumbs should still be crisp at the table, so a lid or a long wait under a pass will soften them and cost the dish its texture. The fennel should read as green and slightly aniseed, not stewed. Watch for versions padded with tomato: pasta con le sarde in Catania sometimes carries a little, but a heavily tomato-based sauce has drifted away from the Palermo original.