Cooking suppers as I do for robust thirty-somethings and a delightful ninety-something, armloads of pasta come through our small kitchen weekly at least. The pasta is weighed to be sure of the right amount (three ounces for hearty eaters, two ounces for the likes of me)…then tucked into the bubbling salted water for about ten minutes (till al dente)…then reverently lifted into the sauce-filled porcelain-coated sauté pan with a slosh of the pasta water…stirred and given a few minutes to absorb the sauce–critical lesson I learned from brilliant cook Tina in Rapallo…then brought to the table and reverently lifted onto our pottery plates… big silver spoons at the ready for traditional twirling of long pasta with a fork on its bowl…
How do I usually sauce our pasta?
I hope you’ve had a chance recently to cruise the Pasta aisle at your favorite market…I must admit that every time I wander down ours, I’m dazzled by the possibilities—glass jars mostly from Italy, in every imaginable presentation of Pasta Sauce: from Marinara to Arrabbiata to Alfredo to Spicy Vodka. I will go out on a limb and say Rao’s Marinara Sauce is, to me, the very finest—fresh-tasting without being jacked up (as in Vodka Tomato Sauce). I ‘m so happy I discovered the Rao label. As a matter of fact, I find it super that while much of their products are prepared in Italy, the parent company is—get ready—good old Campbell’s…chefs of childhood’s Chicken Noodle Soup
B.R. (Before Rao) I made my tomato spaghetti sauce with a foundation of sautéed chopped onion — not part of classic Marinara…ditto chopped carrots and celery—garlic is the only vegetable essential to Marinara. (I’m fonder than ever of the young’un in Bill’s family when I was new on the scene…he didn’t know me but certainly was assured he knew his pasta, and when he came into the kitchen and found me at the stove, looked over my shoulder, choked, rumbled, “Uh, nobody puts carrots in spaghetti sauce!!!” I’m afraid it took some years to get back into his good graces because I laughed…you don’t laugh at a teen-age boy when he’s talking Food. This grandson was a Connectican and I wonder by now if there aren’t folks in that advanced state who sweeten their tomato sauce with sautéed chopped carrots. I’ve no idea where I hatched the notion…maybe just a way of getting more veggies into my kids.) The young man, now a UCSC graduate, probably does too, at least he’s no longer contemptuous when I serve him my spaghetti.
But I wander…
Back to how I sauce Bill’s and my pasta. At this point in our lives, we seem to be partial to the delicacy of pesto…light silky paste originated in Genoa: chopped fresh young sweet basil leaves (if you can grow it, the dark glossy peppery Genovese is the classic cultivar…use no stems), finely grated cheeses (2/3 Parmigiano Reggiano and 1/3 Pecorino Fiore Sardo or Pecorino Romano—pecorino is ewe’s milk cheese), pine nuts (raw or lightly roasted), minced garlic (raw or lightly roasted), finished with extra virgin olive oil to the consistency of mayonnaise (or the texture appealing to you). Pesto is traditionally created by hand with a mortar and pestle—an arduous devotion that rends the finest texture—but nowadays it’s commonly made in the electrified food processor, bless it. If you’re lucky, you can buy good pesto in the refrigerated deli section of your market (I lean on Costco’s). I don’t recommend jars of pesto on the shelf next to pasta sauces…too many degrees of separation from the fresh source.
Pesto, a luscious expression of Genoa’s provender, was first mentioned in print in 1863 in Giovanni Batista Ratto’s cookbook La cuciniera genovese, The Genoese Cook. It’s still in print—four hundred eighty-one recipes–and available on Kindle, for heavens’ sake.
Understandable should your only association with the city of Genoa be from high school—as the hometown of Cristoforo Colombo.
Tucked away at the tippy western top of Italy’s boot, the coastal province of Liguria—Genoa is its capital—I feel does not receive its deserved appreciation. I mean, if you’re in a crowd that travels, how often do you hear a friend gush, “Oh, I’m so excited, we’re going to Florence in the fall—and then Rome, Naples, Capri, maybe Sicily, and on our way back see Ravenna, Bologna, Venice, Verona, fly home from Milan.” Their travel agents forgot the sparkling gem set at the edge of the Ligurian Sea.
They also forgot a three and a half hour ride by ferry from Genoa arrives you on rugged fabled Corsica…continue south a bit and you’ll be on Sardinia. How intriguing is that?
But travel agents do plump for The Italian Riviera.
Beauty and drama in the Ligurian landscape–with the Ligurian Sea at the heart of its curve—begin with a backdrop of statuesque mountains. To the north and west lie the Maritime Alps spilling over into France…to the east lie the Ligurian Apennines vaulting down to Tuscany–then continuing down to the toe of Italy’s boot.
Along the coast, the Italian Riviera links up with the French Riviera then there are hilly oceanside villages on the ocean south to the Tuscan border. Clinging picturesquely to seaside cliffs is Cinque Terre…then further south we come to Porto Fino and Rapallo, towns with narrow beaches and small ports.
So beautiful. (In my girlhood, my parents were fortunate to be able to rent a villino near Rapallo, where I spent probably the most—what? I can’t put a name to it—summer. I was young and beginning to blossom, with my new Italian friends–a couple of them became lifelong friends. We spent days on the beach and nights having supper outdoors (our favorite cafe in Chiavari was on a bluff and we climbed a rope ladder to get to dinner out under a tree) then strolled down to moored yachts hung with lights, singing along with piped-in music of Henri Salvador.
Liguria is, in fact, a region so ultra rich with provender to gather in abundance from earth and sea it has been cultivated and fished since 5000-4000 B.C. ) Men and women of the soil traded timber, skins, and honey with ancient Etruscans and Greeks.
It still is prosperous. Genoa rivals Trieste as the busiest port in Italy, more traffic in and out than Naples and Venice.
Nowadays I read that density of population in this part of Italy is perhaps the country’s most crowded. Small wonder…the combination of noble mountains, deep blue sea, year-around sunshine, and fertile soil –green-clad mountains down to the edges of town–provide an incomparable sustenance for happy living.*
Ligurian wines are—and I am merely a grateful wine drinker, far from an oenophile. But summering in Rapallo, I loved the white wines grown on rocky banks of Portofino…light and crisp, Portofino Bianco. A model white, for my taste.
Why am I telling you about history and geography when we’re here to learn about a shape of pasta? Because, as you well know, cookery reflects its surroundings…if you’re given an abundance of marvelous elements to work with, lucky you…go thou and create.
Which the Genoese did. Do.
As for the origin of linguine, I can imagine that one day a creative Genoese cook rolled out his pasta dough (it’s heavy work, I’ll say it was a man), and likely (I think it fair to speculate) was distracted in the rolling—or was called out of the kitchen before all the paste was rolled. And thus the bottom side of the sheet was flat and the top side was slightly mounded. In a hurry—or not noticing—the cook sliced the dough into the usual very thin strips, let them dry, then boiled them up as usual. His wife likely dressed the now silky pieces with a delicate sauce of clams fresh from the sea (still in their shells), blended with just-pressed olive oil (from their olive grove), shards of butter from the cow outside their door, chopped soe garlic, splashed on white wine from their vineyard, perhaps a pinch of red pepper flakes, a spritz of lemon juice from their orchard, and eccolo! What a treat. “Look, darling,” he said to his wife, “the pasta I made for you has a wonderful texture—unique, don’t you agree? How your sauce does cling to it… Now how did I make that shape?”
Yes, the shape of linguine–Linguine translates as “little tongues…” is a tongue flat on one side and rounded on top? Maybe a misnomer but who cares?
As you likely know, there are tanti shapes of pasta…one AI source says hundreds, another reckons it at thousands. Somewhere in the middle?
Now of long thinnish strands of pasta, there is of course spaghetti, and then very thin capellini (angel hair), fettucine (“little ribbons”), and Bologna’s version of long strips, tagliatelle (from the verb tagliare, “to cut.” ). And bucatini with its hole in the center, is popular around Roman parts.
Ingenuity, darlings, ingenuity in our kitchens.
I wonder. I’m afraid I past the age of Making My Own Pasta, but perhaps from our little vegetable garden—and our crazy-heavy-with-fruit Meyer Lemon tree plus the Pacific Ocean down the lane Bill and I might come up with something ailly like our own version of linguine?
And you know, silly me, reading this over, I suddenly realized I forgot to mention that we both seem to prefer this pasta above spaghetti or vermicelli or other…and I ought mention, too, that I’ve discovered different purveyors of linguini make it differently–the guy on the red package makes his pasta thinner than most. So have yourself a linguine festival and choose your favorit.
*And now as I write this it struck me—forgive the crowing—-except I had nothing to do with it, it was this way when I arrived to marry Bill–that our Santa Cruz, California offers similar elements.
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