Issue #168: Pasta Primavera
An Ersatz Italian Spring Pasta that's Perfect for Late Summer, Too
I know that I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but this is the time of year when my kitchen is overflowing with amazing local produce, most of it from just down the road. Even so, I can’t walk through a farmstand or a farmers’ market without buying more: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, melons, cabbage, more tomatoes, carrots, celery, kale. Every time I open my fridge I’m overwhelmed with possibility and responsibility.
Any dish that allows me to use up a decent amount of different types of vegetables is welcome at our table these days. The corn pudding recipe I shared in Issue #69 is a perennial favorite. I’ve already made it several times this year. Although the basic recipe calls for onions, green pepper, and corn, I’ve been known to also add kohlrabi, spinach, kale, green tomatoes, garlic scapes, daikon, fennel, carrots, celery and its root, Swiss chard, cabbage, and handfuls of fresh herbs—sometimes all in the same pudding.
The other night, a colleague of Nate’s was coming to dinner, just a day before we were leaving for a two-week trip to Asia. (I wrote this newsletter on our 14-hour flight to Seoul.) I wasn’t sure what I was going to make, but I had a fridge full of produce and a few other perishable ingredients, like fresh ricotta, that certainly wouldn’t make it until we got back.
I settled on a dish I think of as a kind of Pasta Primavera, a mainstay of menus in the 1970s and 80s. Admittedly, it’s late summer, not spring (primavera means “springtime” in Italian). And I modernized my version to maximize umami and to use as many vegetables from the fridge as I could. It was so delicious, we enjoyed it the next night, as well. And so, I’ve decided to share with you the recipe, more of a technique, really, so that you, too, can benefit from Pasta Primavera’s flexibility and deliciousness.
But First, A Little History…
Although Pasta Primavera sounds like a dish that originated centuries ago somewhere in Italy, in fact it is said to have been concocted in 1975 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The birthplace was Le Cirque, a French restaurant beloved by the city’s socialite and celebrity set, over which the late owner/maître d’ Sirio Maccioni reigned. Although, as the name would suggest, the menu was decidedly French—the kitchen overseen by a series of celebrated French chefs that included the late Alain Sailhac, the superstar Daniel Boulud, and the Ducasse disciple Sylvain Portay—Sirio and his wife Egidiana were very Italian, very Tuscan to be more exact.
In interviews about and in tableside conversations at Le Cirque, Sirio would always say how New York wouldn’t have accepted a high-end Italian restaurant when he opened his French restaurant in the 1974. French food was the only cuisine at the time considered haute. He wasn’t wrong. While to today’s foodies it may seem odd to think of a time when Italian food was considered inferior to French, in my lifetime chefs and restaurateurs feuded with critics who felt they didn’t valorize Italian cuisine appropriately. One New York Times critic in 1990s famously went on the record to say he didn’t think an Italian restaurant could ever achieve four stars.
That doesn’t mean that people in the know didn’t love Italian food. And anyone who was able to get a table at Le Cirque in its heyday was someone in the know. Although the source of the inspiration to combine spaghetti with a bunch of fresh vegetables cooked separately to make the first off-menu Pasta Primavera served at Le Cirque is disputed—some say it was artist Ed Giobbi, who made it for Sirio and then Le Cirque chef Jean Vergnes; others say it was Vergnes, himself; in his memoir, Sirio said it was his wife Egidiana, who was a famously good cook (more on that later); still others suggest it is Italian through and through—the dish took on legendary status.
Full disclosure: I consumed many calories and spent many hours of my formative years as a young gastronome at the tables and in the kitchens of Le Cirque, it being a favorite stomping ground of my mentor and friend from the Cornell Hotel School, Professor Tom Kelly. After working with Daniel Boulud as one of the guest chefs in a series of dinners at school, he invited me to come work for a few days in the Le Cirque kitchens over spring break. Later, I was engaged to co-author a proposal with Egi Maccioni for a Tuscan cookbook, the creative process for which took place over a couple of weeks cooking alongside her in their home in Montecatini Terme.
Like the off-menu animal-style burgers at In-n-Out, Pasta Primavera became the dish that everyone wanted to eat. It was a badly kept gourmet secret of New York society, it jibed with the spa-cuisine ethos of the era, and it was a sort of pain to make. The “original recipe” published by Craig Claiborne in the New York Times in 1977 had ten steps, each vegetable cooked separately for maximum effect before combing them all with the noodles. When I started working on the line at a beloved bistro in downtown Toronto in the late 1980s, frequented by celebs coming north for the newly established Toronto Film Festival, we would occasionally run a Pasta Primavera special, just to show we knew what time it was in New York.
A Technique More Than a Recipe
None of these Pasta Primavera’s were exactly like the one I made the other night for dinner. Here’s what I did and what I would encourage you to do sometime very soon:
First, I set a large pot of heavily salted water over high heat to boil.
In a large pan I sautéed a little finely chopped onion, scallion, and some garlic scapes with a pinch of salt in olive oil. Then I added a half-pint of Chanterelles I had picked up at the Norwich Farmers Market. Once cooked, I deglazed the pan with a splash of white wine. Once the wine was totally evaporated, I transferred the mushrooms to a bowl and set them aside to use as a garnish for the finished dish.
Into the same pan I put some more olive oil, a more generous amount of chopped onion and garlic scapes, and a pinch of salt. Then some green pepper and a little minced fresh chili. Next a small, unripe green tomato, chopped fine. Then a small head of roasted cauliflower (see Issue #4) that I cored and chopped into tiny florets. Then the kernels from a couple of ears of fresh corn.
While the vegetables sizzled away, I added about ½ cup of white wine and reduced it to almost dry, then added ½ cup of vegetable stock and a heaping tablespoon of white miso for umami and for its binding effect. I add about ¼ cup of crème fraiche and continued simmering the sauce, while I added 300 grams of short pasta (I used casarecce) to the boiling salted water.
Next, to the simmering sauté pan, I added a very generous handful of chopped herbs—fresh basil, oregano, and lemon balm—and a few grinds of black pepper. Once the pasta was cooked, I lifted it out of the pan with a spider and added it to the sauté pan, along with about 1/3 cup of its cooking water. I kept it simmering as I added some freshly grated parmesan cheese, a pat of butter, and a drizzle of fine extra-virgin olive oil to bind everything together. I tossed it all several times, tasted to adjust the seasoning, and spooned it into warm pasta bowls, topping each with a generous dollop of fresh ricotta and then the sautéed chanterelles.
There are so many different vegetables you could use for this pasta—broccoli, asparagus, cherry tomatoes, kohlrabi, and peas, for example. Any combination of herbs. Heavy cream, or Greek yogurt, chicken stock, water, champagne. The technique is endlessly adaptable.
To re-serve the leftovers the next day, in a large pan I sautéed some more onion and fresh corn kernels I needed to use. I added some more wine and then the leftover Pasta Primavera from the night before. To this I stirred in a lone egg yolk I found that I beat with some heavy cream to make a classic liaison. The pasta was revived like new.
The reason I have run through my whole process in paragraph form is it seems silly to me to follow a recipe for a dish so dependent on what you already have to use up. The last thing you should do is go out to the grocery store with a shopping list of produce to purchase everything I just described. A while back in Issue #23, I established some pasta guidelines, a grammar, if you will, for how to assemble a pasta like an Italian. That’s what I’ve applied here, admittedly with a French accent. I think Sirio, Egi, and their chefs would be proud.
I hope you will give it a try.