Here's a simple and very classic dish from Naples. There are very few ingredients, so quality is of top importance. I call here for top quality canned tomatoes: that's because the best brands have a reputation to maintain, the tomatoes are ripe when they are canned, so they are far better than "fresh" supermarket tomatoes in January in New England. Of course if you can get farm-fresh tomatoes in August and September, by all means use them! But the rest of the time you will probably be happier with canned tomatoes from an excellent producer. The onion, cheese, and basil must also be of good quality, and that's about all there is to this sauce.

Of course it's best served on high-quality pasta, too, which means for a Neapolitan recipes you want Pasta di Gragnano if you can get it.

This was developed in New York City in 1967 and it became an instant classic. It is usually served with penne pasta, but any short pasta works well, rigatoni is also common.

You might wonder: Why vodka? It has so little flavor, what can it contribute to this rich combination of tomatoes, cream, and cheese? This sauce is a bright tomato sauce with the richness and color from the cream. But cream dulls the tomato, so we need to punch up the flavor. A generous dose of doppio tomato paste helps to attain this worthy goal. Then the vodka seems to brighten it up, to help the acidity of the tomatoes break through the richness of the cream and cheese. You don't see many tradition Italian sauces that include both tomatoes and cream; maybe it was this innovation that opened up a new option.

This classic from the tiny region of Molise on the Adriatic coast is simple and delicious, but the quality of the ingredients is important. The sauce is just diced guanciale with onion, garlic, basil, and parsley.  You need good pancetta or guanciale, and fresh herbs work out better than dried herbs.

Unlike the fine folk of Molise, my usual diners are not so eager to scorch their tongues, so I left the chili pepper whole, and served it with a little homemade chili-infused olive oil. I got a little fire, not a raging bonfire. Feel free to chop your chili as you see fit! 

This version of spaghetti and meatballs comes from Abbruzzo but it is eaten all over Italy. Spaghetti alla Chitarra (say key-TAH-rra) is a long pasta that is traditionally made fresh, then rolled into sheets as thick as uncooked spaghetti and pressed onto a chitarra, a frame with many long closely-spaced parallel wires. The resulting spaghetti is square in cross section. The square chitarra pasta has more surface area than round spaghetti so it holds more sauce.

Spaghetti alla chitarra is served many ways, but one of the most traditional ways is with a simple tomato sauce and tiny meatballs called pallottine.

This is like Snails in the Burgundy Style (Escargot) from the other side of the Alps. The Piedmont is also a wine growing region, famous for well-known wines such as Barolo, Barbaresco, Barbera, Gavi, Moscato d'Asti, and more. All of those grape leaves have long produced a quantity of vineyard snails that the Italians prepare in their own way, also with a garlic-parsley-butter but enlivened into a pesto with walnuts and an anchovy.  

You can serve these fancy, in snail shells as shown here set in a deviled-egg plate, or without the shells in a snail dish (a simple plate with depressions to hold the snail butter and snails, or just in a serving dish just big enough to hold everything.

This one is for a special occasion! You make a simple stuffing of mostly crab meat, fold fillets of sole over the filling, and poach. When it's done you reduce the cooking liquid and enrich it with lobster stock and butter.

A paupiette is just a thin fillet of fish or piece of meat filled with something savory. They are typically braised or baked in wine or stock. They're very popular in France, and you can often buy them ready-to-cook.

Cacio e Pepe (say KAHT-cho ay PEP-ay) is a traditional Roman dish of local pasta dressed with a wonderfully cheesy sauce that, like Fettucini Alfredo, has a creamy texture but no cream. The zip of the black pepper heightens the richness of the cheese and butter that, together with some starchy pasta water, form the sauce. 

The method here was developed by J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats, one of my favorite food blogs, with his trademark attention to optimizing a recipe to highlight the best parts of a dish.

This golden oldie was invented in the 1890s by the early master Harry Johnson, and freshened up a century later by modern cocktail engineer and historian Dale DeGroff.  It's on the sweet side but nicely balanced by the generous dose of orange bitters. 

This is a delicious sauce made with cream and pork sausage. The town of Norcia in mountainous southeastern Umbria is renowned for its pork products, and it is the source of this simple and delicious recipe. The town is Norcia, and the sauce made in the style of Norcia uses the adjectival form Norcina, with the extra "n".

The recipe calls for fresh Italian pork sausage, but there are many varieties. Try to get a high-quality sweet Italian sausage without fennel, or if you can't get that then use American country-style sausage meat. It doesn't have to be in the casing because you'll be taking it out of the casing before cooking it anyway. For authenticity, you want the flavor to be about the pork, not dominated by fennel or other seasonings.

Lasagna is a wonderful Italian dish, an opportunity for all sorts of creativity, but there are two especially classic lasagna recipes that you should know about: this Lasagna alla Bolognese, and the Lasagna Napoletana. The Neapolitan version includes sausage and meatballs, fresh mozzarella and ricotta, it's quite a complex production! The Bolognese version is far simpler, just lasagna noodles, Ragu alla Bolognese,  Bechamel Sauce, and grated cheese, but with quality ingredients it is exquisite in its own classical way.

This is a primo version of the classic Trieste dish Scampi alla Busara, but the traditional scampi (langoustines) are hard to come by in New England, and when made with shrimp it's a great pasta-topper!

Northern Italy is known for risottos and polenta and potato dishes, and pasta is usually of the fresh variety made with 00 flour and eggs, but of course everyone has access to store-bought dried durum semolina pasta and that make this classic from the far northeastern coastal regions of Trieste, Aquileia, and Grado into something that you can easily make on a weeknight if you have canned cherry tomatoes and frozen shrimp.

This particular version I made with black squid ink pasta because I thought it would look dramatic, but that's not part of the recipe.

Despite its name proclaiming a Genoese origin, this delicious Neapolitan pasta sauce, a cousin of the French soubise onion sauce, is unknown in Genoa today. It is thought to have been brought to Naples by sailors from Genoa long ago, and to have survived in the south long after it faded into obscurity in the north.

Now Sugo alla Genovese borders on a religion in Naples, where countless households make it every Sunday with the traditional local dried pasta from Gragnano, bought long and broken into serving-size lengths just before boiling it, a job often performed with help from the children of the household. The sauce cooks all day, and when it's done the onions are sweet and amazing. 

This is not a vegetarian recipe. A beef roast cooks with the onions, flavoring them, but it is not served in the sauce or with the pasta at all. In Italy it's traditional to have a simple pasta course before a main course, the primo before the larger secondo. At a fine dinner, you would expect a small dish of pasta with one of the many wonderful sauces (ragu, sugo, salsa) invented for the purpose. A heaping plate of spaghetti is what you eat when you can't afford the secondo course.

The photo to the right is from an artisan pasta shop in Gragnano. Candela is a long tube-like pasta shape about twice as wide as bucatini. As you can see in the photo, Mr. Somma wants tourists to know that this particular shape is to be broken into shorter lengths for cooking. It's in English because the Italians already know this.

This is the classic Italian meat sauce, with an official recipe approved by the Accademia Italiana della Cucina and recorded with the Bologna Chamber of Commerce. The recipe gets updated every few generations to account for the changing availability of ingredients, and importantly, to note which popular variations that have arisen are incompatible with the Accademia's focus on authenticity and quality (for example, using cream instead of milk, or brandy instead of dry wine).

This is from the most recent edition, recorded in 2023.