All around Rome and its region, Lazio, these four recipes are available, and while they are available throughout Italy, they are traditional to Rome. They're all related, and you can think of them as descendants of the simple and venerable Cacio e Pepe.
Here they are, with links to the recipes:
This is my favorite of the Four Classic Roman Pasta Dishes. It's essentially a Pasta Cacio e Pepe in which you first fry up a batch of chopped guanciale and stir the pasta into the bacon fat. Then you add the finely grated cheese like in the Cacio e Pepe to make the sauce. When you use top quality ingredients and good IGP pasta di Gragnano, it's simple and simply wonderful!
Rigatoni or other short, ribbed pasta is traditional for this dish. Shown here is Mezze Maniche from Pasta Somma in Gragnano.
This is one of the four classic Roman pasta dishes, along with Pasta Cacio e Pepe, Pasta alla Gricia, and Pasta alla Carbonara. This one has a light zesty tomato sauce enriched with guanciale (smoke pork jowl).
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 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.
In May and June of 2024, we explored Prague, Vienna, Salzburg, Venice, Sorrento, and all the parts of Italy that we had not yet explored, except Sardinia. It was the biggest and final of three grand vacations that I had been planning since 2020.
This trip was extraordinarily productive on the foodie front, including a number of discoveries made and resolved on the trip. I had spent months researching the foodways of each location that we visited, but there were still surprises that I learned of for the first time and then learned enough about to report on.
This article is the entry point to 23 pages that describe the trip day by day. At the bottom of each page you can click forward or back a day, or jump to any of the 23 pages in this journal.
It started with a chance comment from my friend Bryan that his knowledge of food in the Slavic countries north of the Middle East was limited, and that as far as he knew the people of Russia silently starved. I was in the room, and our friend John Morse was there as well. As I prepared a reply, John quickly said that there a lot of really interesting Russian food and that Bryan and his wife should have a Russian feast at my house!
So I adjusted my reply from a somewhat dry anthropological review of Russian food ways to a hearty invitation while I mentally scanned the calendar and my opportunities to get to the right markets. I enjoy putting on these feasts, but they take planning and shopping, and the holidays were approaching. The Russian feast in particular has many components that are unfamiliar to western diners, so it can have great impact for culinary explorers if it's planned, supplied, prepared, and executed carefully.
It took a few weeks, but we finally did it last night, 17 November 2024. Guests were Bryan Gregory and his wife Bridget, and our friends Don Nicholson and his wife Jen. Don and I have known each other for 25 years, but this was his first feast at our house.
We had five courses:
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.
