Italy

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 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.

Here's another unexpected and delicious flavor combination from Italy, somewhat Americanized. The original Italian recipe, gamberoni all'arancia in padella, used olive oil instead of butter, used bigger shrimp, it skipped the brief marination step, and it did not include the orange zest. I tried it that way first, but then I did it this way and we both liked it better. I think the shredded orange zest makes it more pretty, too.

This recipe is quick and easy, with no strange ingredients or tricky techniques, which makes it a good choice for a work night dinner.

This is a staple of children's menus but it's also a delightful primo course when made with good ingredients and fresh gnocchi, and it's vegetarian, too! Kids like it because it has no garlic or onion, but top-quality ingredients really shine, like bright sunny Sorrento in the summer! 

This is easy to assemble ahead of time and then bake just before serving.

This recipe for gamberoni al forno (baked jumbo shrimp) is simple and easily expandable. It has just four ingredients, three of which you probably have in the kitchen most days.

The simple word shrimp is astoundingly confusing when you try to get into details relevant to the kitchen. Please see Shrimp.

Cotechino in Camicia means "Cotechino in a shirt" because in this recipe the unctuous cotechino sausage is wrapped in a shirt of lean chicken!