Maggie's Farm

This is about warm pasta dishes, not cold. Room temperature pasta dishes like Nicoise are nice - but that is from Nice, not Italy.  

I do not care for a pasta dish as a meal.  It makes me feel full and lazy. I don't mind the way the Italians do it - and the way it was intended - which is as a small plate tasty treat as a Primo. Maybe 4-6 forks' worth. That's a meal's carbs, because the Secondi usually doesn't have any. Just meat, with some vegetables in oil on the side.

Southern Italians eat pasta, but they don't eat much of it when they do. Maybe the equivalent volume of a potato. Lasagna (which is Southern Italian) is served as a small Primo. - a little 3-or 4-inch square. 

Sicily is not big on pasta. They make a few classics, like with sardines or clams, but do more rice and couscous as primi. On the mainland, the further north you go the less pasta there is. They do more rice (esp. risotto), gnocchi, and polenta for their primi.

Anyway, an Italian meal with a primo and secondo - and wine or beer - is lunchtime, not supper. (Italian breakfast is typically just an espresso or a latte - cappuccino - with a biscotti. Suppers are light, like a soup and lunch leftovers.)  Italians tend not be be fat and even the elderly women mostly tend to look pretty spry except for the ones who stay home all day cooking for their relatives because they taste things all day long.

I married into a family with some roots in Caserta (lots of ziti and spaghetti pasta down there) and I know the rules:

-  When pasta is cooked al dente, you take it out of the pot with pasta-grabbers and dump it directly into the saucepan with the sauce. Then you mix it with the sauce with the heat on.  You don't drain pasta.

-  Depending on the volume of sauce you have made, you dump a cup or half-cup of the pasta water into the pasta-sauce mix, and slop it all together with the pasta-grabber (with the heat on). Enough pasta water to be right. Heat is on. The pasta water binds it all together and helps the sauce coat the pasta completely.

My favorite pasta primo is Tagliatelle con Funghi  (Fresh Porcini, ideally)

My second favorite is Aglio e Olio (as in photo)

What is the ultimate pasta Primo? The festive Timballo.  I have never had a slice of one, and probably never will have the chance because it's not a restaurant item.

Tomato sauces? Yuk. Cristoforo Columbo and his pals, in my view, wrecked Italian cooking by bringing the tomato back from Central America. Not to mention the Cultural Appropriation sin of putting the Mayan tomato in Italian food. But wait - the Italians stole pizza from the Greeks? And pasta from China. Is there anything that college kitchens will be able to feed the brats now? I mean, like, ice cream is Egyptian and yoghurt is Turkish.  Let them eat gluten-free cake.

What pastas do you like to make?