Pasta Primavera

"I find it very hard to imagine that prior to 1975, nobody in the history of the universe had thought to combine fresh spring vegetables and pasta in a creamy sauce" J. Kenji López-Alt/Serious Eats

Yes I know, pasta again. Well it does loom large in our cooking lives does it not? Well it certainly does in mine. Ironically this post is 'inspired' by a desk calendar recipe for White bean primavera by Sarah di Gregorio. No pasta in sight. What looks like pasta is actually shredded carrot. Ironic, but also sort of appropriate, because it seems that Pasta primavera is not an Italian dish at all.

So as I was gathering quotes, recipes and pictures, I started to stray into that old authenticity thing. I'm completely with J. Kenji López-Alt when he says he finds it unbelievable that somebody in Italy didn't make something that could be called Pasta primavera. We probably all have at some time in our lives made a pasta with a sauce made with whatever vegetables we had in the fridge - and if it's spring, those vegetables would be springlike. I know I've done it and I have half-jokingly called it pasta primavera. It's such a lovely word - 'primavera' isn't it, and it automatically conjures up Botticelli's masterpiece although that's all about flowers and beautiful renaissance ladies. So also not relevant. But here it is.

J. Kenji López-Alt is right though. When I began by searching through my supposedly 'authentic' Italian cookbooks none of them had a recipe for Pasta primavera. There are recipes for pasta with various spring vegetables, but nothing with that name. So no - it's not Italian. It's American/Italian, which I am beginning to realise is a rather huge cuisine. I wonder whether anyone has written a book on it? I'm guessing they have. And is there an Australian/Italian cuisine? Well I had a quick look and found that yes there is - well some say there is. There's an Italian restaurant in Melbourne which says on its home page that:

"we focus on a contemporary Australian interpretation of rustic Italian cuisine.  Second generation comfort food if you will: Italian enough for nonna and Australian enough for multicultural Melbourne."

So I looked at their menu and I have to confess that to my eyes it looked pretty much Italian to me - Italian according to those 'authentic' Italian cookbooks that is. But then again, maybe that's because I really only know what I see in Australia. The chatting hordes on reddit had a few things to say about this, which I thought were somewhat apposite:

"All food is local and people often forget about that.

Italian food was brought over by the post-war immigrants, but they had to adapt it to the local markets. Not just to what the local population was willing to go out and pay for in a restaurant, but also what and when ingredients were available (especially in the age before quick global shipping). Thus [this is] why all cuisine evolved the way it did." Grammarhead-Shark/reddit

Or another reddit commenter who described how he imagined an Italian immigrant - althought it applies to all immigrants of course - subtly changed the dishes from his homeland:

"I've heard of carbonara, let's make that. You know what would go well in this? Cream. Can't get guanciale... let's use bacon. Oh, wow, Giulia, how good is this shit. Let's open a restaurant and share this. And, honestly, a restaurant that only cooks from one region wouldn't be all that popular, so let's just call it all Italian and diversify the menu. Then Aussies will eat it too." reddit

The people joining in that part of the conversation were also at pains to point out that in Italy food is very local and that a Sicilian would cook bolognese very differently from someone in its home of Emilia-Romagno, so that even in Italy you will find 'inauthentic' cuisine.

But enough of that - most of it has been said many times before. Back to American/Italian Pasta primavera. The picture at the top of the page is from the original 'authentic' - yes even American/Italian can be 'authentic - Pasta primavera from Max Tucci on the Appetito website. In the article he fills in on the background history of the dish. The inventor is this man - Sirio Maccioni, a close friend of his father's - shown here in his massively popular Le Cirque restaurant in New York. The time is the 1970s, the actual date 1975 for the dish's introduction to the world, first publicised by food critics in 1977.

Sirio Maccioni is an Italian immigrant from Florence, who on arrival in America began working at Delmonico's - another New York Italian institution. Eventually he launched his own restaurant - Le Cirque - which was the glitzy place where the rich and famous dined, for a very long time, unitl its eventual demise. Initially the story of the invention of this dish as told by its inventor was:

"I believe it started in 1975, when I visited Prince Edward Island with a number of colleagues, including Craig Claiborne of the New York Times. To eat we had only lobster and wild boar. After a week of this, everyone said, "Can we have some pasta?" I set out to make two dishes, one with vegetables, one Alfredo style. But in the end I mixed it all together, vegetables with spaghetti and cream. After Claiborne wrote about it in the Times, everybody started to come to Le Cirque and ask for spaghetti alla primavera. But my French chef said, "You want to do spaghetti? I don't want spaghetti in my kitchen!" I didn't want a crisis. So I decided to prepare it in the dining room, on a cart, tableside. It looked nice, and it tasted nice. We've never put it on the menu, but people still ask for it." Sirio Maccioni, co-owner of Le Cirque restaurant in New York City

However, later in life, in a memoir, Maccioni changed the story slightly to say it was a recipe of his wife's. Whatever is true, it is certainly the story most often told of its inception, although apparently several other Italian/American chefs have claimed it as theirs. But as we said at the start, surely this is a dish from ancient times.

To end on a sadder note. Time marches on and eventually Le Cirque closed, Sirio Macchioni died and the dish died too:

"It wasn’t long before this “mad jumble of vegetables over pasta” (as Amanda Hesser described it in the same pages three decades later) had migrated to more casual red sauce joints all over the States – and then, just as abruptly, it fell from favour, as such madly fashionable dishes often do" Felicity Cloake

It's always been there though, even if you don't often find it on Italian restaurant menus - of whatever kind.

So let's imagine that the original recipe from Le Cirque is the touchstone, so what has everybody (a) thought about it and (b) done with it.

The two recipes that I found which were the most 'knowing', if that's the right word, about the origins and what was potentially right or wrong about it were Felicity Cloake doing her thing on How to make the perfect Pasta primavera in The Guardian and J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats with his Pasta primavera - pasta with spring vegetables - who actually had two different looking pictures - the last two below. Change your pasta and everything changes with it!

Both of these people seemed to think that the original was fussy:

"The original Le Cirque version of the dish is a complicated affair, as all fancy restaurant food tends to be." J. Kenji López-Alt/Serious Eats

Who also said - and Felicity agreed, that:

"Tomatoes seemed out of place in a spring dish, and I thought the mushrooms, while tasty, distracted a bit from the green vegetables. My version would have to be a little simpler and cleaner." J. Kenji López-Alt/Serious Eats

They, and many others it seems, argued about cream however, because they thought it was too heavy. Felicity stuck to the cream eventually, having tried none - just pasta water, and crème fraïche, although I think she decreased the amount. J. Kenji however, went for crème fraïche.

Here I will insert Giorgio Locatelli's Conchiglie primavera as posted on The Vegetarian Times, because he used - like Felicity and several others - large pasta such as conchiglie, pappardelle and paccheri. Now he did spend his youth in Italy, but he has lived in the UK for a very long-time, so perhaps English/Italian - is that a cuisine too? He also stuck with the tomatoes I see, although I do take Felicty's and J/ Kenji's point about them not being springlike.

Herewith a few examples found elsewhere - first the all green ones: Pasta primavera - delicous. UK; Stracci Primavera with Sweet Peas, Asparagus, Edamame, Mint and Feta - Jamie Oliver and Pasta primavera with leeks, zucchini and ricotta - Dominic Smith/delicious. - now he adds cheese - as do a few others here and there - usually ricotta - but 'inauthentic'.

And for the tomato lovers amongst us - well we all love tomatoes don't we, although we are probably eating less of them at the moment because of the horrific price: Pasta primavera - Nagi Maehashi/Recipe Tin Eats - now she's of Japanese origin; Pasta primavera - Love and Lemons; Pasta primavera - The Mediterranean Dish; Pasta primavera - Coles; Easy pasta primavera - Tom Walton/delicious., who adds prosciutto (or is it pancetta) to his.

That's the thing though isn't it? Really this is a template kind of recipe which you can vary to your heart's content as long as you keep the basic ideas - creamy - whether it be from cream, crème fraïche or pasta water; spring vegetables - whatever comes to hand and springlike in overall feel. At what point you mess just a little too much by adding pancetta or prawns or chicken - or those tomatoes and mushrooms - who knows. But then Sirio Macchioni himself didn't really stay strictly with spring with his mushrooms and tomatoes.

And it's not spring here either. Decidedly not today. But thanks to modern growing methods, you can now get most of those spring vegetables all year round. Maybe I should try with lettuce. David, not knowing that I already had two Iceberg lettuces in the fridge - one nearly finished I will admit - has just bought me yet another one.

YEARS GONE BY

June 6

2024 - Nothing

2023 - Carne assada or asada?

2022 - Nothing

2021 - Upper middle vegan

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Is this the end for smashed avocado?

2018 - and pepper

2017 - Nothing