"To show sorrow for your sins"

"May your solitary meals be delicious and the company just as good.” Deborah Madison

I was feeling depressed - not over anything in particular - it just happens every now and then. Why are we here and all of that. Which naturally led me to a feeling of boredom, even disenchantment with writing a blog. Is it time to give up I asked myself, but nevertheless I sat myself down in front of the computer and pondered, eventually going to a list of various quotes I had found here and there, when I came across this from Rachel Roddy:

"Spaghetti with a sauce made from big onions sliced and cooked slowly in lots of olive oil until they’re really soft, but not brown, then stir in six anchovy fillets at the end, until they dissolve. It is grey-brown, fishy and just what I want for lunch right now at least twice a week.”  Rachel Roddy

Now what can you say about that I wondered? Why was it so enticing? So I looked up the original article in The Guardian with its recipe for Pasta with anchovies and onions (shown above) and an introduction that was all about cooking for one, which was uncannily in tune with my mood - even though I shall be cooking for two this evening - and 99.9999...% as always. And so I began to browse, and as always found more than I had bargained for, learning a few unimportant but interesting things along the way, as well as discovering one more website to add to my list, a newsletter to subscribe to, and some more sage words about pasta from Rachel herself. Not to mention, life, the universe and everything on your plate. So where to begin?

Maybe the first little bit of cheering up - cooking for one. Which as I said I rarely do, but do occasionally wonder how I would cope. Indeed would I cook much any more or just eat sardines on toast for ever more?

Rachel Roddy refers to a book she had been recommended by a friend - What We Eat When We Eat Alone by Deborah Madison which led her to the conclusion that:

"What all the different chapters and stories have in common though, is the fact that people are eating exactly what they want."

I.e - eating alone is not necessarily sad, which leads into her two recipes for that week's column - both featuring anchovies, and both ultra simple. This one is really a variation on the cheese toastie - Crostini with cheese and anchovies - although of course the cheese and the bread are Italian, and the English are not generally into anchovies. And neither is my husband, and so I was cheered by the idea of aloneness - but with anchovies.

Although he - and my younger son too - along with a lot of people, professes to hate anchovies, in fact he does occasionally eat them, unbeknownst to him, mashed into tomato sauce. Not always but sometimes. And so I wondered whether this dish of onions, anchovies and pasta might be another opportunity. Particularly when I read the description of her first encounter with the dish:

"a few months after arriving in Rome, discovering what happens when you fry a sliced onion gently in three tablespoons of oil and a knob of butter until it looks like mush, add a few anchovy fillets so it turns into a grey sludge, then toss the whole shebang with long pasta. It is like stumbling into comfortable umami" Rachel Roddy

So amiably slapdash and comforting.

And then the end of all my internet rambling brought me full circle back to Rachel Roddy and an article by Simran Hans on the Vittles newsletter in which she talks about her own experience of Rachel Roddy's recipe including this rather nice coda:

"An unassuming man first served me this unassuming tangle of anchovy and onion spaghetti in a shallow, blue speckled bowl. He introduced me to Roddy’s cookbooks, a staple of his kitchen. I fell in love with him, and now it’s my kitchen, my blue speckled bowl, too." Simran Hans/Vittles

Okay - enough about romance and comfort, other than to repeat Simran Han's reference to Elizabeth David's advice to "adapt my dish of pasta to my state of mind”. Which could actually be applied to every dish one cooks. Unless you are cooking for picky teenagers.

Still near the end of my 'research' but at the beginning of the process of talking about pasta with onions and anchovies, I found in Rachel Roddy's wonderful book An A-Z of Pasta these words which kind of echo Elizabeth David's words:

"Maybe you pulled the packet of pasta off the shelf and from there decided the sauce. Or was it the idea of sauce that came first, and from there you settled on the shape? Perhaps the craving for a shape and sauce arrived together like an airdrop or brainwave - bigoli in salsa - I want bigoli with a soft, slightly grey, sweet-salty mush of onions and anchovies. Whatever it was, the next step was to put the water on."

So back to the beginning and Pasta with anchovies and onions, which I began to explore, and almost immediately discovered - possibly even more than usual, that:

"Every local seems to have their own take on preparing this classic dish, with no two people making it exactly the same way." Italy Magazine

 I mean what could be simpler? 'Classic dish'? So not just people fancying onions and anchovies with their pasta that night? Well yes, because I pretty soon discovered that this is a Venetian dish where it is called Bigoli in salsa. Bigoli is an ancient pasta from the Veneto mentioned in a 12th century rhyme - along pasta made from a mix of hard and soft flours, sometimes with a little wholemeal.

Then in 1604: 

"a Paduan pasta maker designed and patented a bigolaro, a pasta press used to extrude bigoli and other pasta shapes, they soon became the typical pasta in the Venetian Republic. Generally, bigoli were made by combining flour (generally whole or buckwheat) and water, kneading the dough and pressing it through the bigolaro. However, when times were less lean, protein-rich eggs - often from the anatre mute or Muscovy ducks that populate the Venetian lagoon and Po Delta – were sometimes added too." Italy Magazine

And speaking of less lean times, the dish - Bigoli in salsa - which we are about to come to - is often eaten at times like lent, or on Fridays 'to show sorrow for your sins', which was a rather nice, if glum way of putting it, and perfectly in keeping with my mood of today.

So let's begin with the truly authentic Pasta Grannies, in a very short video which shows a Pasta Granny rather reluctantly and shyly demonstrating her very basic but I think, truly authentic Bigoli in salsa - chopped onions cooked until soft in olive oil, anchovy fillets added and then mixed with the cooked bigoli. It doesn't look much does it, but surely you would think it has to be good or it would not be a classic?

I also discovered in my browsing of bigoli in salsa recipes that initially it was made with salted sardines, and sometimes still is, but they can be hard to find, and so anchovies became the main thing - sometimes salted, sometimes not. Rachel Roddy actually has two recipes herself for this dish which just goes to show that not even one cook can be consistent, which sounds rather derogatory, but ties in with her comments in her book:

"cooking pasta is a skilll acquired by experience, study and observtion, and it is ongoing. I learn every time, when I make penne with cheese for the third time in four days for my picky child."

The recipe in her book varies from that in The Guardian article in quantities, and with no butter. However, she also suggests deviating yet more - to surely a different dish - by adding tuna and peas. This version too is rather orangier in colour which perhaps means the onions have been caramelised a touch? My other example recipe with the actual Bigoli in salsa title is from NIna Parker who adds garlic and in spite of calling it Bigoli in salsa actually uses tagliatelle.

My other examples do not give their dishes the title of Bigoli in salsa - preferring to be more mundane and English, but these are surely the same things, with variations - butter, garlic, parsley, lemon,tomato purée, sugar, white wine, vinegar - balsmic and other - ground cloves and cinnamon, which do actually seem to be a Venetian thing - just a pinch, gremolata, breadcrumbs, not to mention varying proportions of onion and anchovy, red, or brown onions and how they are cut - sliced or chopped - roughly or finely - and whether they are just softened or actually caramelised. Judge for yourself which version you would prefer to try - or make up your own version from a fusion of them all, picking what you would like and rejecting what you don't - as long as the fundamental onions and anchovies are there: Pasta with anchovies and onions - Leite's Culinaria; Pasta with onions and anchovies - Nigella Lawson; Caramelised red onion and anchovy pasta with gremolata - Helen Busiakiewicz/BBC Good Food; Spaghetti alle cipolle rosse e alicie - Memorie di Angelina

Then there were two related recipes - Sicilian anchovy pasta - All Recipes, which I suspect is really a version of the Sicilian dish Pasta con le sarde, which, if memory serves me right includes raisins or currants and saffron. This version did not and is much closer to the Venetian version, so maybe the author is just confused about origins. The other is Spaghetti alla colatura di alici - Memorie di Angelina, and I add it here, not really because it is related, but more because in her red onion version of the dish she adds a touch of colatura di alici which is a sauce made from fermented anchovies - sort of the garum of the Romans. A good Asian fish sauce is recommended as a substitute. But there are no onions, so it's really here just because of the sauce.

Finally - two outliers, the first, since we are talking of Asian fish sauce, is Japanese anchovy pasta - Miwa's Japanese Cooking, which is amazingly close to the original if it wasn't for the seaweed and soy sauce. The second outlier, is an example for all the other dishes that have built on this original pairing of onions and anchovies, which, in this case adds cavolo nero, but which in many others adds all manner of other stuff. Orecchiette with anchovies, cavolo nero and caramelised onions - Olive Magazine

The sun is now shining and I have cheered myself up with the wonderful world of pasta anchovies and onions, all of which I love. I hope that this quote from Simran Hans in that Vittles article applies to my ramblings:

"the meandering ruminations that don’t quite lead to a conclusion but it doesn’t matter because it’s all about the journey.

It certainly doesn't matter to me because I now find myself in a better place.

YEARS GONE BY

October 1 - yet another new month

2024 - An Italian day out in the city

2023 - Venice leeks and what's for dinner tonight?

2022 - Nibbles

2021 - Feasts on platters

2020 - Missing

2019 - A guilty purchase

2018 - Nothing

2017 - Buttermilk - not that simple

2016 - Footy fever