We're looking at highs of 90 degrees for at least the next five days here in New York City. Ready to talk about what you're hungry when it's too darn hot?
No-Cook Tomato Sauce is one of our favorite ways to keep it cool in the kitchen: marinate peak of the season chopped fresh tomatoes with olive oil, salt and pepper, maybe some fresh mozzarella. Let them sit together for an hour or as long as you have, as a tomato broth develops. Add in some ripped up basil leaves and red onion, if you like, as you put the pasta water over to boil.
Cook up some pasta. Ladle the sauce on top of the warm pasta ... and a cool, easy dinner is served.
The New York Times Magazine got us a little hot under the collar on Sunday. Amanda Hesser wrote about the tradition of these simple, raw tomato sauces in her Recipe Redux column ...
Hesser suggested that combining hot pasta with a simple cold sauce is totally 1990's (and made us feel pretty un-cool to have a bowl of tomatoes marinating away in the next room). She wrote that her chef friend was "more or less" horrified by the idea. Bah, we're not horrified at all. (And we're not going to get on the steaming subway to buy a lobster as her "improved" recipe requires.)
We like Pamela Sherrid’s original recipe for Summer Pasta. Stay cool and enjoy.
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I just downloaded the atrticle & recipe this morning...
Is this really the invention of a non-Italian? I have to express doubts because I've had this dish in Italy made by friends of mine... and these are not people who spend their time trolling cookbooks, magazines or blogs... These are improvising university students who have tradition in their blood and pass recipes from one to another because their mothers cooked the food the way they are eating it. That's the impression I got anyway. Often, we'd go to the market and somebody would make a typical dish from Rome, or Calabria, or Apulia... and the rest of us would help.
Perhaps Ms. Sherrid merely introduced an Italian method of making pasta to Americans and/or English-speaking folk?
Again, I have yet to read the Hesser article, but fully intend to by the end of today... and yes, wierder things have happened than for an Italian to learn about a non-Italian way to make pasta, but in this case, I suspect this recipe has "Denominazione di origine controllata" written all over it.
PS: The real foodies here probably already know this, but Cook's Illustrated did their version of the same dish in their current issue. What's up with all these writers thinking the same thing? More importantly, who has the better recipe??? That's what I really want to know!!!
PPS: Yes, this dish is outstanding, especially in this weather!
Thank god. I thought I was insane for getting really, really pi**ed about this article when I read it on Sunday night.
I went back through my memories and I'm pretty damn sure that I had this dish IN Italy when i was in 10th grade which was quite a few years before 1996 thankyouverymuch.
It feels like sensless hubris for anyone to "claim" having invented this dish, and to call it a "salad" is quite frankly, ridiculous.
I knew you were a sensible man Chris! Thanks for the opportunity to vent about this. The boy was completely unsympathetic ;-)
After reading the comments here, I read the NY Times article carefully. I have to say, as far as I know, the rather classic Italian pasta dish that qualifies as "summer pasta" (according to my father who lived in Rome part of every year) was comprised strictly of olive oil, tomato, basil, and salt (though really it's heavily salted water for the pasta). He gets upset if I add garlic. I think Marcella Hazan lists a fresh tomato and basil option for her Aio e Oio "recipe" in Essentials of Italian Cooking. On that note, the NY Times article spells out the recipe under review:
"First you combine the garlic, basil and oil and let the mixture macerate. A few hours later you add tomatoes and let it sit some more. Next, you pour the cooked rigatoni over the tomatoes, and cubes of mozzarella over the rigatoni. Then you gently mix the cheese into the pasta, coating it with a buttery veil of fat, before tossing it with the tomatoes at the bottom."
I think it is the particular method spelled out here (especially the cubes of mozzarella coating the pasta") that may have been objectionable to the chef friend. Plus, I've always been taught to add the basil (torn only, no cutting) right at the end to maintain a fresh bite. It may seem like nitpicking, but I don't think the author of the NY Times article is claiming the "invention" of summer pasta outside of Italy.
I'll agree with minipanda. It's the addition of mozzarella that makes it "new." However, I used to add mozzarella in the late 70s, so it's still not a 1990 "invention."
I've been eating my grandmother's (Sicilian) Summer Sauce since sometime in the 1950s. Always oil, garlic, basil and tomatoes, with Romano cheese tossed in with the pasta. Sometimes she'd add a little fresh oregano or sage. I don't remember onions it hers.
I can hardly wait each summer for our tomatoes to be ready for this sauce.
My mother makes a similar summer sauce from a Mr. Food cookbook that also lacks the mozzarella. Definitely not chic, but awfully good. Everyone who eats it wants the recipe. I can't imagine that combining fresh tomatoes, olive oil, basil, garlic and seasonings is all that groundbreaking, however!
It sounds lovely, wherever its from! And hurray for Marcella Hazan!