A recipe for surprising pasta
This is one of several extremely basic seeming pasta recipes I’ve been putting off, for snobbery reasons only—if it’s so simple, there can’t really be much to learn, and it won’t be interesting to write about, is the conversation I find myself having with myself. That snobbery often gets the best of me, and this time was no exception. When I realized that not only had I not properly read the recipe and gotten a good sense of the fun tweaks on old favorites it contained, but also that its origin had more to it and was worth digging into it.
Indeed, it will shock no one to find out that not only is this recipe featured in The New York Times, but it has connections to both Mario Batali and Lidia Bastianich. I’ve written about my family’s love of Lidia before, but we were certainly under the thrall of Batali as well. My father loved Molto Mario, had at least one of Batali’s cookbooks, and spoke fondly of special meals at Esca, the seafood restaurant that was owned by the Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group, before they were bought out by their partner (it closed last year). That was all, of course, before Batali’s extensively covered fall from grace. Since then, he has laid low, save for recently winning a Boston court case in which he was accused of sexual assault.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time wondering what my father would have thought about the men he admired whose legacies have radically shifted in the years after his death, an exercise that has been mostly futile. As I’ve written before, an aspect of grief that is particularly exhausting is trying to hold up both sides of the relationship, before realizing you are talking to yourself instead of the person you want to be talking to. I think he would be disgusted and saddened by their behavior, but what I really want is not the certainty of how he would react but the option to discuss it with him, regardless of the outcome of the conversation.
Penne With Roasted Cherry Tomatoes was not authored by Batali, but by Paola di Mauro, who, as Amanda Hesser notes in the recipe’s headnotes, “was one of a band of cooks who helped distinguish ‘cucina casalinga,’ roughly translated as ‘housewives’ cooking,” and was a mentor to both Batali and Bastianich. Though di Mauro developed a cult following of her own among chefs, her feature in the Times is in small part a testament to how much Batali, and his orbit of Lidia, and her son and co-restauranteur Joe, dominated the space circa 2001.
At first glance, I assumed this was just a recipe for tomato sauce with cherry tomatoes, bread crumbs, and parmesan—featuring a delicious, but not mind-altering, option to roast the tomatoes instead of cook them on the stovetop. Though I usually use kosher salt, I used sea salt because the recipe called for it, and prepped my bread crumbs sort of fresh—what I like to do is keep stale bread (whatever loaf sadly didn’t get eaten before it went on its way) in the fridge for such occasions.
What I missed initially was that you put the bread crumbs and parmesan on top of the tomatoes before you roast them, resulting in some nice crispy bits to contrast with the soft tomatoes. I didn’t realize this until I had literally put the tomatoes in the oven, but I swiftly whipped them out to add said topping once I read the recipe again. (I’m a broken record but: what I learn when I actually use my brain!) I did this on a sheet pan instead of a casserole dish, but once heated on high, the crunchy bits of cheese and bread can be a little hard to scrape from a sheet pan and I’m sure glass or ceramic would be easier for getting all those delicious parts. (For what it’s worth, A Los Angeles Times article on di Mauro that mentions this recipe actually suggests metal because glass “doesn’t heat up quickly enough so the juices won’t evaporate enough to make the sauce the right consistency.”) I didn’t find the need to add any more olive oil at the end; as one very verbal commenter at the Times notes, there’s plenty, though a glaze with some finishing oil would be fine.
If you’re looking for an old twist on a classic, this is an easy way to twist, especially in summer, when cherry tomatoes are at their peak. For me, it prompted more wondering—I don’t remember eating this, so was it ever served to me? Perhaps the involvement of Lidia and Mario was enough to push my father to include it in his favorite recipes. Or maybe he read the article and loved the story of Paola di Mauro, or ate at her son’s restaurant when he was living in Rome. I’ll never get to talk it out with him, and living in that in between is the strangest part.
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