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A Conversation About Pasta With Broccoli Raab and Anchovies
No cheese. No sausage. Trust me.
Just before this all happened, I was eating orecchiette with broccoli raab and sausage at Manducatis Rustica in Queens with my three other guys, all of us old-time buddies saying hi over some pasta.
One was Lars, a wine guy (he worked for Banfi for about 800 years, but in any case knows more about wine than almost anyone I’ve ever met) who’s half Italian (and speaks it, among other languages). He has spent a lot of time in Italy and is always good for a food anecdote or two. He’s especially knowledgeable about the food of Tuscany and farther south — Lazio, the Marches, Calabria, Puglia, Sicily.
This pasta at Manducatis was good. Lars said, “You know, the broccoli raab thing is arguably even better with anchovies and garlic than it is with pasta — and that’s how everyone made it when they couldn’t afford sausage.” (For some reason, to me, the most memorable Lars story is how really poor people had an anchovy hanging from a rope in their kitchens, and would wipe their bread on it for flavor. That’s cucina povera.)
As we talked about this some more, he mentioned cooking the greens and the pasta in the same pot, and I remembered a Minimalist column I did with my friend Jack Bishop like 20 years ago. Jack is also…
