The Essential James Beard Cookbook (43 page)

Beat the eggs in a bowl with ½ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon pepper. Add the zucchini mixture and 4 tablespoons of the grated cheese. Heat the butter over medium-low heat in a heavy 10-inch skillet, preferably cast-iron, until it foams and begins to bubble. Pour the mixture into the skillet, and add the parsley and basil. Keeping the heat very low, cook only until the eggs have set, about 20 minutes. The top should still be a little runny. Sprinkle with the remaining tablespoon grated cheese, and put under a hot broiler for not less than 30 seconds nor more than a minute, until barely set on top, but not brown. Run a sharp knife or thin spatula around the edges of the frittata to loosen it from the pan, slide it out on a plate, and cool to room temperature. Cut into wedges and serve. This is equally good if it is chilled.

PASTA

Basic Egg Pasta

Egg White Noodles

Barbara Kafka’s Buckwheat Noodles

Avocado Pasta with Cream

Green Noodles Bolognese

Kreplach

Nockerli

Angel Hair Pasta with Light Tomato Sauce

Fettuccine with Zucchini

Noodles with Cabbage

Pasta with Parsley Pesto, Cherry Tomatoes, and Dill

Pasta Primavera

Pasta con Quattro Formaggi

Swordfish-Olive Pasta

Penne with Tomato–Ground Meat Sauce

Chèvre-Tomato Spaghetti

Spaghetti with Clam Sauce

Spaghetti with Raisin and Pine Nut Sauce

Spaghettini with Spinach-Anchovy Sauce

Tagliarini Verdi alla Pancetta

Beef and Scallops with Cellophane Noodles

Peking Curry–Tomato Sauce on Noodles

Herbed Noodle Salad

Beach Pâté

Cannelloni with Tomato Sauce

Macaroni and Cheese

Lasagne

Pasta and Cheese Roll in Tomato Sauce

Pastitsio for a Party

Stuffed Shells

Cornmeal Gnocchi

BASIC EGG PASTA

MAKES ABOUT 1 POUND

1½ cups all-purpose flour, plus more for kneading by hand

½ teaspoon plain table or fine sea salt

2 large eggs, at room temperature

1 tablespoon olive oil, if mixing in an electric mixer or food processor

To mix the dough by hand: Put the flour mixed with the salt on a wooden board or a countertop. Make a well in the center of the mound, and break the eggs into the well. Beat the eggs with a fork, slowly incorporating the flour from the sides of the well. As you beat the eggs with one hand, your other hand should be shoring up the sides of the mound.

After a while, the paste will begin to clog the tines of the fork. Clean it off and continue to mix the flour into the egg mixture with your fingertips, just as you would in making any paste. When the flour and egg are all mixed, press the dough into a ball. It will seem to be composed of flakes of dough. Set it aside to rest for a minute while you wash your hands, scrape and clean the board, and dust it with flour. If there are dry flakes that obstinately refuse to become part of the mass, get rid of them now.

Now begin to knead the dough. Push the heel of your hand down hard, stretching the dough firmly away from you. Fold the flap back toward you and give the lump of dough a quarter-turn. Press down on another section of the dough.

Hand-mixed dough isn’t easy to work with. It is stiff-textured and requires a lot of hard pummeling. At first it may seem that the ball of dough won’t hold together, but the act of kneading will distribute the moisture evenly through it, and, after a few minutes, it should begin to form a ball.

Knead for a full 10 minutes, pushing, folding, and turning until the dough is smooth. The thing to remember is that this is supposed to be harder than kneading bread, so don’t despair. When you are done, pat the dough into a neat ball and cover it with a dish towel or a sheet of plastic wrap. Let it rest for at least 30 minutes. Two hours’ rest is even better.

To make the dough with a heavy-duty stand mixer: Fit the paddle attachment into your electric mixer. Put the flour and salt into the bowl, and give it a quick whirl to mix them. Add the eggs and oil and turn on the beater. Let it go for half a minute, until you have coarse grains of dough in the bowl, something like the consistency of piecrust before it is gathered into a ball.

Replace the paddle with the dough hook and knead in the bowl for 5 minutes. Or take the dough from the bowl, dust a wooden surface with flour, pat the dough into a ball, and knead it for 10 minutes. You will find that this dough is much easier to work with than the hand-mixed dough. After 10 minutes, you should have a firm, smooth, pale yellow ball of dough. Put it to rest under a dish towel or in plastic wrap.

To mix the dough with a food processor: Put the metal blade into the food processor. Measure in the flour and salt, and process briefly to blend them. Drop the eggs and oil through the feeding tube, and let the machine run until the dough begins to form a ball; around 15 seconds should do it. Once you’ve become familiar with the method, you’ll be able to correct the recipe at this point. If the dough seems too sticky, add a tablespoon or two more flour. If it’s too dry, add a few drops of water or part of an egg. Process again briefly.

Beard on … Pasta

I never get tired of pasta, any more than I can get tired of bread. I eat it when I’m exhausted and want a quick meal that will give me a lift. I eat it when I am in an ambitious mood, looking for something pleasant and different to compliment a guest.

When I want something spicy, I toss spaghetti with warm olive oil, garlic, and anchovies. When I want something voluptuous, I bake elbow macaroni in a cheese-rich béchamel sauce. And when I’m fed up with complicated foods, I fill a bowl with piping-hot green noodles and top them with icy tomatoes and scallions in a sharp vinaigrette.

Pasta is always the same, yet always different. It has a comforting familiarity, with its pale golden color and chewy, wheaten taste. And then there are all those amusing shapes, and the thousands of ways to sauce them: from avocado to zucchini, or from plain butter to cheese to purée of frog’s legs. It’s always different because we find pasta recipes in nearly every country in the world.

In my own life, pasta didn’t begin as an Italian food at all. I must have been six or seven before I even ate spaghetti, but I was eating Chinese noodles long before that.

They were given to me by Let, the Chinese chef who worked for my mother. He used to make a soup that was a rather weak chicken stock absolutely full of noodles, ham, scallions, and thin strips of egg that he had beaten up, cooked in a thin pancake, and sliced into strips.

I didn’t have Italian noodles until I was in school, when we started going to a pretty good Italian restaurant that served “family style” meals at great long tables. They’d bring you a little antipasto and then a dish of pasta. The menu never varied, and it was always fifty cents. They made a good tomato sauce, and one with butter and fresh herbs, and a version of carbonara. The sauces were nothing complicated, it was great fun, and I just loved it; and, after all, what can you do for fifty cents?

Oddly enough, when I began to cook pasta myself, it was in the German style. That was because my mother had close friends from a German family, and they used noodles in a lot of soups and with stews. They had one wonderful dish for which they took all the lesser parts of the pig—the backbone and tail and such—braised them, and served them with sauerkraut and noodles. That was fun.

The point of all these reminiscences is to show how, even in a small American city at the beginning of the [twentieth] century, there were several quite distinct traditions of cooking with pasta.

Turn out the dough onto a floured surface. You will notice that this method results in the yellowest and stickiest dough of all. That’s because it’s already half-kneaded. Dust your hands with flour and continue the kneading. Work for 3 to 5 minutes, adding more flour if necessary, until you have a smooth ball of dough. Set it to rest under a dish towel or in plastic wrap.

Let the dough rest: I cannot emphasize too strongly the importance of letting the dough rest between the kneading and rolling. During this period, which should last at least 30 minutes and can continue in the refrigerator for days, the gluten in the flour relaxes and the dough becomes soft, well blended, and easy to work. I’ve put many a worrisome dough to rest under a dish towel, only to retrieve it 2 hours later, in perfect condition for rolling.

To roll the dough by hand: There are two stages in rolling pasta by hand. In the first, the dough is worked just as it is when you are making piecrust, pressing down and out from the center of the disk. This usually presents no problems for the American cook. The second stage is harder to learn, because you have to be able to do two things at once. It’s a little like learning to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time: once you get it, it’s easy; but the first few times you try to do it, it seems impossible.

To begin, place the ball of dough on a floured surface. Pat it into a flat disk, and start to roll it with your rolling pin. Move always from the center to the edges of the circle, giving the dough a quarter-turn after each roll to keep the circular shape. Keep checking to be sure that the dough isn’t sticking to the board. If it is, loosen with a dough scraper and dust with flour. When the dough is about ¼ inch thick, the first stage is finished.

During the second stage, you will be pulling and stretching the dough instead of rolling it. Very often, I’ve seen experienced pasta rollers hang one end of the sheet over the edge of the table and lean their tummies against it as they roll. That way, they get a three-way action, pulling, rolling, and stretching!

Curl the far edge of the circle around the center of your rolling pin. Then roll the pin back toward you, wrapping some of the dough around it. Push and stretch it away from you as you unroll the dough. At the same time, slide your hands lightly out and in on the pin, stretching the sheet sideways. Don’t press down. Pull out.

Turn the circle slightly after each stretch. You are trying to make a very thin sheet of dough, something like the thickness of good writing paper. It will be slightly transparent. You won’t be able to read through it, but if you’re rolling on a wooden surface, you should be able to see the grain of wood through the dough.

One way to be sure that you’re rolling the dough evenly and that it isn’t sticking to the board is to check its color. If the color is more intense at the center of the circle than at the edges, it means that the dough is thicker there. That often happens when it has stuck to the board. Roll it up onto a pin (a dough scraper will be helpful).