Noodling around: Pasta al Pomodoro

In The Kitchen

What’s now considered the most classic Italian dish is, historically speaking, a relatively recent invention layered onto much older pasta traditions.

Ask most Italians for a family recipe for pasta al pomodoro and they'll struggle, not because it's forgotten, but because it was never really taught. It's absorbed, the way you absorb how to boil water.

Tomatoes arrived in Italy from the Americas in the 1500s but were treated with suspicion for nearly two centuries — thought to be poisonous, or fit only for decoration. It wasn't until the late 1700s/early 1800s, particularly around Naples, that tomatoes and pasta were paired together in earnest, and even then it started as street food — maccheroni eaten by hand, dipped in sauce, sold by vendors to hungry passersby.

By the mid-1800s it had migrated into home kitchens, and by the 20th century it had become so ubiquitous it stopped being more of a reflex than a recipe.

If you ask Alice and Francesca, they’ll tell you it’s the meal they make nearly once a week. Not just because it tastes so good, but because it costs so little attention. What gets left over is time: time on the sofa while the sauce simmers, hearing about the kids’ small dramas and dreams of the day.

Recipe:

Pasta al Pomodoro

Ingredients:

14.3 ounces spaghetti (or whatever long pasta is in the cupboard)
28.6 ounces canned whole tomatoes, the good ones if you have them
3 garlic cloves, peeled, left whole
4 tablespoons olive oil, a generous glug
1 teaspoons salt, for the water and the sauce
0.5 teaspoons a pinch of sugar, if the tomatoes taste sharp
10 basil, a handful, torn (there's lore about this; skip the knife)
1 tablespoons butter, if you're in the mood
1.1 ounces parmesan, as much as feels right

To make:

Get a big pot of well-salted water going first, since that's the slow part — salt it so it tastes like the sea, then just let it do its thing while you get everything else moving. In a wide pan, warm a generous glug of olive oil and toss in a few whole garlic cloves, peeled but not chopped, and let them turn golden and fragrant over medium heat, a couple of minutes, no more. Crush in a can of good tomatoes by hand, juice and all, add a pinch of salt and, if they taste sharp, a small pinch of sugar to round it out, then let the whole thing come up to a gentle bubble before turning the heat down low. Let it simmer until it thickens slightly and stops tasting raw, fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe longer if someone's in the middle of a good story. About ten minutes before you're ready to eat, drop your pasta into the boiling water and cook it a minute under what the box tells you, since it'll finish in the sauce anyway, and scoop out a mugful of the starchy water before you drain it. Fish the garlic out if you feel like it, or don't, then tip the pasta straight into the sauce with a splash of that reserved water and toss it over low heat until it turns glossy rather than soupy. Off the heat, stir in a knob of butter if you're in the mood for that kind of richness, along with most of a handful of basil torn by hand rather than cut, plate it, scatter over what's left of the basil, grate over parmesan and eat it while it's still hot.

Don't overthink it: