Unless otherwise noted, the recipes in this chapter are for the saucing of good quality commercial dried fettuccine, about 1/4 pound per person for main course dining. (I must say, however, that in the best of all possible worlds you should try to find fresh pasta, in which case the cooking time will plummet to about four minutes!)

        You want to drop the pasta into boiling water (a large pot of it!), stir it occasionally to prevent sticking, and remove it after exactly 12 minutes — well, it’s all right to be five or ten seconds off — this allowing time for the water to return to a good boil after the pasta goes in. Twelve minutes should give you a golden mean pasta, neither chewy nor mushy. (For shells and tubes, check the timing on the box and add several minutes).

        When the pasta reaches the zero hour, so to speak, drain it in a colander, letting a bit of liquid cling to the strands, then pour it into a serving bowl where it will impatiently await your sauce, along with grated cheese: either the robust dry jack we favor or the daintier, more traditional parmesan (one man’s sand, I guess, is the other’s parmesan). Now stir your sauce in well.

        And always leave extra grated cheese on the table — you know what it feels like in a restaurant when the waiter whisks the cheese away or parks your bottle of wine in a bucket a small football field from your rapidly emptying glass.
        Before proceeding, I should add that the Bloomfields occasionally dine on a pasta dish not included in the formal precincts, so to speak, of this chapter, because, well, it’s scarcely a recipe, merely pasta — tubes, preferably — tossed with butter and grated cheese . . . except that I should add that lots of freshly ground black pepper, a significant issue of nutmeg, and a medley of herbs gathered more or less at random from pots on your deck or in your garden will bring this minestran offering to star status. Very little effort is involved here, and you won’t be reduced to succumbing to the charms of your upscale supermarket’s take-out counter, or the promise of a pizza delivery person at your door.

        Alas, pasta with butter and cheese pure and simple, unadulterated by imagination, proved a thing of comedy, and not a very high variety, when Anne and I traveled one night on the ferry from Naples to Palermo. Here we were, bobbing about on presumably Italian waters, and what could the kitchen come up with but bowls of pasta, pats of cold butter and containers of grated cheese, these ingredients to be assembled by the diners aboard the M.S. Sicilia as if they were children hooking together pieces of Lego.

        Our consolation was that next morning, like Paul Theroux, we beheld the Bay of Palermo “in a sunny Sicilian dawn . . . mountains on either side and a great harmonizing background of stucco-colored peaks behind the ancient buildings.”

        This is a “mother” sauce, our trusty house tomato, and the Busseto and Agrodolce that follow are offspring involving diverse elaborations — if they’re siblings they’re radically different in personality, one suave, the other frisky.

        Stout and tranquil, Carlo Bergonzi himself was behind the bar when we visited the beloved tenor’s Due Foscari in Busseto in ‘71: in this civilian role he shed all vestiges of footlight glamor. I’m not sure now exactly what the tomato/cream balance was in Signor Bergonzi’s pasta sauce; for years we’ve been enjoying it as about 75 or 80 percent tomato to 20-25 cream. Well, recently our daughter Cecily was preparing a good tomato/cream pasta recipe (with sautéed sliced zucchini!) and in this one the balance was inverted, in other words it was a cream sauce with flecks of tomato, and since we didn’t have enough cream on hand about a quarter of the “white element” was milk. This resulted in a marvelously light and fragrant sauce, and the chance to offer you a Busseto I and II. Also note: several pinches of red pepper flakes, while not precisely Busseto-esque, are amusing in these recipes.

Soften 1 thinly sliced onion in 1 or 2 tablespoons of olive oil, adding 1 clove of pressed garlic as the onion colors.

Stir in 1 28-ounce or 2 14-ounce cans of tomatoes (even with the “ready cut” variety you may want to use a potato masher to un-kink your sauce) and season them with several pinches of sugar, a little oregano, and a splash of dry sherry — it needn’t be a distinguished one — to give a little “complexity.” A nice sec or demi-sec white wine would be a more than ordinary alternate.

Now simmer all uncovered for 20 minutes or more: you want the sauce to reduce a fair amount but not become really thick before it’s combined with your boiled pasta and a small avalanche of grated dry jack or parmesan cheese. Note here that Greek black olives are an amusing occasional extra . .

and
PASTA ALLA BUSSETO

souvenir of Carlo Bergonzi’s albergo
(two versions)

I

The same sauce as above, into which you stir toward serving time 1/4 to 1/3 cup of lightly reduced cream, plus a few thick-sliced mushrooms (brown or “boutique” would be best) you’ve sautéed in a little butter.

II

Make about half as much of our tomato sauce and stir in a good cup of the “white element,” mostly cream with some milk . . .

and
PASTA AL AGRODOLCE

While simmering the above basic tomato sauce add 2 overflowing tablespoons each of yellow raisins and pine nuts along with a few chocolate chips, plus about 1/4 cup of red wine vinegar and 2 teaspoons of sugar, gastronomical opposites whose in-sauce sparring will be conducted for your benefit — best, by the way, to combine all these ingredients first.

. . . . and all this is not to forget pasta topped with a gaggle of baby tomatoes you’ve baked in olive oil and a little lemon for half and hour in a hot oven, plus grated cheese of course.

        There are some quirks here from the purist’s point of view, but we lap this up every two or three weeks throughout the year with virtually unfailing pleasure.

        I think “the Auguri man” would have liked my pesto. Those three words, alas, are all that’s left of him in my diary for ‘71, but he was a haunting figure, like an ancient beggar/philosopher in some oldtime opera. We were leaving Signor Bergonzi’s inn the morning after the pasta of the previous page (thinking, perhaps, of Bergonzi’s exquisite phrasing in the big third act aria of Forza del Destino) and there he was, venerable enough to have known the great Verdi himself, who hailed from Busseto, hobbling about with a cane, saluting our industry in coming to this untouted corner of his country, insisting our journey would be full of joy and meaning.

        The pistachio version is the most intense of my three, but not unduly so. It was over a plate of it the conductor John Mauceri revealed an ingredient in Brahms’ Third I’d never realized was there: the passionate opening of the slow movement’s coda is a quote from the finale of Wagner’s Goetterdaemmerung — Wagner had just died as Brahms was preparing for his symphony’s premiere.

        John, I must report, cleaned his plate.

In a blender or food processor mince 2 or 3 tablespoons of one or another of the above-listed nuts; then in the same apparatus purée with the nuts:

1 cup of chopped fresh basil

a short 1/4 teaspoon of lemon juice

a smidgen of nutmeg (for that mysterious added richness, as if the sauce were beginning to turn a corner to . . . ?)

1 large pressed garlic clove

3 or 4 tablespoons of grated dry jack or parmesan cheese

2/3 cup of olive oil (”pure” is fine!)

Now stir your pesto into boiled pasta with more grated cheese.

AS A MATTER OF FACT: This pesto is also good without nuts, pine or other.