Flex your mussels
Rather than playing at making fresh pasta, reach for the best dry stuff you can find in stores and dress it in fine style
HERE’S an admission: I have never made pasta from scratch at home and served it to guests. Moreover, as a chef working in restaurants, I chose not to offer fresh pasta, leaving it to those cooks who knew more about it than I did—italians, that is, in their familiar element.
Home-made or even dried pasta simply didn’t seem quite correct at my stove, although a ‘Continental’ approach to the food I liked to cook could often encompass anything from risotto to gnocchi, piperade to pot au feu and callos (tripe) a la Madrilena to crème caramel. Then, quite suddenly, many other cooks of my generation seemed to be making pasta endlessly, rolling it out and embracing its silky allure. A craze, if you like.
It would, however, only ever be kitchen-made pasta. It had to be a hard-worked and wellkneaded dough, made using egg yolks the colour of steeped saffron and emerging as the bestlooking kitchen version of edible Play-doh ever made. I use the toy reference because it seemed that these chefs were, in essence, playing with pasta, instead of it being a part of their natural modus operandi. Michelin pasta, shall we say, rather than in any way Milanese. I’m not saying this wasn’t good cooking, it just felt odd to me at the time.
Hardly ever would this golden paste, once rolled and cut, be used as a dish in its own right— simply enriched with butter and cheese, say, or lightly dressed with fresh tomato, fine olive oil, garlic and basil. No, of course not. The thinnest dough would be tortured into enveloping a fistful of creamed salmon mousse and langoustines as a gross ‘raviolo’ and served with a bisque-like shellfish sauce. Or butter-rich strands would be turned and turned with a fork in a sweaty kitchen fist until they resembled a ‘nice little tower’, as a garnish to a dish of sauced meat or fish. Personally, I’d rather a tumble of simple spätzli with tender tafelspitz any day.
‘I have never made pasta from scratch at home and served it to guests
I have made, with a modicum of success, traditional ravioli with spinach and ricotta and a deeply savoury meat tortellini (finely minced mortadella, Parma ham, parmesan) to serve ‘in brodo’. However, I have never been confident enough to serve them to others; no, just for me. I like the faff of it all and also enjoy watching the thin, golden strands fall from the steel cutting rollers of my cranked machine— you have to buy the very finest eggs, with startling yolks.
As a sensible cook, I will most often reach for the very best dried pasta I can find—and that is very important indeed. In the following two recipes, I would recommend using durum-wheat pasta for the mussels and an egg one for the runner beans.