THE DISH I COME HOME TO: FRANCESCO MAURI, PASTA CON LE PATATE

In the third instalment of the series (check out the others here and here), chef de cuisine Francesco Mauri shares his love (and his recipe) for a simple pasta preparation that pretty much defines home cooking in the area south of Naples.

Francesco tells the Sirenuse Journal:

“Pasta con le patate is a ‘comfort food’ dish that I associate with coming home from school on cold, rainy days. A great winter warmer, it’s what we call un piatto di recupero – a dish designed to use up leftover ingredients.

It’s made from ingredients that you could always find in the larder or the kitchen garden. Pasta mista or ‘mixed pasta’, for example, wasn’t something you bought pre-prepared, as you can today. It was simply an assembly of all those frustratingly small quantities of pasta that somehow always get left over in packets. You would simply mix them together, and that was your pasta mista. Every time, the mix would be a bit different, depending on what was left over. If some of the pasta was long, like spaghetti or tagliatelle, you’d simply break it up with your hands.

The other thing about pasta mista is that as the different types of pasta have different cooking times you get a real mix of textures – some of the pasta is pretty soft, other parts are crunchy!

For the fresh ingredients, there would always be a sack of potatoes and for the others you simply went out into the orto or kitchen garden. We lived in the country, and if you wanted a tomato, depending on the season, you’d just pick one. There would be bunches of carrots and onions hanging up, herbs and celery just outside the door.

In Napoli they doll this dish up by adding provola, but for me this smoked cheese covers the simple, genuine tastes of the original dish too much.

The hills behind Positano were once famous for their potato crops, which grow well in the mountains, alongside carrots, pumpkin and squash. But the locals realized at a certain point that it made more sense to make money out of tourism than potatoes.”

Heat some olive oil in a high-sided, heavy-bottomed pan or casserole and toss the pancetta chunks in it until they take on a golden colour. Then add the roughly chopped celery and onion and the sprig of rosemary. Put in the chopped tomato and stir to amalgamate. Put in the potato, cut up into largish irregular chunks – these will gradually soften and dissolve so that you’ll be left with smaller pieces. Pour in 2 liters of water. Add the chunks of parmesan rind – you may want to cut off the very toughest exterior side. Bring to a simmering boil and cook until the potato chunks are softened, then add the pasta and continue cooking until it’s ready – this depends on how al dente you like it. Take off the heat, add a generous spiral of good olive oil, the grated parmesan and a snowfall of black pepper from the mill.

Francesco adds: “There are almost always leftovers with a recipe like this. At home we tend to refresh leftover pasta and potatoes by adding more ingredients the next day… it becomes a continuous cycle! If you only have a little left and don’t have time to ‘reboot’ it, toast some coarse-cut bread slices to make bruschettas, drizzle them with oil and salt, and top with the pasta and potatoes, heated to reduce it to a thick consistency.”

Photos © Roberto Salomone