Table Of Content

JULIA DEL pasta JL. As favorite foods, pasta one of the world’s truly deserves the lavish attention it receives in Ultimate Pasta, which brings together the most extensive range ever of delicious pastas and pasta dishes from Italy’s finest traditions. .Delightful pasta gallery. Ultimate Pasta opens with a gallery of irresistible pasta dishes illustrated with superb close-up photography. This gallery highlights a delicious sampling from the wide variety of dishes contained in the recipe section: from simple summer minestrone with ham and Parmesan to vividly colorful farfalle with roasted red and yellow peppers to elegant pappardelle with crab and asparagus. .More than 120 recipes. There are pasta dishes here for every occasion and every taste, all created by international award winning author Julia della Croce. You’ll find a dazzling collection of original recipes, regional specialties, traditional favorites, and imaginative contemporary dishes. Ultimate Pasta also features a step-by-step section on making your own fresh pasta, demystifying the art of creating this endlessly versatile food. .Authoritative guidance. The easy-to-follow instructions and tasting notes, and the expertise of an author passionate about her subject, enable you to choose ingredients that have a natural affinity with each type of pasta. An indispensable “photo album” reveals an astonishing array of more than 100 pasta shapes and provides practical advice on the best ways to serve each. Indispensable for beginner and expert alike, Ultimate Pasta is the definitive guide to the art of making, cooking, and enjoying pasta. 124.95 i Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/ultimatepastaOOOOdell pasta U L T I M A T E A JLjULIA DELLA CROCE Photography by IAN O'LEARY DK PUBLISHING, INC. A DK PUBLISHING BOOK Project Editor Lorna Damms Art Editor Helen Dtplock Senior Editor Nicola Graimes Senior Art Editor Tracey Clarke US Editor Laaren Brown Editorial Assistant David Summers DTP Designers Karen Ruane Harvey de Roemer Managing Editor Susannah Marriott Managing Art Editor Toni Kay Production Controllers Antony Heller Manjit Sihra Production Manager Maryann Rogers Home Economist Oona van den Berg Additional Photography Dave King For my beloved Gabriella Leah and Celina Raffaella, who rejoice in pasta stars, rings, shells, butterflies, and all the rest All recipes serve 4, unless otherwise indicated. All nutritional-information figures are approximate and are based on figures from food composition tables with additional data for manufactured products, where appropriate, not on direct analysis of prepared dishes. Nutritional information is given per serving based on the number of servings in parentheses. Use these figures as a guide only. Please note that KCal is an abbreviation for kilocalories, sometimes inaccurately called calories. Parmesan, when used to serve, has not been accounted for. Readers should note the following breakdown for Parmesan KCal:68 P:6g C:tr Na:290mg SFA:4g UFA:I9g . tr = trace, neg = negligible. First American Edition. 1997 2468 10 97531 Published in the United States by DK Publishing, Inc, 95 Madison Avenue New York. New York 10016 Visit us on the World Wide Web at http://www.dk.com Copyright © 1997 Dorling Kinderslev Limited Text copyright © 1997 Julia della Croce All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any fonn or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Published in Great Britain by Dorling Kindersley Limited. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Della Croce, Julia Ultimate pasta / by Julia della Croce.— 1st American ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-7894-2086-4 I. Cookery (Pasta) 2. Sauces. I. Title. TX809.MI7D27 1997 64I.8”22—dc2I 97-16375 CIP Reproduced by Colourscan (Singapore) Printed and bound by Graphicom (Italy) Contents Introduction 6 Cutting Fresh Pasta 52 Making Colored Fresh Pasta 54 A Gallery of Pasta 10 Making Stuffed Pasta 56 Cooking and Draining Pasta 58 An enticing array of dishes, from fragrant minestrone to layered baked lasagne and exquisite stuffed pasta. Recipes 60 Minestre Soups 12 A fabulous collection of over 120 recipes, including regional specialties, traditional favorites, contemporary Pasta Fresca Fresh Pasta Dishes 14 dishes, and mouthwatering desserts. Pasta Secca Minestre 62 Dried Pasta Dishes 16 Soups Pasta Secca con Salse Crude Salse, Sughi, e Ragu 70 Dried Pasta with Uncooked Sauces 18 Sauces Paste Ripiene Pasta Fresca 78 Stuffed Pasta Dishes 20 Fresh Pasta Dishes Pasta al Forno Pasta Secca 90 Baked Pasta Dishes 22 Dried Pasta Dishes Pasta al Forno per le Feste Pasta Secca con Salse Crude 102 Festive Baked Pasta Dishes 24 Dried Pasta with Uncooked Sauces Gnocchi Paste Ripiene 110 Gnocchi and Dumplings 26 Stuffed Pasta Dishes Pasta al Forno 122 Catalog 28 Baked Pasta Dishes Pasta al Forno per le Feste 132 A vividly illustrated catalog of more than 100 dried Festive Baked Pasta Dishes and fresh pasta shapes, each presented by type. Gnocchi 142 Soup Pasta 30 ♦ Long Pasta 32 ♦ Tubes 34 Gnocchi and Dumplings Ribbon Pasta 36 ♦ Pasta Shapes 38 Ricette Regionali 152 Regional Specialties Stuffed Pasta 40 ♦ Fresh Colored Pasta 42 Dolci 158 Pasta Desserts Making and Cooking Pasta 44 The techniques of successful pasta-making and cooking Pantry and Glossary 162 demonstrated in superb step-by-step photographs. Equipment 46 ♦ Making Fresh Pasta 48 Index 163 Rolling Fresh Pasta 50 Useful Addresses and Acknowledgments 168 INTRODUCTION Introduction When my PUBLISHER asked me to write this book, I momentarily wondered what more I could say, for it would be my third book on the subject of pasta. Then the thought vanished almost instantly. I began to feel an enveloping delight m being able to continue my conversation, as it were, on the subject. In attempting to describe my affinity for this wonderful food, my thoughts stray to the words of anthropologist Folco Portinati, at the University of Turin, about the meaning of pasta in Italian life: “Pasta, like wine,” he said, is to the Italians somewhere between a sacrament and a psychotropic drug.” The Italian devotion to pasta is perhaps most aptly noted m the designation of St. Stefano as the patron saint of pasta makers. The event preceding his canonization is illustrated in a Renaissance painting now hanging in the Museo Nazionale della Paste Ahmentari in Rome: it shows the discovery of the murdered samt lvmg in a wooden trough of the kind used for kneading pasta dough. There is evidence that pasta existed in the Italian diet from the time of its earliest inhabitants, the Etruscans, but its real popularity came with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the development of dried pasta made large-scale production possible. It was made of durum wheat semolina flour rather than refined white flour, and contained no eggs, which rendered it both more viable for mass production and cheaper to make. Manufacturing began first in Sicily, then spread to Liguria through Genoa, an important port in the trade routes. Finally, by the end of the nineteenth century, Naples had become the center of pasta manufacturing due to its climate and port, which could receive shipments of wheat from abroad to supplement native crops. Dried pasta became identified with southern Italian cuisine. Pastificci, pasta factories, sprang up all over Naples and along the Amalfi coast, where the hot and breezy climate was ideal for drying the dough outdoors. By the late 1900s, there were as many as 1,500 pasta manufacturers in Naples alone. Pasta and Myth Dried pasta became abundant and accessible to even the poorest Italian and a reverence grew for this food that had kept the proverbial wolf from the door. In turn, pasta became part of a new folklore. The Italians began to endow pasta with magical properties. In the Pasta drying out of doors at a spaghetti commedia dell’arte, the popular street theater of the sixteenth to factory in Naples, c.1900. 6