Forever Summer (7 page)

SPAGHETTI AGLIO OLIO PEPERONCINO

I have ummed and erred internally – and sometimes, I’m afraid rumblingly out loud – over whether to include this here or not. On the one hand, pasta with a bit of garlic, olive oil and dried red chilli pepper is hardly a recipe, but on the other, I can’t imagine summer without it. I am not someone who wants to eat just cold food when it’s hot: I want to sit in the garden with a quickly made bowlful of something heat-infused and fiery. And this is simply the culmination, and almost instant gratification, of that desire.

Besides, since when has ease of execution been a factor militating against any recipe?

150g spaghetti

Maldon salt

3–4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 fat clove garlic, or 2 smaller, peeled and sliced thinly lengthwise

1 dried red chilli pepper or fat pinch dried red chilli pepper flakes (or to taste)

chopped fresh parsley (optional)

Put a pan of water on the heat to boil for the pasta. When it’s come to the boil, add salt and then the spaghetti. When you’re about 3 minutes away from the pasta being ready, add the oil and garlic slices to another pan, crumble in the dried chilli pepper and cook over low to medium heat, stirring with a wooden spoon. Once the garlic has taken on a light golden colour, which will hardly take any time, add a couple of tablespoons of pasta-cooking water, stir well with your wooden spoon and turn off the heat. Tip in the cooked, drained spaghetti and toss well so that it’s well slicked by the garlic-studded, chilli-flecked sauce. Sprinkle with Maldon salt and some freshly chopped parsley, if you have some to hand, and eat.

Serves 1.

LINGUINE WITH CHILLI, CRAB AND WATERCRESS

You know, I’d eaten this a couple of times and made it myself (throwing in handfuls of peppery watercress as I did so) a few more before I realised it was, give or take, the River Cafe’s recipe – by which I mean to say that although the amounts and full list of ingredients vary, it is an English seaside version of their fabulous original. I suppose that’s how you know something’s become a classic: it just seeps its way into the culinary language.

Crab is, I think, hugely underrated – so much better than lobster, and much cheaper. You can use frozen crab meat for this, but it’s best to get a fishmonger to cook and pick out the meat for you.

Don’t let the fact that a pestle and mortar is indicated put you off: this is fabulously easy to make.

2 cloves garlic

1 scant tablespoon Maldon salt

1 large red chilli

1.25kg undressed crab, to give you 200g white meat and 100g brown meat

125ml extra virgin olive oil

juice and zest of 1 lemon

500g linguine

handful fresh parsley, chopped

handful watercress leaves, roughly torn

Put a large pan of water on to boil for the pasta.

In a large pestle and mortar pulverise the peeled garlic cloves with the salt, so that it makes a smooth paste. Then add the chopped and seeded chilli and crush again until you have a gloriously red-tinged mixture. Tip in the crab meat, breaking it up gently with a fork, and pour in the oil. Zest the lemon into the mortar and then add the juice.

Using a fork, beat well to mix, and then you are ready to cook your pasta. So do so, and then drain the pasta and tip into a warmed serving bowl. Immediately pour over the crab sauce and toss the pasta about in it, then throw in the parsley and watercress and toss again.

Serves 6 as a starter; 4 as a main course.

CAPELLINI CON CACIO E PEPE

This is another gloriously simple, intensely flavoured pasta, best eaten quickly and hungrily under a warm sun though the deep heat of the pepper is gratifyingly warming on cold winter nights. I list pecorino here, rather than parmesan, simply because, in the first instance, that’s how I came across it (in Rome, many summers ago) and, in the second, because I love its sharper, sourer edge. Sometimes, though, I use the parmesan I always have hanging about, with the zest of a lemon, or half of one, grated in alongside.

You need the black pepper really quite coarsely ground here (though not quite so coarsely as to induce a coughing fit) so if you can’t adjust your pepper mill, bash some peppercorns about in a pestle and mortar instead.

300g capellini

salt

15g unsalted butter

10 tablespoons (about 50g) freshly grated pecorino Romano

1 tablespoon black peppercorns, coarsely ground

Put a panful of water on to boil for the pasta; once it’s come to the boil, add salt then the pasta and cook according to the instructions on the packet. Just before you drain it, though, remove a coffee cupful of its cooking water.

So, drain the pasta and add the butter to the hot pan and then tip in the capellini and toss well, dribbling in a tablespoonful or so of cooking liquid as you do so. Now add the grated pecorino and coarse black pepper and toss well in the residual heat of the pan – adding a little more pasta-cooking liquid if you need the lubrication – before tipping into warmed bowls.

Serves 4 as a starter; or 2 as a main course.

SHORT PASTA WITH ASPARAGUS, LEMON, GARLIC AND PARSLEY

If there’s anything you’re going to end up eating, sitting in the garden, throughout summer, it is this. True, new season’s asparagus, our own home-grown asparagus, is what you’d use ideally (and this is, incidentally, a very good way of making a relatively small amount of expensive asparagus go far without tasting of economy), but I don’t think it’s necessary to restrict preparation of this to the short time it’s in season. You wouldn’t want to eat this in winter when all you can get is thick and fibrous spears from far-flung places, but bits straggling in from here and there later on in summer is nothing to get preciously sniffy about.

The simplicity of this is not just about ease of preparation, gratifying though this is, but about the uncluttered, perfectly balanced arrangement of tastes and texture.

500g asparagus

salt

125ml extra virgin olive oil

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

juice and zest of half a large lemon

500g rigatoni or penne or any short, stubby pasta you want

2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Snap the woody stems off the bottom of the asparagus, and cut the remaining stalk lengthways and diagonally at 2cm intervals, leaving the tip whole. If it is possible, find a large saucepan to cook the pasta in, that can fit a steamer on top. Bring the saucepan to the boil, add salt generously, and steam the asparagus for 2 minutes. Obviously, you can use two separate pans if you want, but there’s something pleasing about dovetailing the operation. And I know that steaming the asparagus means it will be no longer hot when you toss it in the pasta, but I don’t mind that; if you do, put it in the microwave for a few seconds – go slowly just till it’s warm, otherwise you run the risk of overcooking it – to reheat when you drain the pasta later.

Put the oil in a frying pan and gently turn the garlic golden over a pretty low heat – you neither want the garlic to burn and turn acrid nor the oil to lose its robustness of flavour – then add the lemon juice, stir and take off the heat. Meanwhile cook the rigatoni, or whatever, in the big pan of water, and when it is al dente, drain and pour into the frying pan. Add the asparagus, toss everything about, sprinkling with the parsley and not-too-finely grated lemon zest.

If you’re serving the pasta in a bowl (rather than just serving it straight from the pan – and there’s nothing wrong in that) remember to heat it first, and add the parsley and lemon zest only after the pasta’s been transferred.

Serves 6 as a starter; 4 as a main course.

LINGUINE WITH MUSSELS

You might label this shiny black musselled variation of linguine alle vongole, linguine alle cozze, but to be frank, this version is not very Italian-flavoured. It owes something to the French taste for moules marinière, and reaches Spainwards for a slug of sherry, in place of the usual white wine, to add oomph to the molluscs’ briney juices.

It helps if you can get small mussels, simply because otherwise you get too much clattery shell per strand of pasta, but it’s not a life-or-death stipulation. Mussels that are sold in already cleaned and debarnacled bags tend to be reasonably sized. You do have to soak them in cold water in the sink (mussels that stay open at this stage need to be jettisoned, just as mussels that fail to open once they’re on the heat have to be chucked later), and you might have to scrape off a few bits of beard and barnacle that cling to the shells, but it’s unlikely, these days, to be much of a job.

500g small mussels

salt

250g linguine

2–3 tablespoons olive oil

1 clove garlic, cut into shards

1 fresh long red chilli, deseeded and cut into strips

100ml Amontillado sherry

2–3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

Put the mussels to soak in a sinkful of cold water – using a knife to scrape off any bits of beard or barnacle that cling to the shells – while you heat the water for the pasta. When the water comes to the boil, add salt and then, when boiling again, the linguine. Cook them until nearly ready: you’re going to give them a minute or so later to continue cooking with the mussels and their briney, winey juices.

So, while the pasta’s cooking, drain the mussels, discarding those that remain open when you rap the shells, and sit them in a colander for a while. Get out a large pan (big enough to fit all the pasta in later) and pour in the oil. Add the garlic shards and strips of chilli pepper and heat over a lowish flame till warmly sizzling, but don’t let the garlic brown or it will become bitter and acrid. Tip the mussels clatteringly into the garlic and chilli pan, turn up the heat, pour in the sherry and clamp shut with a lid. Shake the pan a couple of times, just to disperse the heat, but not so much that you fracture the shells. In a few minutes, the mussels should be steamed open; any that stay resolutely shut are bad and you must just pick through them and throw them away.

Add the drained, almost-cooked pasta, put the lid on again and swirl about. In another minute or so, the pasta will have cooked to the requisite tough tenderness – the joy of linguine is that it keeps a certain robust and satisfying chewy mouth-fillingness – and will have absorbed much of the garlicky, smokey-sherried mussel juices, and be swellingly bound in a wonderful Riviera-redolent sea syrup. But if the pasta looks like it needs a little more time, just shove the lid on again and give it another minute or so. The thing here is to let everything, quite simply, come together.

Add half the parsley, shake the pan to distribute evenly, and turn into a large bowl, sprinkling, finally, with the rest of the parsley. You do not offer cheese with this pasta; I am not generally good with authority, but some rules – such as the Italian one that forbids the addition of cheese to any pasta sauce containing fish – hold good.

Serves 2 or, sometimes, just this one.

LINGUINE ALLE VONGOLE

To cook yourself a glorious bowlful of this, you just follow the recipe above, substituting a crumbled dried red chilli – I just prefer it with this – for the fresh one above and in place of the mussels, use 300g palourde clams (their shells weigh less, so you don’t need as much in weight) and instead of the sherry use white wine or vermouth diluted with a little water.

GREEKISH LAMB PASTA

This is not-quite spag bol but a warming but still summery one-course supper for evenings when the sun is shining, but not so fiercely as to make slow-cooked meatiness an unseasonable abomination. In truth, I wouldn’t like to claim that this oregano-flecked, feta-topped meat sauce
is
really Greek, but a Greek friend of mine (admittedly deracinated, and educated in England) used to make something like it. If it makes life easier, you can cook the lamb mince in advance, seeing to the pasta and reheating the sauce and crumbling over the astringent white cheese at the last minute. And it is a wonderful combination: the salty-sourness of the feta and sweetness of the tomatoey, oregano-redolent lamb meld fabulously, persuasively together. I don’t usually go in for meat sauces with pasta hugely, but this is heavenly, food for the (Greek) Gods.