Almost Italian

Depending on the dialect your Italian forebears spoke, these chewy curls of pasta were cavatelli, cavatieddi, cavatel, cavateel, gavadel… And whether their maker was your nonna, great aunt, mother, sister, or third cousin, you and everyone else in your family elevated any woman who made them to a higher plane. Made to absorb a little Sunday Gravy or support wilted greens, homemade cavatelli hold a special place in the hearts—and stomachs—of Italian-Americans.

Copyright © 2011, Skip Lombardi

Once again, we need to remind ourselves that most 19th and 20th-century immigrants from southern Italy left behind lives of abject rural poverty. In Italy most of their calories had come from the soft-wheat flour baked into their daily staple, bread. The more nutritious durum wheat was milled as a coarser, sandy-textured flour, semolina; this was used for manufactured pastas in urban areas, especially Naples. However any wheat-flour pastas were rare luxuries for peasants and shepherds. Food historian, Oretta Zannini de Vita,* who has meticulously documented pasta throughout Italy, discusses the many alternative substances from which pastas have been made. In most instances those who lived in the rural south, where conditions favored growing the harder wheat, had little access to the semolina used by city pasta factories. Nor did rural southerners consume much of the finished spaghetti and vermicelli, products that had to be purchased with cash, not acquired through barter. Instead, peasant housewives stretched whatever wheat flour they may have had, or replaced it entirely, with ground fava beans, chestnuts, acorns, rye, barley, bran, corn, potatoes, stale breadcrumbs, dried porcini, and even charred wheat grains collected from fields after gleaning and burning (grano arso). All found their way into pastas made at home.

Both for its nutrients and dough consistency, semolina was and continues to be preferred by commercial pasta manufacturers. Durum wheat dough demands far more laborious kneading than dough made from soft wheat flour, and this very toughness makes it better-suited to production of dry pasta, pasta secca. So although semolina pasta was a luxury, making it was also much more work for any home cook who undertook the task..

Copyright © 2011, Skip Lombardi

And this brings us to the curious case of cavatelli in America. Search the Internet and you’ll find numerous blog threads on pasta and bulletin board requests for lost family recipes for cavatelli, “the dough my nonna kneaded and formed…,” “only on Fridays…,” or, perhaps, “for someone’s birthday.” But what made this a special-occasion pasta? In Italy, cavatelli treatments range from ordinary to richly festive, from wilted arugula or spring turnip tops to a spicy tomato and lamb ragù. Sauces and condimenti vary from village to village, house to house. But here in America, the focus seems to be on the pasta itself. Meanwhile, we wondered, why we were seeing frozen cavatelli. Frozen meat-stuffed ravioli and cheese-filled tortellini made sense, but why freeze an unstuffed pasta form? We started reading recipes, both American and Italian, in greater detail…

It is striking how many of the American cavatelli recipes include ricotta—not as a stuffing, but in the pasta dough itself. It is safe to say that cheese is virtually unknown in old-country Italian pasta-making, with the exception of gnudi, also known as malfatti, gnocchi, or gnocchetti depending on the region. Many culinary scholars would debate whether these are pasta at all. Gnudi literally means “nudes,” and indeed they are more like the stuffing of modern ravioli, for they wear no mantle of dough. At their most basic, gnudi are a combination of finely chopped seasonal greens or herbs combined with ricotta and just enough flour or stale breadcrumbs to bind the mixture, which may also include an egg. The soft, fresh gnudi are then quickly poached like dumplings, done when they float to the surface of the water.

In the micro-economies of the traditional Italian campania, fresh cheese would have been available only in the spring when animals were lactating. Seasonality explains this inside-out “pasta” creation, which made use of both cultivated and foraged spring greens. At winter’s end, wheat flour was likely to be the least abundant pantry staple.

Much has been written on the word “gnocchi,” (most of which are not made from potatoes). Let us just say that over the centuries, Italian women have made “dumplings” from a wide variety of ingredients. But Signora de Vita points out one common feature, that most gnocchi evolved “in areas that were once very poor.”

The “Friday Special,” Cavatelli with Broccoli and Artichoke Hearts
at Mike’s Italian Kitchen, Cranston, RI
Copyright © 2010, 2011, Skip Lombardi

As usual, we have digressed, but the ricotta in gnudi/gnocchi has given us a clue to how cheese found its way into cavatelli here…

The first generations of poor immigrants discovered that in America they could afford foods that had been beyond their means back in Italy. They found not only the esteemed semolina flour but also abundant milk products, which were available year ‘round. No special skill is required for someone with a few spoonfuls of vinegar or lemon juice to turn a gallon of hot milk into curds and drain the whey to make fresh ricotta. And why not make use of ricotta, letting its butterfat enrich and soften the hard-wheat pasta dough they fashioned by hand into forms like cavatelli, orecchiette, and other concave pasta shapes?

Many immigrant women would have known the techniques for both quickly-made gnudi and the more tedious pasta secca, even if both were festive treats enjoyed only a few times each year. An opportunity to combine the two would have been tantalizing.

The irony is that this most basic of pasta formations, curled over the edge of a dull knife or a pressed fingertip (as demonstrated in many YouTube videos) has antecedents among the poorest of the poor. Immigrant housewives must have felt empowered by the chance to use ingredients from the fat of the new land to create a food so elemental, yet one they had barely experienced in Italy.

As generations of American Calabrians have enjoyed their “gavadel” and Sicilians their cavatieddi (which some call gnucchetti), cavatelli seem to have acquired a mythic stature never completely articulated by proud people who wanted to be seen by their community as “carrying on the old ways,” even if those old ways were actually Italian-American innovations.

Cavatelli with Broccoli

Ingredients:

Make your own Old World-style cavatelli or buy the ricotta-enriched pasta. Use fresh or frozen broccoli, jarred or salt-packed capers, tinned or salt-packed anchovies—this recipe is flexible, allowing anyone to produce a delectable dish.

For the Pasta* (to serve 4 as a pasta course, or 2-3 as a main dish)

1 1/4 Cups fine semolina
1/2 tsp. Salt
4-5 Tbs. water
Ordinary flour or a little more semolina for dusting

Stir the salt through the semolina and add the water. Stir to moisten the flour and knead the mixture until you have a smooth and slightly elastic dough that does not stick to your hands. Allow dough to rest, covered, for at least 10 minutes. You can also mix the dough in a food processor, pulsing until the dough forms a ball.

Dust a little semolina or flour on the board and on your hands. Pinch off a piece of dough the size of a walnut. With your fingers, stretch and roll it into a cord about 1/2 inch thick. Cut off pieces of dough the size of a chickpea. With the edge of a butter-knife or your fingertip, flatten a piece as you move the blade or fingertip towards you. The opposite edges of the dough will curl to form a shell. You may need to practice a little, but the dough won’t suffer from being reworked. Once you can do this easily, forming the cavatelli will go quickly. Use up all the dough. As you make the cavatelli, set them so they are not touching each other on a board sprinkled with semolina. Roll each form lightly on the board to coat it with semolina. Let them air-dry for at least 30 minutes and up to an hour. Cook according to the instructions below.

For the Broccoli:

1 Head of broccoli, cut into florets; stalk peeled & cut into bite-sized pieces OR
1 Lb. Frozen broccoli florets, thawed
2 Tbs. Olive oil
3 large Cloves of garlic, peeled and minced
1/2 tsp. Peperoncini (crushed red pepper flakes)
A few grinds of black pepper
4 Anchovy fillets If salt-preserved, debone & rinse. Otherwise, use fillets packed in oil.
2 1/2 Tbs. bottled capers, drained OR 2 Tbs. salt-cured capers, rinsed.
1/2 Cup dry white wine
Juice from 1/2 to 1 lemon
Grated rind of 1 lemon
Parmesan cheese
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped

Preparation:

For the cavatelli

In a 4-quart pot, begin to bring 8 cups of water to the boil.

If using fresh broccoli, steam it first. Bring 1 cup of water to a boil in a large saute pan Add the broccoli pieces, reduce the heat to medium and steam the broccoli for 2 minutes. Drain and rinse broccoli with cold water. Set it aside in a colander to drain.

Meanwhile, dry the sauté pan and use it to heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the garlic, peperoncini, and black pepper. Sauté for approximately 1 minute.

Lower the heat and add the anchovies. Stir until the fillets have dissolved, then add the capers.

Have your cavatelli and a slotted spoon ready. (If you are using frozen cavatelli, measure out 1 pound of frozen pasta from the package; do not thaw before boiling.)

Add the steamed broccoli to the sauté pan. Stir the broccoli, shaking the pan, until it becomes coated with the oil mixture. Add the wine and lemon juice and simmer for 2 minutes. Reduce heat to low.

Wait until the pasta water begins to boil and add 2 teaspoons of salt to the water. Add a third of the cavatelli to the now-boiling water. (Fresh cavatelli will take about 2 minutes to cook, floating to the top when they are ready. Frozen pasta may take a little longer.)

With the slotted spoon, scoop them out as they are done and gently stir them into the broccoli mixture. In batches, continue boiling more cavatelli, adding them to the sauté pan as they are done. When all the pasta has been boiled and added to the broccoli, stir in the grated lemon rind and parsley. If you like the dish to be a little more liquid, add a ladle or two of the pasta water. Taste the mixture for salt and pepper.

To Serve:

Divide the pasta and broccoli equally among 4 shallow bowls and finish with a light grating of Parmesan.

Serves four.

* The Encyclopedia of Pasta