Pasta alla Paolina

Most of my Italian cooking knowledge comes from mentors who lived in the north, so I'm always interested in experimenting more with southern Italian cooking. I heard about this dish from a Sicilian acquaintance, and I concocted the recipe below based on his descriptions. The dish uses some spices that people don't often associate with Italian savory cooking, and there might be some history to explain that. Perhaps those with more knowledge than I can weigh in, but my understanding is that Pasta alla Paolina was invented by monks in the Monastery of San Francesco di Paola, who - during times when they could not leave the monastery - would make do by cooking from pantry staples. I believe that Italian monks are known to be behind much of Sicily's pastry history, so it's not surprising that their pantries would have had spices such as cloves and cinnamon in abundance.

I started by defrosting some pantry staples of my own: tomatoes which I had roasted during the height of last season, peeled and frozen separately from the liquid I had poured off while they cooked.
Roasted tomatoes and their liquid, defrosting:




Into the pan went a couple of minced garlic cloves, a few anchovies, a light pinch of freshly ground cloves, and a heavier pinch of good-quality ground cinnamon. I cooked that over low heat, mashing it together occasionally with the back of a spoon, until it formed a dark, fragrant paste.

Garlic, anchovies, freshly ground cloves, cinnamon, olive oil:


Cooked into a paste:




Then I added the tomatoes, roughly chopped, and some of the tomato water.
Tomatoes added to the pan:



20-30 minutes later, I had this:
Finished sauce:



I boiled a pot of my favorite dried pasta until quite al dente...
L'Antica Rocca Spaghetti alla chitarra


...and added it, and a bit of the cooking water, to the sauce. The pasta and sauce cooked together for a few minutes.


Pasta and sauce cooking together:




I suspect that bread crumbs would be the traditional topping for this pasta, but I didn't have any, so I used some superb Turkish pine nuts instead, which I had toasted previously. Garnished with some chopped mint and a little grated incanestrato.

Pasta alla Paolina, finished with mint and grated incanestrato:



This was different from anything I'd ever had, and I really liked it. The aromatic, woodsy cloves and cinnamon balanced the acidic tomatoes well. A complex-tasting sauce that's pretty simple to make.

That's a really beautiful dish.

Kennyz wrote:The dish uses some spices that people don't often associate with Italian savory cooking

You're absolutely right, but the finished recipe looks and sounds delightful, in particular the use of mint and pine nuts to finish coupled with anchovy/clove/cinnamon in the sauce.

Very intriguing. I have trouble marrying the cinammon to the anchovy/garlic in my mind's tongue, but I suspect that reflects the limitations of my experience and paltriness of my imagination.
I love pasta dishes finished 'in padella' and I almost always forget to do it if I'm not reading a recipe that directly instructs me to. I also forget every year to put up various things like ripe tomatoes for later. Mrs. B. tends to remember to make and freeze wonderful pie fillings from tart MI cherries and such, but I never get around to freezing the tomatoes, etc. The more fool I.
I'm fascinated by the bag of pasta in the photo. I love spaghetti a la chitarra, but often have trouble finding it. Also, what might "bronze drawn" mean?
Another beautiful post and compelling call to experimentation.

Also, what might "bronze drawn" mean?

Uusually, extruded through bronze dies. Maybe here they mean cut by bronze wires.

You see cinnamon in Friulian cooking as well.

mrbarolo wrote:I'm fascinated by the bag of pasta in the photo. I love spaghetti a la chitarra, but often have trouble finding it. Also, what might "bronze drawn" mean?
Another beautiful post and compelling call to experimentation.

Thanks, mrb... L'Antica Rocca spaghetti all chitarra is regularly available at JP Graziano, unless I've just been there to clean them out

Bronze-drawn refers to the fact that the company uses a traditional die, which is made of bronze, to extrude its pasta. Bronze is by nature a metal that is never truly smooth, so pasta extruded this way has tiny, almost-invisible little pores that better sop up sauces.

Funny, my first thought at the spice combo was Cincinnati Chili - which proports to be Greek in origin, but I can see where this seasoning mix is common in areas of the Mediterranean, especially where there's a busy seaport.

Mhays wrote:Funny, my first thought at the spice combo was Cincinnati Chili -

Interesting! That had not occurred to me, but you are exactly right. This dish has the core flavors of Cincinnati Chili, without the meat.

Two things. I'd defer to Antonius on this but I suspect that "sweet" spices found their way into Sicilian cooking from the influence of Arab commerce. Second, my "go-to" Sicilian cookbook is Mary Taylor Simeti's "Sicilian Food" (originally published under the unfortunate title of "Pomp and Sustenance"). Either way, she's extremely knowledgeable and has put out a several books on Sicilian cooking. In any event, her brief introduction to this dish confirms Kenny's story of the monks in San Francesco di Paola in Palermo. However, she explains the combination of spices another way: "These monks were vowed to perpetual abstinence from meat, and thus looked elsewhere to give variety to their diet." Neither Giuliano Bugialli nor Carlo Middione seem to discuss the dish and all the rest of my regional cookbooks are packed.

Looks delish, though, as someone might say.

Gypsy Boy,
Thanks for the background from Simeti's book. I'm awfully curious: does her recipe use bread crumbs, nuts, or neither to finish the dish? Any cheese? I had a suspicion that my addition of incanestrato was anti-tradition, as many classic pasta dishes with such strong flavors as this eschew the cheese. I liked it a lot though. Her explanation of the spices is interesting too, and I think it's consistent with the one I heard. Perhaps the monks were always searching for interesting twists of flavor to replace meat, and had a pantry stocked with spices they used to make pastries.
KZ

Gypsy Boy wrote:Two things. I'd defer to Antonius on this but I suspect that "sweet" spices found their way into Sicilian cooking from the influence of Arab commerce.

From watching Molto Mario when Fine Living was running two a day for a number of months (now they don't run him at all), cinnamon, ginger and other eastern spices are common in Venetian cooking, because Venice was always a maritime trading power. Seeing it in a Sicilian dish seems to not meld well with that, but sounds awesome. The use of bread crumbs also sounds more Puglian than Sicilian.

Venice may also have been a trading power and have used those spices; I'm simply not familiar with Venetian cuisine and will defer to you (and Mario). But Sicily has always been a center of commerce--it's an island, after all. It was ruled by Muslims for a few centuries and has distinct Arab influence throughout its cuisine. The use of a wide variety of things like apricots and citrus, saffron, raisins, pine nuts and the sweet spices --not to mention sugar itself--are all evidence of Arab influence in Sicilian cooking.

Kennyz wrote:

Mhays wrote:Funny, my first thought at the spice combo was Cincinnati Chili -

Interesting! That had not occurred to me, but you are exactly right. This dish has the core flavors of Cincinnati Chili, without the meat.

The Chow Poodle's Greek spaghetti also uses cinnamon & cloves. It's a recipe broght over from Greece and handed down from her grandmother.

And, not surprisingly, Greek (and Spanish) are also cuisines whose influence can be found in Sicilian cooking.

As Gypsy Boy quite rightly says, there are certainly some very noteworthy 'Arab' influences in the cuisine(s) of Sicily but in my estimation, the whole matter has been very badly handled in the scholarly literature (such as it is), with a strong tendency these days to overvalue the 'Arab' element in a simplistic fashion and to an absurd degree. I have lots to say about this subject but I had best reserve all that for another time and place.

Joel -- The use of breadcrumbs exemplified in this dish is typical for all of the south of Italy and is to my mind not to be specifically associated with Puglia; the primary mental associations for me would sooner be with a) fasting and b) poverty, though breadcrumbs are obviously used a lot outside of those contexts as well; they taste really good and contribute a nice texture.*

KZ -- Nice dish.

Lu pani è cucca, cu l'havi si l'ammucca.
A


See, for example: Buccini, A.F. 2008. "From Necessity to Virtue: The Secondary Uses of Bread in Italian Cookery." In: Susan R. Friedland (ed.), Food and Morality. Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2007, pp. 57-69. Totnes: Prospect.

I will have to say in watching Molto Mario, I only saw him regularly use breadcrumbs as a pasta sauce as a Puglia thing... but I didn't get to his Sicily or Napoli series, if he had one, before FLN pulled the reruns from regular rotation.

JoelF wrote:I will have to say in watching Molto Mario, I only saw him regularly use breadcrumbs as a pasta sauce as a Puglia thing... but I didn't get to his Sicily or Napoli series, if he had one, before FLN pulled the reruns from regular rotation.

'Molto Mario' is hardly an authority on Italian cuisine; he is a chef and a television personality.

Antonius wrote:'Molto Mario' is hardly an authority on Italian cuisine; he is a chef and a television personality.

No argument. Just the source of my limted knowledge.

Kennyz wrote:Gypsy Boy,
Thanks for the background from Simeti's book. I'm awfully curious: does her recipe use bread crumbs, nuts, or neither to finish the dish? Any cheese?

Kenny,
Simeti's recipe calls for breadcrumbs, but--interestingly--as an accompaniment! Her ingredient list is 15-16 anchovy fillets, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, 16 ounces of tomato sauce (she recommends her own recipes, not surprisingly, one of which contains garlic and the other of which doesn't), 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/8 teaspoon of cloves, all for 1-1/2 pounds of spaghetti. For that amount, she specifies 1/4 cup of toasted breadcrumbs. No nuts. No cheese. (And toasting, to her, means fried in olive oil.)

Will somebody please 'splain me what cinnamon and cloves are doing in Macedonian (let alone Greece proper) cuisine? That's the supposed origin of Cincinnati chile, The-Former-Yugoslavian-Republic-Frequently-Known-as-Macedonia (or so I understand things; for all I know, it's the Present-Greek-Province-Where-Alexander-the-Greek-Learned-Logic-from-Aristotle). In any case, cinnamon and cloves just don't strike me as Greek. I've spent a lot of time eating in Greece, I cannot remember even oncet have tasted those spices...

If you were to ask me, it would make more sense if the originator of Cincinnati chile came from The Lebanon.

I'll leave it to Antonius to straighten us out re: how these spices came into the Roman and post-Roman culinary sphere.

Geo

Regarding the use of breadcrumbs, a short comment based on my own experience in Southern France after WW II.
During the very difficult years of 1947 and 1948 when food supplies were often as rare as money in the pocket, I remember that we ate often "tomates farcies" (stuffed baked tomatoes). But in these days there were 2 variations of this dish. One, called "tomates farcies au gras" (stuffed tomatoes with meat, or fat) was the very tasty and nutritious one that people with money would prepare, where the stuffing contained ground meat, usually pork, stale bread mixed with milk, garlic, sometimes chopped sauteed onions, parsley, and some egg yolk, the whole thing doused with olive oil.
The other one, that people with very limited income would eat, that was the case in my own home, contained no meat, but was covered with a crust of breadcrumbs. It was called "tomates farcies au maigre" (stuffed meatless, or fat free, tomatoes).
It seems to me that breadcrumbs have very often been associated in Mediterranean countries with many dishes, including pasta, with a tomato base used in low income segments of their population

Geo wrote:Will somebody please 'splain me what cinnamon and cloves are doing in Macedonian (let alone Greece proper) cuisine? That's the supposed origin of Cincinnati chile, The-Former-Yugoslavian-Republic-Frequently-Known-as-Macedonia (or so I understand things; for all I know, it's the Present-Greek-Province-Where-Alexander-the-Greek-Learned-Logic-from-Aristotle). In any case, cinnamon and cloves just don't strike me as Greek. I've spent a lot of time eating in Greece, I cannot remember even oncet have tasted those spices...

If you were to ask me, it would make more sense if the originator of Cincinnati chile came from The Lebanon.

I'll leave it to Antonius to straighten us out re: how these spices came into the Roman and post-Roman culinary sphere.

Geo

I haven't spent much time in Greece, but I've always perceived these spices to be a defining characteristic of the cuisine, particularly because as a child I hated cinnamon but grew up in an area with a lot of Greek people and food. Like the recent Frank's Red Hot sauce ads say, they put that sh*t on everything. The word itself has Greek origins, I believe; in the classical world, it was added to wine, Phoenix's nests, etc.

Geo wrote: In any case, cinnamon and cloves just don't strike me as Greek.

Aren't cinnamon and cloves a standard part of Greek moussaka? Now, I'm not saying that this dish is exclusively Greek, it's clearly one of those dishes that has traveled and slowly evolved wherever it went, but I would guess that that's where people began making the association between Greek food and Cincinnati Chili.

At any rate, like any regional dish, the origins of Cincinnati Chili depend on who you ask: most internet websites do point to Tom and John Kiradjieff who are confusingly referred to as "Macedonian immigrants from Greece" (meaning they emigrated from Macedonia to Greece and then to Cincinnati, I guess?) who seem to offer the earliest version of the dish, but the Skyline Chili website says that their founder created the chili from memories of his mother's Greek cooking, and the Dixie Chili website (which is fascinating) says theirs was created by a "young Greek man escaping Turkish guerillas." If you ask a native Cincinnatian to describe the chili, they'll say something like: "it's different, with sweeter spices, kind of Greek."

How specifically true that is, I can't say, but it's part of Cincinnati culture.

Mhays wrote:

Geo wrote: In any case, cinnamon and cloves just don't strike me as Greek.

Aren't cinnamon and cloves a standard part of Greek moussaka?....

At any rate, like any regional dish, the origins of Cincinnati Chili depend on who you ask: most internet websites do point to Tom and John Kiradjieff who are confusingly referred to as "Macedonian immigrants from Greece" (meaning they emigrated from Macedonia to Greece and then to Cincinnati, I guess?)...."

I don't know diddly about Cincinnati (my loss, no doubt). But the answer to your first question is yes. And the observation to be made about Macedonian immigrants is that Macedonia is not only a republic that used to be a part of Yugoslavia but it is ALSO the name of a region in Greece. It is the northernmost region of Greece and, confusingly only for us, shares a substantial border with the Republic of Macedonia.

Hmmm. I just checked 5 random moussaka recipes on the net. 1 had cinnamon, 2 had cloves, 2 had nutmeg (for three recipes total); and two had neither, but had oregano.

I must admit, I've never made moussaka, and have only ever ordered it maybe once in my life. So I'm absolutely not one to say anything either way about what spices/herbs should be in it. But mix lamb and a grill any way you want, and I've made it, and ordered it, a zillion times in 5, maybe 6, countries. And the herb set I'm used to when moving in that direction, any and/or all of: oregano, dill, mint, rosemary, garlic—my taste-predictor doesn't seem much room in that set for cinnamon or cloves. And since that's what I'm used to, that's what I expected.

But now I know that there's some cinnamon and/or cloves lurking before me were I to branch out toward something other than lambs and grills.

And next time I go 5-ways with Skyway, I'll have to remember to think Greek!

Geo

PS. KC used to have its own version of Cincinnati chili: Dixon's Chili Parlors, where Harry S Truman used to eat.

Geo wrote:Hmmm. I just checked 5 random moussaka recipes on the net. 1 had cinnamon, 2 had cloves, 2 had nutmeg (for three recipes total); and two had neither, but had oregano.

I must admit, I've never made moussaka, and have only ever ordered it maybe once in my life. So I'm absolutely not one to say anything either way about what spices/herbs should be in it. But mix lamb and a grill any way you want, and I've made it, and ordered it, a zillion times in 5, maybe 6, countries. And the herb set I'm used to when moving in that direction, any and/or all of: oregano, dill, mint, rosemary, garlic—my taste-predictor doesn't seem much room in that set for cinnamon or cloves. And since that's what I'm used to, that's what I expected.

But now I know that there's some cinnamon and/or cloves lurking before me were I to branch out toward something other than lambs and grills.

And next time I go 5-ways with Skyway, I'll have to remember to think Greek!

Geo

PS. KC used to have its own version of Cincinnati chili: Dixon's Chili Parlors, where Harry S Truman used to eat.

All of moussaka that the Chow Poodle's Greek Aunts make contains cinnamon and cloves in varying amounts. I'd be surprised to eat some that didn't have it.

Very interesting topic! My family's basic meat ragu sauce (passed down from a Lucchese grandfather) uses a generous amount of allspice. I also wondered about that type of spice in Northern Italian cooking. I haven't been able to determine where the allspice comes in - maybe it was a cheaper substitute for cloves/cinnamon to new immigrants?

The regional (Emilia-Romagna) cookbook "The Splendid Table" has many different recipes for various ragu's, and several incorporate cinnamon and/or cloves. I think those spices make sense with the wild boar and game sauces, but haven't seen many recipe examples.

This is just a datapoint that you can do what you want with, but allspice is a very important base spice in a lot of Arabic, particularly Levantine, cooking. Not sure about North Africa though, the region which probably supplied the "Arabic" influence, if any that would be found in certain Italian cuisines.