Pasta with Zucchini in the Style of Campania

Zucchini is the first vegetable either of us remembers really liking as children.  Yet precisely because it can seem so unobjectionable and homely, zucchini often doesn’t get much respect.  Notorious for its superabundance when in season, its very bounty can make it seem burdensome.  When we lived in Ohio, a neighbor would sometimes leave a paper bag of huge zucchini at the door, ring the bell, and then nip away.  We inevitably suspected that the stealth was a strategy to prevent us from refusing the gift.  There is a suburban legend that the reason one should always lock car doors in summer, even (or especially) in small, relatively crime-free towns (like Davis), is because otherwise someone will leave a bag of zucchini on the seat. 

Of course, people try so hard to offer their too too-abundant squash not just because they have so much of it, but also because, after all, it's just too good to waste.  More than once, a trip to Italy taught us to see zucchini anew and to try different takes on that summer staple, zucchini pasta.  

Some years ago we had a dish at a little restaurant in Montalcino, in Tuscany, of butterfly pasta, cooked squash, garlic, basil, and a generous amount of pecorino fresco, a soft, fresh sheep’s milk cheese from Tuscany that is available at the Davis Co-op.  The more widely-known pecorino romano is an aged version of a similar cheese.  With this dish, we learned about something that we’ve come to refer to as “the restaurant pause.”  In the restaurant in Italy, we could see the pasta being finished in the pan with the cooked vegetables and herbs.  It was then plated, and small pieces of the cheese (which is too soft to grate) were sprinkled on top.  We could see the chef putting the plate on a shelf just outside the kitchen for the waiter to pick up.  In the tiny, busy and hot restaurant, with one waiter striving his best to serve every table, the plate of pasta waited for perhaps two minutes or so on that shelf; and when it arrived at the table the cheese had melted perfectly on top.  It’s not a liquid cheese sauce, but a sort of lovely light lattice of melted cheese on top of the cooked butterflies.  In most recipes, of course, one is told to serve pasta “immediately,” but this recipe makes a positive virtue out of the inevitable (small) delay between cooking a dish and getting it in front of your guest.

This summer we were in Campania, the region in the middle of Italy whose capital is Naples, where the local specialty is often claimed to be spaghetti with zucchini.  We certainly ate it constantly when we were there.  Usually it’s just squash cooked in olive oil and tossed with spaghetti and grated pecorino romano.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but neither is it particularly memorable.  In one tiny restaurant near Positano, however, the pasta was dressed in a rich green sauce with flecks of brown.  As we ate, we speculated that they had added cooked bacon or ham, or perhaps a glug of sweet cream, to pureed squash.  But when we asked our waiter (part of the family that ran the restaurant), he wagged his finger and said “no, no” and then explained what they did as best he could.  Only when getting home and reading around a bit did we also learn that one of the secrets of this recipe is a variety of squash known as romanesco, which by a happy chance was turning up at Fiddler’s Green at the Davis Farmers Market just as we were experimenting with this dish.  The flesh of this variety has a creamy texture that is part of the secret of this dish — along with, truth be told, a rather generous amount of butter.

Romanesco Squash from Fiddler's Green Farm

Anyway, the recipe below is our best shot at synthesizing what our friendly waiter told us in Campania and a few other recipes seen elsewhere. In this version, we juiced it up a little further by adding some basil and chopped zucchini flowers, since the latter happened to be available.  The basil doesn’t do much, so feel free to omit it, but it does amp up the green color somewhat.  We’ve also included a method for plating the spaghetti that we noticed everyone doing in Italy.  

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Spaghetti with Romanesco Zucchini in the Style of Campania

5-6 medium romanesco zucchini squash, scrubbed, trimmed and sliced medium thinly

Olive oil for frying

1 lb dried spaghetti

5 tbs butter

about one cup of grated parmesan cheese

¼ cup basil leaves, sliced into thin ribbons (a chiffonade)

1 basket of zucchini flowers, trimmed and sliced thinly (optional)

Fry the zucchini slices in olive oil at medium heat until soft and beginning to brown a little.  It will take at least two rounds of frying.  (We’ve found that zucchini tends to get bitter if you get it really brown.  What you’re aiming for here are pieces that are soft, spotted with brown, but retaining some of their green color and just beginning to fall apart.  Remove from pan to a plate and reserve).

 

All the rest of the dish gets done when you finish it, which, unfortunately, has to be right when you want to serve it.

To finish and serve

Bring a large kettle of generously salted water to boil.  Drop in your spaghetti, and stir vigorously until it is boiling again.

Put the butter in a separate pan big enough to fit the whole dish.

When the spaghetti has cooked about half of its time (check your package of spaghetti, but usually around 4-5 minutes), take one cup of the pasta water and add it to the pan with the butter and turn the heat to high.

When the butter-water mixture comes to a boil, add the reserved zucchini.

Now, still at high heat, stir the zucchini mixture vigorously, allowing the pieces to fall apart, until you have a kind of rough puree.  It should take a good two minutes or so.  When it starts to look the way you want it, turn the heat down or off; but this is a game of inches, measured against your pasta in the kettle. 

When the spaghetti is still a little underdone, drain it (reserve another cup of pasta water just in case), and add it to the pan with the zucchini.  Stir vigorously as the pasta absorbs some of the liquid.

Add 1 cup of grated parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper. Continue to fold the pasta into the sauce until it has the right consistency.  If it looks watery, cook a little longer to dry it out; if it seems dry, add a little more pasta water.

(Just before calling it done, gently fold in the basil and the chopped flowers, if using.)

Take a large fork, and gather a goodly bit of the spaghetti, turning it into a spiral in a large ladle.  Put one generous spiral of pasta on each plate. 

 

To be really honest, this dish seems to us to have so successfully distilled the earthy taste of the squash that, as the old saying goes, a little goes a long way.  But this is an absolutely wonderful pasta served in small amounts as part of a three-course Italian dinner, following some kind of light antipasti and preceding a meat course, perhaps one of Bledsoe’s wonderful thick pork chops.