Spring Herbs: A favorite pasta

It's the beautiful early days of spring in Davis: when it's sunny but still cool and the blustery rainy days are belied by the glorious blue skies.  The perennials are leaping after their sleeping, the shoots are shooting up, and the fruit trees are everywhere extravagantly in bloom.  It’s difficult to resist the clichés about the season that come so easily to mind

Bitweene Merch and Averil
When spray beginneth to spring.

This is a pasta dish that we think can be made only in early spring, for it relies on tender herbs at their first growth, and the onion and garlic chives that are everywhere in the market right now.   

We’ve seen many recipes for this basic kind of pasta, but ours is adapted from Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s famous The Splendid Table.  Our signal for making this now was seeing the very first basil to appear at the market, at California Vegetable Specialties, who have been bringing little pots of basil not intended for planting but rather, for taking home and snipping leaves as needed (as well as their wonderful, small English and Japanese cucumbers).    

One could make a different version of this dish later in the summer that, like pesto, would center on the taste of the basil, which will then be available in huge bunches everywhere.  But in this version, on the contrary, you use a subtle mixture of young, uncooked herbs including ones like rosemary, sage and thyme that, later in the season, would be too strong to use in this way.  This is not, however, a vegetarian dish, but one that depends on the vibrant interplay of these fresh herbal flavors, the salty savor of prosciutto di parma, and the richness of reduced meat stock.   On our much-used and splattered copy of The Splendid Table, this recipe is annotated: "best in early spring," and "don't stint on the prosciutto!"

From the farmers' market, we brought home a few bunches of spring onions, garlic chives and parsley (as well as  that little pot of basil mentioned above), and then went out to our garden to snip off some of the new leaves of rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano, and tarragon.  You can find most of these on sale at the market too, which is fortunate since, truth be told, we've often had only modest success growing culinary herbs at home (except for oregano, which comes back every year like a trooper and, of course, rosemary, which grows everywhere in town so abundantly that some people use it as a hedge).  You need a total of about two cups of chopped herbs, the majority of which should be milder herbs like parsley and basil but combined with enough of the others to make the whole mixture complex.  You'll also need a lot of regular onion, at least one bunch of spring onion, and one bunch of garlic chives.  Actually the original recipe uses regular garlic, but we like to substitute the garlic chives that are available only at this time of year.

The recipe ideally needs some home-made meat stock (see our post of April 29, 2012).  Chicken stock is fine, but this dish is especially good with Rossetto Kasper’s recipe from this same book, which uses a mixture of beef bones (which Yolo Land and Cattle usually has for sale) and chicken to produce a somewhat darker and richer stock than those made with just chicken.  When we've made stock with her recipe, we call it "splendid stock" in homage to this wonderful cookbook.

Splendid Table's Tagliatelle with Caramelized Onions and Fresh Herbs

• Olive oil
• 4 onions, chopped
• 1 1/2 cups of chicken or chicken/beef stock
• 1 pound tagliatelle (or substitute fettucine, linguini or spaghetti).  This is a great chance to use the noodles available from Pasta Dave at the market. 
• About two cups fresh herbs (basil, parsley, marjoram, oregano, chives, sage, rosemary and thyme, in roughly that order of priority in terms of relative amount.  You don't need all of these, but some mixture of the sweet milder herbs with the stronger ones is essential.)
• 2/3 cup of heavy cream
• 2-3 ounces chopped prosciutto di parma or other good cured ham (such as Bledsoe's from the market)
• 1 bunch spring onions chopped
• 1 bunch garlic chives chopped (or 1-2 cloves of minced garlic)
• 2 cups grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
• salt and pepper to taste  

Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a heavy pan or dutch oven.  Add the onions, salt lightly, stir to coat with oil, then cover and turn down the heat.  Cook covered about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until very soft.  Then uncover, turn up the heat to medium-high, and cook, stirring constantly, until the onions are brown.  You will have made, in effect, a kind of onion compote or marmalade which, as you'll see if you taste it, is surprisingly sweet from just the natural sugar in the reduced onions.

If you're using regular garlic instead of the garlic chives, add it when the onions are almost brown.  Then add the stock, and scrap off any brown glaze from the pan.  Let the sauce simmer until the stock has reduced by half.


Rinse, de-stem, and coarsely chop the herbs, spring onions and garlic chives.  Chop the prosciutto.  Combine all these in a bowl and reserve.


Everything up to this point can be done a few hours in advance if you wish.  

To finish the dish:

Cook your pasta until it is just barely tender but still a bit firm.
Reheat the onion mixture and add the cream.  When your pasta has just been drained, stir the herb mixture into the sauce and stir: you don't want to cook the herbs, just warm them.  Season to taste with salt and pepper.
  

Toss the cooked pasta with the sauce, adding about a cup of cheese, and a very small amount of the pasta cooking water if it seems necessary.


Plate and pass the rest of the cheese at the table.