Think On It

Pasta alla Norciera

August 26th, 2008

I invited a friend to supper and she brought me one of the greatest hostess gifts I have ever had. It was a shallow basket filled with things from her vegetable garden and these porcini mushrooms which she had found and picked.

Porcini mushrooms

It’s very early to find porcini, but she had been in the mountains where they come earlier. I photographed these to show you how they look cleaned and uncleaned. All have been brushed and then pared away at the stem except the dirty one up front.

I had lots of ideas of what do do with them, but I knew that these porcini would make at least three dishes for me. I think of porcini and autumnal foods together, and one of my favorite autumnal pastas is pasta alla Norciera, named for a woman from Norcia. Norcia is an Umbrian town famous through the millennia for her pork. Norcia and pork are so connected that in many parts of Italy pork butchers are stilled named after the town, as they were in Roman times. This pasta, usually made with penne, reflects that area of Umbria which is high in the hills and surrounded by woods. It’s rich and deeply flavored and will stick to your ribs unless you run outside immediately after consuming it and chop some wood. I can swear to its deliciousness, because I have eaten it at least once every year since I arrived.

You do not need to have fresh porcini mushrooms to make this dish. I know they are becoming more available all the time, shipping from Finland, Chile, Poland so that even in Italy many times we are not buying Italian porcini. Dried porcini are very easy to find in most places and work perfectly in dishes for which the mushrooms are sliced or chopped. Boletus edulis grows in many places and has many names, Cepes, for example, being the French. I have never met a boletus edulis I didn’t like. Dried ones are fabulous and perfect for dishes like this. Really huge porcini are very often grilled like a steak, but these smaller ones you can use to make the hundreds of wonderful dishes like this pasta.

Pasta all norciera

for 2 to 4 people

1/2 medium onion, chopped
a little olive oil
2 sausages — if you are not in Umbria, you may need salt in your dish. Umbrian sausages are very salty and provide all the salt you could want. They are also very lean and can’t fry without a bit of oil.
2 porcini, sliced lengthwise or a handful of rehydrated dried porcini
65 to 125 ml (1/4 to 1/2 cup) heavy cream
a scraping or two of nutmeg
pepper

200-350 g pasta prepared according to the package and timed to be very al dente when the sauce is done.

Optional grated Pecorino or Parmigiano cheese.

In a frying pan, heat the olive oil and then fry the onions until transparent, without browning them. Cut open the sausages and crumble the meat into the pan, then fry that until it loses its color.

Add a little more oil and the mushrooms, stirring and sautèing until cooked but still firm. Then add the cream, stirring up every bit of the brown part that is on the bottom of the pan. Taste for salt and correct it if necessary. Continue to simmer this on a very low flame if possible, until the pasta is done. You may add a little of the pasta water to loosen the sauce a bit, but remember, too, that with cream sauces it is important that the pasta not be even a bit past al dente, or it will feel slimy.

Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce pan, tossing around to coat very well every piece. Add a bit of nutmeg, then grind fresh black pepper over the whole. Serve smoking hot to two as a main course or 4 as a first course.

That, just in case anyone questions it, is how pasta should be boiled. Except for delicate stuffed pastas or some gnocchi, pasta isn’t a gentle simmer with a dimpled and jolly surface, but crazy-wild-foamy and volcanic like that photo.

Grated cheese is optional because it adds salt. Mine could not take the additional salt, so the cheese was placed there to make it look better in a photo. This is not a particularly pretty nor photogenic dish! But it is a really satisfying thing on a cool or rainy day.

I could eat that right now and it is not yet even 11 AM here. Anyway, let’s send this off to Presto Pasta Night, because in Canada it’s going to be cold a lot sooner than here, and they should be well armed for it before it happens.

Entry Filed under: Italy, meat, pasta, primo, pork, Italian food, cucina, porcini, recipes, easy, cookery, funghi, maile