Recipe: Tagliatelle with seafood

Who better to learn how to make pasta from than Italy’s best home cooks, the nonnas themselves? In the cookbook Pasta Grannies you’ll find accessible and traditional family recipes from nonnas all over the country, and learn how to make pasta yourself (with and without a pasta machine). This seafood pasta recipe from nonna Lucia and her friends is hugely popular on the Italian coast and in our home too.

In the Italian coastal town of Savio, an annual sagra is held, a food festival in honor of strozzapreti, ‘priest stranglers’. That name is given to various pasta shapes; here they are short twisted ribbons. The ladies who make them for several weeks in preparation for the sagra are Anna Rita, Betta, Fenina and the matriarch, 94-year-old

Lucia. Lucia was born in the hills of Romagna. Her family were contadini (farmers). She only moved to the coast when she got married. She brought her cooking skills with her: she calls this shape lunghetti and adds finely grated pecorino to the dough instead of eggs. Eggs used to be sold and were only added to pasta dough when there were extras. Her friends laugh and joke about her preference for cheese, but for the sagra they make the dough below. The seafood used for this dish depends on the catch, so make your own selection. In this part of the Adriatic Sea, mantis shrimp, for example, are highly regarded. Prawns, vongole, squid and white fish are all fine too.

How to make tagliatelle with seafood

• First make the pasta dough. Mix the 00 flour and farro flour, and place the mixture on the pasta board. Make a well in it and add the egg, olive oil, water and salt. Stir the liquid ingredients together with a fork, then draw them through the flour. Break the well once the liquid ingredients no longer run and form it into a ball of dough. Knead the dough for 10 minutes until smooth. Let the dough rest for 30 minutes in a covered bowl.
• Roll out the dough to a thickness of 2 mm and cut it with a knife or pastry wheel into ribbons 1 cm wide. Pick up a ribbon and twist one end between your palms; break off this twisted piece with your fingers and continue with the next one until you reach the end of the ribbon. Repeat with the remaining ribbons. Watch the video—it really helps! Place the strozzapreti separately so they don’t stick together.
• For the sauce, heat the olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium heat and fry the onion with the cayenne pepper for about 7 minutes, until the onion is translucent. Add the garlic toward the end; it must not brown. Add the seafood from your selection that requires a longer cooking time (e.g. squid). Pour in the wine and wait until the alcohol has evaporated; add a little water if necessary so the bottom of the pan does not dry out. Add the cherry tomatoes and a small pinch of salt, and stir. Let this simmer for a few minutes until you think the squid or whatever you added is almost cooked. Now add all the seafood with a short cooking time, such as prawns and vongole, and let everything simmer for another 2 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the parsley.
  Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil, add the strozzapreti and cook for about 4 minutes until almost done. Set aside a few ladlefuls of the cooking water before draining the pasta, then let the pasta slide into the pan with the seafood.
• Turn up the heat and toss everything well. If it looks dry, add some of the reserved pasta water.
  Serve the pasta immediately and divide the seafood fairly between the bowls, otherwise you’ll have an argument.

Title: Pasta Grannies
Author: Vicky Bennison
Price: €29,99
Publisher: Fontaine Uitgevers

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