Weird Kitchen 1!
Pasta e patate
Pasta & potatoes, pasta e patate, pasta padan & pasta bedan (cw: not a vegan recipe nor a chill memory)
Ok so this dish I want to tell you about...it’s… exactly what it sounds like. It’s pasta and potatoes. It’s thick and it’s starchy, with a savory sludge in place of a broth. It’s both a hangover cure and a very functional base to spackle down your stomach lining before you even think about opening up any liquor.
It’s hard for me to tell you about this dish without telling you about another one, also highlighted by pasta and potatoes. It’s kind of a boring, homey soup that we make in my family called, phonetically, “Pasta Padan/Bedan.”
My Uncle Pat (Pasquale) used to make pasta badan whenever he would visit our house in West Virginia (show up randomly in his RV). I have a memory of him putting on a pot of soup with tomatoes, potatoes, onion, carrot, garlic, hot pepper, salt pork and dried parsley. The aromatics, the warming smells filled up the house. Then I remember him leaving again, to drive up Cheat Mountain to hunt rabbits with a friend of his who lived out near Pisgey. They met overseas during the Korean War. In my memory, Pat comes home with some rabbits, dresses them and cooks them cacciatore style in our tiny galley kitchen in Star City, but not before boiling water for ditalini. I think my dad is maybe not living with us anymore at this point, so Pat was probably checking in on my mom and us. Even though I was very little and not super psyched to eat cute rabbits covered in olives and onions (100% would now tho), I didn’t really have a choice but to try it. The consolation was a gargantuan heaping bowl of pasta and potatoes. Though he had a repugnant, stereotypical 60’s-era Italian-American world-view, Pat was a tremendous cook and these two dishes of his have completely soaked my memory of that time. Whenever I cook, I aim for the simplicity and authority of that rabbit cacciatore and pot of soup (side note: we can talk about problematic Italian relatives and/or cooking wild game any time, just text me).
Pat’s been dead for a few years now. The last time I saw him was at family day in Hartford, CT. My mom or someone must have told him I’d be there, but when he showed up (again, in his RV, even at 90-something), he went to the kitchen and put on a pot of soup. He didn’t even give it to me personally, and in fact he hardly spoke more than a handful of words to me the whole afternoon. He looked at my tattoos and very, very unkindly called me a turkey. But he left the soup on the counter and told my Nanna it was for me. There was a pot literally bursting with pasta bedan, a margarine container filled with oily ditaleen, and my name written in pen on some masking tape holding the lid in place. It had been probably ten years since he'd seen me last, but he remembered this one ridiculous detail: that I was an absolute mad bastard about that pasta badan.
I was grateful to have his soup one last time.
Hoping back over the Atlantic for a sec to auld Napoli, Paste e Patate (the thing I came here to tell you about but I’m too much a goddam chiacchierona to ever get to the point) is both simpler and more complex (yay! that makes no sense!) than Pat’s version, even though his pasta padan had this no-nonsense mess hall utilitarianism to it. Pasta e patate is not a very popular soup in the Italian/Italian-American repertoire, but if you search for it you might find a handful of recipes online, published on spiraling, rambling posts a lot like this one. You’ll find someone earnestly oversharing (like me!) about their family’s favorite soup, and it’ll more or less appear to be an unremarkable dry looking bowl of rigatoni. Compared on paper to all the other showy Italian dishes you can argue about for fun (onions in a red sauce Y/N, angel hair is for assholes, alfredo isn’t real, etc), this soup can hardly hold a flame. But I’m going to try to convince you otherwise anyway.
It’s got the rubber stamp of “authentic” Italian because it is so simple, cheap and filling. You have a pot of onions, garlic, salty cured pork ,and you add in intervals potatoes, tomatoes, pasta and an unforgivable amount of cheese. The more you read about it in message boards, comments sections and blog posts, the more apparent it becomes that this dish was a one that working class Italians kept in their back pocket to feed the family. I guess it’s utilitarian readiness left it almost invisible to cooking shows and celebrity chefs. What’s more is because it’s so simple, pasta e patate lends itself to endless variations (carrots or no carrots, etc.), so there’s not really a quintessential version. In The Sopranos, the protagonist of one of the more compelling/tragic side stories, Vito, cooks his New Hampshire hottie-biker-cum-diner-owner date a dish of what he calls “Pasta Badan.” In the half-second that we see it, it looks like life-sustaining, heavenly gruel. Vito shrugs and says “pasta and potatoes, peasant food.”
Hey bada bing sfacheem! There it is, there’s that name I know! The one we use! But wait a sec, it’s not the same dish at all wtf!
Or is it? My *hot take* here is that these dishes actually are the same dish. But over time and distance, and through translation, the dish didn’t so much evolve exactly, but instead heaved itself into a totally separate, fluid form - like some kind of quantum parallel of starch and semolina. Sometimes you’ll get a soup, other times orange-colored spackle. Sometimes it’ll have carrots in it, other times it won’t. Sometimes you don’t have access to weird smoked cheeses, sometimes you do. Maybe you want to use celery and start with the holy trinity, I don’t know. Does pasta bedan absolutely, 100% need the specialized niche Italian ingredients to be warming, comforting and homey? No, not really! That’s the magic of potatoes and pasta, baby. In fact, using what’s available is cooking more in the spirit. Anyway, there are endless variations, and I think that’s part of what makes this such a satisfying and captivating dish. I think the main things, the things that do not change, are the presence of potatoes and the presence of pasta.
So here I am trying to loop back around to what I initially wanted to talk to you about, and I recognize this probably has like zero interest to anyone other than me, but I get real excited about words - specifically how they’re spoken out loud. So what keeps ringing my bell about this isn’t the recipe itself - the ~literal~ piles of scamorza, or even my family’s iteration of whatever this dish is. It’s the name, how the name changes depending on who is speaking it and what the name signifies. I don’t know, I just like the idea that I can say Pasta Bedan and it can mean a ton of different things, all while being the same. It lends itself to variation and defies attempts to define it. It’s an anarchist soup, it’s a poetic soup. It’s a soup for the poet anarchists of the world.
Italian-American, as a dialect or quasi-pidgin or whatever, is essentially known by its abbreviations. Vowels are dropped, constantly, and consonants are softened. Words from the Italian dialects and English are combined, and then treated to these vowel and consonant transformations. It’s immediately identifiable.
Here’s an example: at this point everyone is familiar with gabagool, the pronunciation of capicola made unavoidable by memes about The Sopranos. Consonant c is softened into g, the last vowel is dropped and the preceding one is stressed. Capicola, tossed into this verbal tumbler, comes out gabagool. Why am I talking about this, about the Sopranos? All recipes and preparations, but especially working class family style recipes, go through a similar process of transformation. Of vowel dropping, so to speak. They change to fit circumstances of affordability, of scarcity or plenty, of political climate. Anyway, if you think any this language change stuff is fun, go track down where fongool, googootz or stugots comes from. I would also like to point out that if you like this stuff - how another language changes spoken English - remember that we’re talking about people who have immigrated to this country. These social and culinary and language phenomena I’m talking about are always accepted as fun and interesting when talked about in the Italian context but as soon as you start talking about other cultural groups or languages, new immigrants the conversation suddenly switches to protecting the integrity of the English language or whatever. That’s bullshit. English has been used as a tool of destruction and domination for centuries. You can’t take joy in one immigrant group just because you cling to its heritage or, I don’t know, really like Frankie Valli or something (I really like Frankie Valli). The English language should be destroyed and the concept of whiteness is a chemical weapon. I don’t know how I got here, other than I don’t know if it is even really possible to talk about food in this country without at least touching on whiteness.
I realize I’m almost irreparably off-topic here, and I’ll try to bring it back in. Here’s my “hot take” about soup again in case you forgot: Pasta e patate, like they eat in Naples, is the same dish as Pasta Bedan that we eat in the Donnarumma family.
Even though our soup is a thin-ish broth with potatoes and other vegetables, and pasta e patate on the other hand, is THICK and simple: potatoes, macaroni, a couple of maters, they’re the same. If I have to be less hyperbolic or extreme about it (which I will only do under protest), the two dishes come from the same place, one is just a little flattened and Americanized, militarized. In Uncle Pat’s soup, our version, the macaroni doesn’t go in until you sit down to eat (which I will say does a good job of making it all last longer in the fridge). On the other hand, for the soup in Naples, the pasta goes right on in that sucker and soaks everything up and that’s the whole point. It becomes this life-sustaining, grace-bestowing, starchy glop filled with cheese. It cements your insides shut for 24 hours in the best way imaginable.
This was supposed to be a post about pasta e patate, and I’ll tell you about how I make it in one sec. Uncle Pat never let anyone else make his soup, pasta badan, and honestly he never even told me what was in it beyond once giving me a list of ingredients out of order. I have worked backwards from there. My nanna and my mom both say it’s about as close as they can remember. Butttt I’m not going to share that one recipe with you today. Just come over for lunch next fall. Give me a like 5 hours notice and there will be a big ol bowl on the table waiting for you.
OKAY FINALLY THE RECIPE
This is my best attempt at explaining the Neapolitan pasta e patate to you. It’s indebted to google translate, about 10 different Naples food bloggers, the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company and the skin I surrendered to my cheese grater.
You’ll need:
garlic
onion
potato
tomato
parsley
olive oil
pancetta
scamorza
parmigiano
pasta misto
the rind from the parm
some kind of chili pepper
water or some kind of broth
NOTES: Regarding the cheese, you can omit the scamorza. You can sub it for smoked provolone or smoked mozz, or omit it altogether. At Penn Mac they have nice ones from Liuzzi’s in New Haven. I never in my life had fooled around with melty cheeses in Italian recipes. Its always been pecorino or ricotta. My mom will put asiago in spadini and braciole, and mascarpone in tiramisu but me I don’t mess with those things. For this bowl of glop, I like the extra melty cheese I just think its fun, and I really do think the smokey flavor is nice and rounds the whole thing out. But like, will it be bad without? Hell no. Secondly, Nabblydon recipes typically call for pecorino over parm, which is apparently more of a northern italian foo-foo cheese, but I dunno. The consensus here does seem to be for this one dish you do choose parm. Maybe its just creamier or meltier than pecorino? Or maybe food rules are just completely arbitrary, and subject to shrieking human chaos.
Regarding vegan adaptations, I think it would be super easy to omit the cheese and meat and sub in cashews and nutritional yeast. There is so much delightful starch already present, and oil and so many aromatics. I would say for a vegan version, bulk up your aromatic base with a proper soffritto by adding celery and carrots in with your onions, but here this time just cook them on lower heat so they really stink up the place good.
Dice your onion. Dice your potatoes. Get a pot with salted water on the boil. Smash a garlic clove or two in your hand.
Saute the garlic in another big pot until lightly browned in a fair to heavy amount of olive oil, but don’t burn it jesus christ
Add your pancetta or guanciale or bacon or saltpork or whatever you’re using (the idea is you want salt and you want fat), fry until almost crispy in places
Add onions and chilis or pepper seeds, and saute until just about done (some people say this soup does not need to be spicy but they are wrong)
Add potatoes, cook 3-4 mins.
Take your tomatoes out of the can and crush them in your hands, add to the pan, stir in some salt. You can really wiggle with how much tomato to use. I like to to just use the toms, no juice and only like 3 or 4 of them. I like it when this comes out orange, but maybe you want a stronger tomato taste?
Pour in enough broth or hot water to cover, toss in the cheese rind if you feel like, let it simmer in there like you would with a bay leaf or dried lemon. Like cheese tea.
You let this cook for a little while now, maybe 20 minutes. Stirring occasionally. I like to smoosh some of the taters and maters at this point.
Add your macaroni. Misto is a Neapolitan thing where it’s basically just a bag of broken mismatched pastas. You can sub for literally any squat past. A clever sub would be ½ ditaleen and ½ broken spaghetti, but like again, literally anything works as long as it’s small.
This is where it gets annoying. You’ll have to stir until the past is al dente, but the soup slowly becomes just absurdly thick so you gotta stay on it. You really don’t want to burn it at this point bc you’re like, what, half an hour, 45 minutes in? If it starts to get too thick, add some more broth or water (you saved some extra hot broth or hot water right? right?).
Anyway, once the macaroni is al dente (and you want it to be very al dente because everything will stay quite hot for a long time and continue to cook), turn off the heat. Pull out the cheese rind and dump in like, just so, so much cubed scamorza. Stir it with a wooden spoon until the chese melts completely, and thoroughly combines with the starches in the soup. This will take longer than you expect it too, and it really isn’t as good if you quit too early. Sorry.
Add some grated parm.
Let it sit for a few, let it really come together. When its time to eat, you can top it with torn basil, parsley. Rosemary could be really nice. Any herb really. Sprinkle it with some black pepper, too. The other day I squeezed a little lemon on mine - that was not a good idea, don’t do that.
TL;DR here’s a youtube from a goofy old guy that my mom likes a lot, and it pretty much contradicts everything in my recipe but then again I would say his is kind of lazy, so that’s fun. Also he takes a big bite out of a hot pepper like it’s a carrot.