pasta a la Pavarotti

''One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating''  - Luciano Pavarotti.

For the 1988 Metropolitan Opera Cook Book (worth buying for the photos alone) Pavarotti contributed two recipes - both pasta, naturally. I've owned a copy for a couple of years but never cooked from it, so I thought Pavarotti's Pennoni al Tonno might be a good start. Legend has it the great tenor had bowls of tuna pasta secreted around the wings whenever he performed at Covent Garden. But whatever Pavarotti ate, he clearly went back for seconds, which has to be some sort of recommendation.

Here's a close-up of the recipe:

All those tins and packets took me back to student days, but at least it looks simple.

London clearly isn't as well stocked as the Upper West Side - I couldn't find the specified pennoni anywhere. So I bought the smaller version, the ubiquitous penne. More surprisingly, I couldn't find plain, unadulterated tomato juice, so I settled for passata (sieved tomatoes) instead. And because bottled French anchovies are cheaper and nicer than the tinned ones, I substituted them in too. Sorry Luciano.

I considered the little flat tins of tuna in olive oil from Spain, but that would have taken the costs up to gourmet level, so I settled for the regular sort. I didn't realise they still made garlic salt, but as you can see, I lucked out. Ye olde 80s shopping basket:

 

Step one - I chopped the onion as delicately as I could manage through my tears and sautéed it very gently for about 15 minutes:

 

then added in the tuna (drained) and the chopped anchovies:

 

then after a couple of minutes, the tomato paste, passata and garlic salt:

 

Here's how it looked after 15 minutes simmering on a low heat, the ingredients now all beautifully blended, the flavours super-concentrated. Very salty at this point; it really needs the pasta to tone it down:

 

I cooked the penne at the same time:

 

then mixed it in with the sauce. It makes an amazing amount -the recipe says 6 portions, but 8 is more like it:

 

and here's the finished article, topped with grated parmesan. It's a terrific recipe, rib-sticking and saltily intense. I'd never have guessed chucking a few tins into a saucepan could produce something quite so delicious. Pavarotti could apparently polish off a whole kilo of pasta in one sitting (that's this recipe times two). I could manage only a small plate:

 

Here's the great tenor before he discovered pasta:

and here he is cooking for Peter Ustinov on German TV. Why? Search me. But it proves he knew his way around a kitchen.

Luciano Pavarotti cooking:

Comments

[Hal]

Juan Diego Florez also is something of a gourmet but obviously you can see that he controls his eating better than did Pavarotti. He said that he had to learn to cook for himself when he was a student at Curtis in Philadelphia. He tends to meld Italian with Peruvian cuisine. Before his marriage in Lima he put on a chef's uniform and displayed some of his dishes at the Rosa Nautica restaurant in Lima (you can see it all on You Tube). But before he performs he is careful what he eats. Only quinoa, a kind of Peruvian porridge. And he has said one has to be careful after a performance not to go whole hog and eat too much or you will end up fat and (I presume) unable to jump onto tables, etc., as he likes to do.

Joan Sutherland also had some humorous remarks about how Monserrat Caballe after a performance would say that she only wanted a "tiny bit of pasta" and then eat most of the plate.

[Steven Rowland]

Are you sure that's Pavarotti at the top and not fun-loving Keith in his hilarious face mask?

[John]

I have never understood American "cups". How much is this? A cup and half of Parmesan! No wonder he was big P!

[Gert]

I have that book, too, but, like several other American cook books I own I get flummoxed by the measurements by volume, not weight. Plus, it's not very veggie*-friendly, this being one of the few veggie* recipes.

It nearly cost me a great deal of money, because I noticed a wine recommendation by Gerald Finley - Ribeira del Duero A few days later, I was in a Spanish restaurant and spotted some on the wine list for £30, so decided to order it. It was at the very bottom of the left hand page. An extensive wine list, at the very bottom of the next left hand page was another bottle of Ribiera del Duero, for £300, and I actually ordered that before immediately spotting my error!

(And no, I'm not normally in the habit of ordering £30 bottles either. Three of us demolished it with pleasure, and ordered a second bottle of something at half the price, and even got our glasses exchanged from elegant to everyday!)

*(by veggie, I mean in a Katherine Jenkins way, like her I am a 'vegetarian' who eats fish. But, other than when booking airline meals, this is the first time I have actually described myself as a veggie)

[Hal]

An American "cup"=230 grams. There are "cup" measures sold in most stores in the US, so they are easy to use. Also sold are half cup, third cup, quarter cup and one-eighth cup measures.