Seafood

Marinara with the addition of canned tuna and capers makes a great pasta sauce.

Small shrimp cook right inside these very fresh-tasting ravioli. You don’t need fancy big shrimp for this: small and inexpensive “41/50s” (which means there are forty-one to fifty shrimp in a pound) are a good size, or even smaller rock shrimp. Make the simple flavored butter a bit ahead of time, and chill it in the freezer to facilitate handling.

Marinara is my quintessential anytime tomato sauce. I can start it when the pasta water goes on the stove and it will be ready when the pasta is just cooked. Yet, in its short cooking time, it develops such fine flavor and pleasing consistency that you may well want to make a double batch—using some right away and freezing the rest for suppers to come. The beauty of this marinara sauce is that it has a freshness, acidity, and simplicity of taste, in contrast to the complexity and mellowness of the long-cooking tomato sauce that follows. This recipe for marinara includes lots of fresh basil, which I keep in the house at all times, now that it is available in local supermarkets year-round. I cook a whole basil stalk (or a handful of big sprigs with many leaves attached) submerged in the tomatoes to get all the herb flavor. Then I remove these and finish the sauce and pasta with fresh shredded leaves, giving it another layer of fresh-basil taste. (If you are freezing some of the sauce, by the way, you can wait until you’re cooking with it to add the fresh-basil garnish.) This sauce can be your base for cooking any fish fillet, chicken breast, pork fillet, or veal scaloppini. Sear any of these in a pan, add some marinara sauce, season with your favorite herbs, and let it perk for a few minutes—you’ll have yourself a good dish.

Small shrimp make a lovely addition to skillet sauces, because they cook so quickly, barely 2 minutes in the skillet. The trick is to make sure that you don’t overcook the shrimp. If you can, start your pasta before the sauce, so they finish at the same time. But if your pasta isn’t ready when the shrimp and sauce are, take the skillet off the heat.

This recipe provides a good introduction to the quick skillet sauces and pastas in this section. Typical of these dishes, it’s quick: the sauce itself cooks in 5 minutes in the skillet, and the capellini I’ve paired it with needs barely 2 minutes in the pot; when all is tossed and garnished, the pasta is on the table in 10 minutes. And it demonstrates how well a pasta dish can be created from common pantry ingredients when they are cooked and combined thoughtfully. With its generous amounts of anchovies, capers, peperoncino flakes, garlic, and tomato, I can honestly tell you that this is the kind of pasta I love to eat. The flavors are strong and sharp yet balanced—staccato notes in harmony, to use a musical metaphor. In the recipe, I’ve given a range of amounts for the bold ingredients. If you use the lesser measures of anchovies, capers, peperoncino, and garlic, you will enjoy a distinctive dish suited for most people’s tastes, what I call “middle of the road” at my restaurants. If you use the greater measure, you’ll have the same dish I make for myself at home. Incidentally, you don’t need to use perfect summer tomatoes for this sauce. Even in winter, decent market tomatoes will work as long as they’re not too soft. If none are available, you can make a fine sauce without tomato at all (just don’t substitute canned tomatoes). You’ll need more pasta water for moisture, but otherwise follow the recipe. Like all sauces, this one goes with many pastas. In addition to thin varieties like the capellini, presented here, I suggest linguine, spaghettini, or just regular spaghetti. Remember to coordinate the cooking of the sauce with the cooking time of each kind of pasta. If I was cooking linguine that takes 9 or 10 minutes in the pot, I would put the pasta in first and then start cooking my sauce, reversing the sequence given in the recipe.

Here’s a welcoming dish, delicious and eye-catching.

Though it cooks for only 15 minutes, this tomato sauce gets loads of flavor from both the tonno and the olio of your marinated tuna. But you don’t want just to boil the tuna and tomatoes together: it is essential to add the fish, the oil, and all the other ingredients to the big skillet at the right time. The technique of skillet sauces, and how to finish pasta and sauce together, is explained in depth on pages 89 to 93. For this chunky sauce, I recommend a short dried pasta with lots of nooks and crannies, like cavatelli or campanelle or conchiglie. These will catch some tuna for you with each bite, so you don’t end up with all the tuna swimming in the bottom of your bowl.

This is a special salad worthy of your homemade tonno sott’olio. You blanch the tomatoes and scallions, and briefly sauté the red onion to mellow pungency and soften textures. The salad needs a good hour of marinating to let the sweet and savory flavors mingle. Incidentally, leftovers make great juicy sandwiches. I recommend white balsamic vinegar here, to wilt the red onion and dress the salad. White balsamic is not a traditional product, but it comes from Modena, like any decent balsamic, and it has a clean taste and a light color that don’t muddy dishes the way dark balsamic can. If you can’t find it, use regular wine vinegar. You may also use top-quality canned tuna in this salad, but drain and discard the packing oil and substitute fresh extra-virgin olive oil in the dressing and sauté.

Canned tuna is a staple in my kitchen—in one of the cupboards, there’s always a tall stack of colorful cans of excellent Italian tonno in olio di oliva. Tuna packed in olive oil is the only kind to have, in my opinion, and I make it the basis for many meals, sometimes some pasta for lunch or dinner, or a salad for myself, my mother, and Gianni, or sandwiches for the kids. But when I want the best marinated tuna, I make my own marinated tonno sott’olio: I poach thick tuna steaks gently for 15 minutes, let them cool and dry for a couple of hours, then pack the fish in jars in big chunks, submerged in extra-virgin olive oil. It is truly simple, as this recipe will show you. If you love tuna, then I know you will make this recipe your own. Just a chunk of it on a plate, with nothing more than a drizzle of the marinating oil, makes a great antipasto. Or dress it up with onion or tomatoes, as I suggest for Marinated Mackerel (pages 4 and 5). Use it in the colorful salad I give you here with cherry tomatoes, red onion, and scallions, or see how tonno sott’olio takes your own favorite tuna salad to a new level. And don’t miss the opportunity to make the outstanding pasta sauce with tomatoes on page 14. With this recipe you’ll have about 2 pounds of tuna, in jars or crocks of oil. Stored in the refrigerator, it will keep for a month or more, giving you plenty of time to try it in several different dishes. But I guarantee you’ll want more: to make larger batches, just multiply the ingredients and follow the basic procedures.

A great way to enjoy baccalà mantecato, before you eat it all as a spread or dip, is as a dressing for cooked pasta; 1 cup is enough to make a flavorful sauce for a pound of spaghetti, other long dry pasta, or fresh maltagliati pasta, which my father always liked. It is also good to dress potato gnocchi. Transforming the baccalà mantecato into a pasta sauce is best done in a big skillet—14 inches in diameter—into which you can drop all the pasta, straight from the cooking pot, and dress it—see the first part of chapter 3 for the basics of skillet sauces and how pasta and sauce are finished together.

Mackerel is a wonderful fish to buy when it is in season. It is inexpensive and intensely flavored, and when it is preserved in oil this way, you can keep it as long as a month; you’ll have in your fridge a delicious treasure to draw on for a quick appetizer or lunch dish. The most common size is 11 to 12 inches, and the filleting and boning of these small fish can be quite a job. So, unless you are feeling ambitious, get your fishmonger to do the work.

Here’s another of my delicious discoveries at Le Lampare, in Trani. Farro is again paired with seafood, the simply cooked grain tossed and dressed, like pasta, with a lively sauce of cured tuna, tomatoes, and capers. We can’t match the tuna used at Le Lampare—theirs was expertly house-cured from the flavorful and expensive ventresca (belly flap) of the fish—but with this recipe you can make a version that is truly delicious in its own right, using good-quality Italian canned tuna (packed in olive oil, of course). It is a great summer dish, as a main course or an appetizer.

As much as Puglia is about the land, it is also flanked by water: the Adriatic on one side and the Ionian Sea on the gulf side. Hence, one finds a big tradition of seafood as one travels down to the tip of the heel. In the quaint seaside city of Trani, along the Adriatic shoreline, is a delightful restaurant called Le Lampare. There I was introduced to farro con legumi e cozze, a beautiful stew of ceci and cannellini beans cooked with farro, one of my favorite grains, tossed before serving with savory mussels and their juices.

Anna Cornino Santoro’s memorable couscous with scorpion-fish brodetto inspired me to create this version when I got home. I use grouper, a delicious fish, widely available and easy to work with (and certainly with fewer bones than scorpion fish!). Making couscous by hand, as Anna does, is not feasible for most of us, I realize. Fortunately, good-quality packaged couscous is in every supermarket these days. Almost all commercial couscous is precooked, so it takes barely 5 minutes to make a flavorful, fluffy base for the brodetto.

Of the treasures taken from the sea that surrounds Sicily, tuna is among the most prized. Sicilian cooks prepare tuna with care and respect, which usually means simply, as exemplified by these grilled tuna steaks. Aromatic wild oregano is found all over Sicily, and bouquets of the dried herb hang in almost every Sicilian home. When the tuna steaks come off the grill, they get a drizzle of virgin olive oil and a shake of the oregano bouquet—simply perfect.