5 Ingredients or Fewer

You can buy sun-dried tomatoes already reconstituted and soaked in olive oil, but they’re expensive. It’s certainly easy enough—and only slightly less convenient if you think ahead—to begin with dried tomatoes. They’re almost as tough as shoe leather when you buy them but can easily be reconstituted: Soak them in hot water to cover until they’re soft, about an hour. (You might change the water once it cools to hasten the softening.) Drain the tomatoes and marinate them in a good fruity olive oil to cover (a half cup or more) for at least an hour. After that, making the tomato paste takes just a moment. Traditionally, the tomatoes are pounded, usually with garlic, in a mortar and pestle. I use a small food processor and like the resulting texture very much.

Parsley is the most reliable and underrated herb in the western culinary world. Although we’ve come a long way from the days when its major role was as a decorative sprig on the side of a plate, we still don’t use it in the kinds of quantities we could. Here it is cooked like a vegetable like spinach, really—to create a delicious, fresh-tasting sauce that I frequently serve over pasta but that also makes an interesting foil for simply grilled or broiled chicken breasts.

When you get past using parsley as a garnish and sprinkle a handful on top of a dish just before serving, you begin to appreciate the bright, clean flavor of this common herb. And when you realize that it remains in season far longer than basil, rosemary, or other popular herbs, you get a further sense of its value. You can also blend parsley with vinegar to make a sharp, spiky sauce that is an ideal accompaniment to the simplest grilled, broiled, or roasted meat—great on well-browned steaks, pork, or chicken, or on Salmon Burgers (page 107).

This relish is good with a bit of minced jalapeño or habanero chile if you like hot food. If you have them on hand, don’t hesitate to add up to a quarter cup of fresh herbs, like basil, oregano, or marjoram.

Marjoram is related to and resembles oregano, but its flavor is better. Oregano is a good but not perfect substitute. This sauce is excellent over simply cooked seafood.

This recipe is basic make it a few times and you’ll find ways to vary it to perfectly suit your tastes.

A couple of years ago, on a trip to central Italy—where true Parmigiano-Reggiano is made—I learned yet another use for the world’s most important cheese. A cook in a trattoria was taking handfuls of the grated stuff, sprinkling them in a skillet, and forming melted cheese pancakes. While they were still warm, he draped them over the back of a cup, to form crisp, edible, single-ingredient containers. He filled these with a mixture of zucchini, eggplant, and tomatoes and sent them out as a first course. I found the idea intriguing, but not all that easy to duplicate at home, where my skillet seemed always too hot or too cool, the pancakes too thick or too thin. But when I took the task seriously and set about figuring out the most reliable way to produce these Parmigiano-Reggiano cups, it turned out to be fairly straightforward. Thanks to the miracle of the nonstick surface, just put four rounds of grated cheese on a baking sheet and, five minutes later, they’re done.

The flour-enriched water in which pasta has cooked is never going to be an essential component of fine cooking, and it seldom appears in recipes. Yet from its origins as a cost-free, effortless substitute for stock, olive oil, butter, cream, or other occasionally scarce or even precious ingredients, pasta-cooking water has become a convenient and zero-calorie addition to simple sauces. When you compare a lightly creamy sauce like the one in this recipe to the highly flavorful and ever-popular Alfredo sauce of butter, cream, eggs, and cheese, the latter seems relatively heavy. Substituting water for much of the butter and all of the cream and eggs produces a sauce with a perfect balance of weight and flavor. The water lends a moist quality, not unlike that produced by tomatoes, as opposed to the slickness contributed by straight fat. This is best as a starter, not a main course, but it’s still pretty rich. I would stick with a light fish preparation to follow, even a big salad.

There is an important and splendid group of pasta recipes that is associated with Rome and the area around it; all the variations begin with bits of cured meat cooked until crisp. Around these delightfully crispy bits—and, of course, their rendered fat—are built a number of different sauces of increasing complexity. The first contains no more than meat and grated cheese and is called pasta alla gricia; the second, in which eggs are added, is the well-known pasta (usually spaghetti) carbonara, one of the first authentic non-tomato sauces to become popular in the United States, about thirty years ago; and the third is pasta all’Amatriciana, which adds the sweetness of cooked onion and the acidity of tomato.

In this dish, the pasta takes on a fruity acidity from the reduced wine—smoothed by the last-minute addition of butter—and a beautiful mahogany glaze that’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. The kind of wine you use is of some importance, although it need not be expensive. Try a decent Chianti Classico, a light wine from the Côtesdu-Rhône, or a good-quality (red) Zinfandel. This is a true starter, not a main course; follow it with something gutsy, like grilled meat or fish, or something grand like Crisp Roasted Rack of Lamb (page 187).

This is a technique popular in Liguria—the Italian Riviera—in which all of the clam liquid is used as part of the sauce, but without much effort. The result is delicious pasta in a little rich, thick sauce—along with a pile of clams. Use the smallest clams you can find; cockles are fine, too. Figure eight to twelve littlenecks or twenty-four cockles per person. Wash and scrub the clamshells very well, as they will cook in the sauce and any unremoved sand will find its way into your mouth. Discard any open or cracked clams before cooking; those that remain shut after cooking may be opened with a knife.

Most of us associate pasta and sausage with a dense, heavy tomato sauce, the kind that is so Italian-American it is just about indigenous. Yet sausage can contribute to a relatively light, almost delicate pasta sauce, especially if it is used in small amounts. In fact, sausage is the ideal meat to use in a quick pasta sauce, because it is preseasoned and cooks almost instantly.

Few things are simpler than a quick tomato sauce over pasta, but as an unending diet it can become somewhat tiresome. Here it’s completely jazzed by the addition of a hefty amount of garlic and a few anchovies. The transformation is as easy as it is remarkable. Canned anchovies—packed in olive oil—are the easiest to use here. Salted anchovies, if you have them, are fine also, but you must mince them first (after cleaning them, of course, which you do under running water, stripping the meat from the skeleton).

The fundamental procedures required to make this pasta dish are easy, but this is as instructional as any simple recipe I know, and one that builds a wonderfully flavorful dish with just a few ingredients.

The dish has a thick creaminess that you can never duplicate with canned tomatoes, no matter how good they are. So the season when you can make it—when there are good, ripe tomatoes in the market—is fairly short; where I live, just two or at the most three months a year. There is an ideal instant for serving this sauce: When the tomatoes soften and all of their juices are in the skillet, the sauce suddenly begins to thicken. At that moment, it is at its peak; another minute or two later, many of the juices will have evaporated and, although the essence of the sauce is equally intense, it won’t coat the pasta as well. If this happens, just add a little fresh olive oil or butter to the finished dish.

You might think of this as winter pesto, with a higher percentage of walnuts and the always-available parsley filling in for summer’s basil—though if you can find good basil, by all means use it.

There are pasta sauces you can make in the time it takes the pasta-cooking water to come to a boil, and there are those that are really fast—those that can be made in the eight to ten minutes it takes to actually cook the pasta. This is one of the latter, one that boasts just a couple of main ingredients and a supporting cast of two staples.

A quick way to add great flavor to many simple dinner dishes is already sitting in your pantry or cupboard: anchovies. Anchovies are among the original convenience foods and contribute an intense shot of complex brininess that is more like Parmigiano-Reggiano than like canned tuna. Use them, along with garlic, as the base for a bold tomato sauce or combine them, as I do here, with greens, garlic, oil, and chiles for a white sauce that packs a punch.

This dish which has zucchini as its focus—is simply amazing when made in midsummer with tender, crisp squash, but it isn’t half bad even when made in midwinter with a limp vegetable that’s traveled halfway around the world to get to your table. Either way, it is an unusual use for zucchini, which here substitutes for meat in a kind of vegetarian spaghetti carbonara, the rich pasta dish featuring eggs, bacon, and Parmigiano-Reggiano. Made with zucchini instead of bacon, the dish becomes a little less fat-laden, obviously, but it is still rich and delicious.

It is pasta’s nature to be simple. I’ve long made a vegetable sauce by poaching greens such as spinach in the pasta water, then removing them and adding the pasta, a neat trick. But my friend Jack Bishop, author of Vegetarian Italian Cooking, mentioned that he’d gone one step further, cooking the greens right in with the pasta and adding seasonings at the last minute. The method relies on the fact that there is a period of two or three minutes between the moment when the pasta’s last traces of chalkiness disappear and the point where it begins to become mushy. If, just before the pasta is done, you add the greens, whose tough stems have been removed, greens and pasta will finish cooking at the same time. When making this dish and others like it, you must adhere to the often ignored canon of allowing at least a gallon of water per pound of pasta, because you need a pot large enough to accommodate the greens and because they cannot be allowed to slow down the cooking too much