Quick

Forget tartar sauce. Rémoulade is its predecessor, and it’s superior in every way, the ideal sauce for grilled (and other) fish.

It’s no secret that people eat leftover pasta, but this is a time-honored way to turn it into something else. It’s so good that you might find yourself cooking extra pasta just so you have an excuse to make this. As with any other frittata, you can add what you like here. It might be a bit of pancetta or bacon, but it can also be a bit of cooked vegetable or something as simple as minced scallion or parsley.

A dish I learned from my good friend Andrea, who is originally from Rome but has collected unusual pasta dishes from all over Italy. This is clearly a peasant dish, but the presence of sausage, butter, and cream makes it special enough for guests. Use well-seasoned “Italian” sausage; it can be hot if you like. That made without casing—in patties or bulk—will save you a step.

A pasta dish kids love and one that became traditional with mine whenever we left them with a sitter for the evening. It’s best if the ham is prosciutto, the cream thick and fresh, and the peas just shelled, but it’s pretty good with supermarket ham and cream and frozen peas, and I’ve made it that way plenty of times. For variety, add about a cup of sliced button mushrooms to the ham mixture.

One of those wonderful from-the-pantry pasta dishes that can be prepared in the time it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta. Canned tuna is not only acceptable but necessary; but the ideal tuna here would be that taken from the tuna’s belly, the fattiest part, and cured (preferably by your Sicilian grandmother) in great olive oil. Assuming you don’t have that, buy tuna packed in olive oil from Italy or Spain. (In a serious specialty store, you might find belly tuna—probably labeled ventresca—packed in olive oil. It’s dynamite.) What you’re looking for is dark, soft meat that will flake nicely and add its rich flavor to the sauce.

There are several types of pasta sauce based on walnuts in northern Italy, including the one on page 550; this is among my favorites. It also happens to be the easiest. If you like, you could throw in a tablespoon of capers, too.

This is a simple preparation that can serve as a side dish or main course (add some cooked sausage if you like) and can be made with any dark green, from spinach to collards to turnip or mustard greens. It needs no cheese.

True pansotti are stuffed, with a mixture like this, but I rarely feel like filling pasta, and this way it makes a very fast meal and tastes just as good (it tastes even better with fresh pasta, page 541). Like Tarator or Skordalia (page 600), a terrific use of nuts as sauce.

There is something about the sprightliness, the lightly assaultive, somehow-sweet nature of mint that is unlike any other herb. Here, softened by butter and cheese, to which it in turn lends spark, it converts a simple and basic but undeniably heavy combination into an easy but complex pasta dish that can best be described as refreshing.

A fast, classic pasta sauce popular not only in Rome but throughout central and southern Italy. Arrabbiata means “angry,” and this sauce should be not only spicy but also strong, with the taste of garlic that has been browned, not just colored—as well as a good dose of chile.

Another classic, this one Roman, that simply cannot be omitted; to do so would be a huge disservice to beginners. This is a great snack, late-night meal, or starter. For variety, toss in a couple of tablespoons of toasted fresh bread crumbs (page 580) or start with a few anchovy fillets along with the garlic and chile.

I featured this little group of recipes in my New York Times column and in The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, but it’s so instructive, important, and wonderful that I felt it belonged here as well. All (well, almost all) the variations begin with bits of cured meat cooked until crisp, around which are built a number of different sauces of increasing complexity. Most people insist that the “genuine” meat for these recipes is pancetta—salted, cured, and rolled pork belly. Pancetta is available at almost any decent Italian deli and at many specialty stores, but you can use bacon (or even better, if you can find it, guanciale, which is cured pig’s jowl; see the back of the book for mail-order sources). Pecorino Romano is the cheese of choice here, but Parmesan is also good.

Spaetzle is harder to spell than make. In fact, it’s one of the easiest and most impressive side dishes there is, a noodle whose dough is about as complicated as pancake batter and that can be crisped up in a pan to create a delicious accompaniment for almost any poultry or pork dish, especially braised ones. Once you get the technique down, you’ve got plenty of latitude with how you flavor these fresh little dumplings. The recipe here is for plain spaetzle, though adding two or three tablespoons of an assortment of flavorings in the first step will infuse them with taste without changing the method at all. Try pureed chives, roasted and minced garlic, chopped shallots, and so on.

Udon noodles are generally made with softer wheat than Italian pasta, giving them a more tender texture. You can find them at Japanese markets and many supermarkets. Like Chinese noodles, they’re great stir-fried. And, as in any stir-fry, you can substitute for the pork, shrimp, or vegetables if you like.

A prime example of the simplicity with which you can successfully treat fresh Chinese egg noodles, which are available at many supermarkets.

Interestingly, though this is usually and correctly associated with Eastern Europe, I had it first in northeastern Italy. That’s not entirely surprising, because the Alto Adige region of Italy, also known as the Tyrol, was part of Austria until after World War I. Often thickened with rice, this soup can also be used as a sauce for pasta; see the variation.

The first time I had hiyashi somen they were a revelation. It was a staggeringly hot day, and a Japanese friend was cooking dinner. When I found out we were having noodles, I was a little dismayed—I was more in the mood for a salad than for pasta. Then she brought out (what I now know as) hiyashi somen, in little bowls on top of ice with a cool dipping sauce to accompany them—perfect food for a blistering day. You can top the somen with poached and chilled shrimp or room-temperature grilled shiitakes, but it’s plenty good plain, as here. If you want to significantly speed up an already fast dish, skip the dried shrimp and sugar (or substitute homemade sugar syrup). For information on dried shrimp, see page 185.

Where the sesame sauce in the recipe on page 532 makes for a rich, hearty dish, this one is elegant and light. In Japan—where it gets plenty hot in the summer—cold soba noodles, served with a dipping sauce, are a common snack or light meal. Soba are brown noodles, made from wheat and buckwheat, and the sauce is based on dashi, the omnipresent Japanese stock. (You can also serve somen, thin wheat noodles, cold; cook them for a little less time, but also until tender.) Dashi is close to essential here, though you can use chicken stock in a pinch. But dashi is so easy to make (and so good) that if you try it once you’ll become devoted to it.

Cold noodles, almost in salad form, with vegetables, spice, and meat. Perfectly fine with regular pasta, it is prettier and better with the fresh egg noodles now sold at many supermarkets and every Chinese market.

A perfect start to a Chinese meal, this can be prepared almost entirely in advance, varied in a number of ways, and even served as a main course if you like. Though it can be made with peanut butter (the natural kind, please, with no added sugar or fat), it’s easy enough to buy sesame paste (tahini) at health food stores, stores specializing in Middle Eastern or Asian ingredients, and even supermarkets. Sesame oil, which contributes mightily to the flavor of the finished dish, is a staple sold at Asian food stores (and, increasingly, supermarkets) and belongs in every refrigerator. Chinese egg noodles are sold fresh at almost every Chinese market, most Asian supermarkets, and even many ordinary supermarkets. Regular dried pasta makes a good substitute here.