Sinopsis

Pasta making is, at its most basic, an act of humility. It’s repetitive, precise manual labor—a simple gift to the gods of gluten offered up in flour-dusted basements and prep kitchens around the world. It is ceremonious only in its utter lack of ceremony. What has always appealed to me is how the frank marriage of two ingredients—whether flour and water or flour and eggs—splinters into hundreds of variations of stuffed, rolled, extruded, dried, stamped, and hand-cut shapes; how each has its own origin story, rhythmic set of motions, and tools; and how mastery can sometimes come down to an elusive sleight of hand: the flick of a wrist, the perfect twist of the index finger away from the thumb. Movements learned only through practice.

In the two years between leaving A Voce in Manhattan and opening my first restaurant, Lilia, in Brooklyn, I spent most of my days at home learning, for the first time since I was a kid, what it meant to cook not for accolades or recognition but for comfort. There was no Michelin. No New York Times. No owners. No need to prove that a Jewish kid from Connecticut with no Italian heritage had any business cooking Italian food. No longer were my thoughts, Is this nice enough? or Is this cool enough? but rather, What kind of food do I want to eat? or What food do I want to cook? and most importantly, Why?

I was cooking pasta that paid homage to Italy’s iconic regional dishes, sure, but the virtue of craveability was paramount. It’s why my food at Lilia and my second restaurant, Misi, is so rooted in home cooking, and it’s perhaps the only way to explain how a dish as simple as rigatoni with red sauce ended up on Lilia’s opening menu, and then once again at Misi. I wanted to serve the food that I like to eat—the food I’d always been cooking, just stripped down to the studs and rebuilt with a simple mantra in mind: quanto basta.

In Italian cookbooks, quanto basta is typically represented as “q.b.” It translates to “as much as is necessary,” and it appears when an ingredient is listed without an exact quantity. It’s essentially the Italian version of “salt to taste,” but it has come to symbolize a shift in focus for me—one that places simplicity and comfort first and always makes me ask, Is this really necessary?

It took me decades to get here. This book is meant as a ride-along, from red sauce to regional classics to the pastas I’ve made my own. At its core is a journey back to the home regions of some of my favorite pastas in an effort to understand them with new clarity—to gain a deeper knowledge of not only how they are faring in a country undergoing constant culinary evolution but also of their sense of place.

Perhaps more than anything, though, this book is my love letter to pasta. What has made pasta the cornerstone of Italian culinary culture for centuries, an indelible part of so many Americans’ early food memories, and a food so eminently alluring that even the gluten averse cannot resist its siren song is that it asks, first and foremost, something elemental of us: that we enjoy it.