On The Plate: A pasta primed for spring

Spring, yay! Don’t you just “lurv” these crisp mornings and chilly evenings and warm-you-to-the-bone sunshine in between? I do.

You can just feel that solar energy going right into you, easing the joints, making you want to go out and play in the garden, take long walks along the beach, or go exploring your nearest farmer’s markets to gather in the new season’s produce. You’ll know by now that I’m no fully-fledged green thumb, and so I leave it to the wonderful local producers to scratch the surface of the carefully tendered garden plots to reap the new spring produce of asparagus, broccoli, tiny zucchini and so on.

But, scratch the surface of the background on any signature dish and you invariably find a good story.

This can be said of pasta alla primavera, which essentially is pasta prepared with lightly sautéed spring vegetables.

The story goes that in 1975 the quite famous chef Sirio Maccioni was invited to cook for an Italian Baron – Carlo Amato – at his Canadian summer house.

Maccioni took two of his top chefs and no doubt cooked up scrumptuous meals, but the Baron and his guests must have tired of the gamey dishes, all that Canadian salmon was too much, and as does happen, the palates of the diners became jaded and they probably craved something homelier. “Can we please have some pasta?” was the cry – a craving for some comfort food I suspect.

So, using the ingredients to hand, a meal of lightly cooked vegetables and pasta was created.

Not for the first time, some elements of “claiming the fame” associated with the dish, (think pavlova and the perennial claims made whether this desert was New Zealand or Australian in origin), ensued when, on returning to Maccioni’s quite famous New York city restaurant, Le Cirque, it was included on the specials list.

Several ego-driven chefs all laid claim to it being “their creation” but the part of the story that I love most is the part where one chef at Le Cirque, hailing from France simply said to his boss, “you want to do spaghetti? I don’t want spaghetti in my kitchen” and as a result this popular dish was cooked in the style known as “gueridon service”, meaning it was cooked in the dining room.

Gueridon is the term used in the restaurant business of using a portable trolley, which is wheeled in beside the dinner guests and their dish is typically finished of right beside them.

It was a flashy sort of meal service and typically crepes suzette, a caesar salad or more spectacularly some sort of flambé would be the usual dish prepared.

It was all very theatrical and now rarely seen!

So, as I wandered along the colourful array of ravishing vegetables at the Torquay Farmer’s Market, I knew what I was craving for dinner – some pasta and vegetables.

You might enjoy this quick and simple dish this weekend too – it’s my version of what became a contentious classic.