works of wanderlust

A little over a year ago we were wandering the streets of Rome in the blazing heat of an August scorcher. It’s a far cry from where I am sitting writing these words in a suburban strip mall Starbucks as the first flakes of snow for the season fall outside the window.

It was hardly a food focused vacation, but I as whenever I travel, I had my heart set on trying new and interesting local dishes, from the unique and interesting to—of course—the typical and regional tropes. One evening, after a long walk through the narrow streets in and out of tourist shops and a museum or two, and maybe I think we strolled under the dome of the Pantheon that morning, we succumbed to the call of a barker who was standing at the entrance to the patio of a street restaurant and took a table for a mid-evening dinner. We perused the menu, ordered a bottle of wine, and noshed on some breads. It all looked great, but my eyes went to the cacio e pepe, a (literally) cheese and pepper pasta that is everywhere in Rome. 

Properly made, this is basically a creamy pasta sauce of pecorino cheese melted over pasta and peppered with a hearty kick. Italian food likes to label itself spicy, but personally I find even the spicier Italian offerings generally on the milder side compared to Asian or, say, Mexican cuisine. But, I do find cacio e pepe, at least the offering I tried, ranked pretty high on the spicy scale. Peppery spicy, obviously,  and not melt your face off spicy, but certainly reach for the water hot.

I hadn’t thought much about cacio e pepe since that evening Rome until, at work, I cracked open a case full of ready to serve pasta sauce that had arrived on the back of a delivery truck. This isn’t meant to be a brand specific review, so I won’t bother writing a run down of the quality or taste or any of that. Chances are you have your own brands at your own stores in your own countries anyhow. But I will say that I spun up my discount one evening last week and bought the ingredients to reconstruct a fresh-from-the-jar version of that Roman evening.

The Kid hated it. She likes her share of spice these days, but hasn’t warmed up to pepper apparently. We had half a bottle of chianti left over from the previous weekend and so over some pasta secce cooked al dente we followed the jar directions and recreated a quick and easy cacio e pepe at home. 

Couldn’t you have made it from scratch, you ask?

Well, sure. But that’s kind of the thing isn’t it? It is very easy to leap to these home cooking solutions, reaching to achieve great feats of regional recreation from your own kitchen post-vacation. Sure. But I also am a strong believer in incremental steps. Jarred sauces are not great, but often they are pretty good and set a base line for what a dish should be aspiring towards. I like to think of it as bracketing. I had tried a version in a Roman street cafe and I had tried a version poured from a  jar purchased from a local grocery store. I won’t put a stake in the ground and say those were the top and bottom of the scale, heck no, but they certainly have now given me some solid context for the flavours intended for this probably-famous dish.

The same thing happened to us in Milan. We stopped in a little restaurant and tried a Milanese risotto, a dish heavy in saffron spices, creamy and rich and oddly enough reminding me of an upscale mac and cheese. Then, when we came home back to Canada, we bought a couple packages of rice and spice “just add wine and water and heat” mixes from the local Italian food market and made our home version of it. 

In both cases, cacio e pepe and Milanese risotto, I now have a kind of bracketed expectation of taste and preparation and final result from two very different sources. And I suddenly have the confidence to, maybe when I have some time to cook, make each from scratch.  Ambition, in my heart of hearts, blossoms from familiarity and confidence in the pursuit. Both of these things are bolstered by, yeah travel blah blah blah, but also shortcuts and incremental steps. A bag of rice and spice, or a jar of sauce—both cut a path to a bolder effort to make these from rawer ingredients. After all, that store of mine doesn’t just sell jars of ready to serve sauce, it sells pecorino cheese, too.