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Vermicelli Alla Sangiovannello (Midsummer Eve's Pasta)

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Italy

Known as an Italian recipe, with similar versions prepared across other nations.

Ingredients 15 ingredients

  1. 1 lb Fresh red ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped
  2. Pasta
  3. 1 tb Capers
  4. 3 Salted anchovies or 6 oil-packed anchovy fillets
  5. Salt to taste
  6. Freshly ground black pepper to taste
  7. 1/3 Pitted and chopped black or green olives
  8. 2/3 c Finely chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves
  9. 1/3 c Extra virgin olive oil
  10. 1 Garlic clove, chopped
  11. 1/4 ts Crushed red pepper flakes
  12. Water
  13. 1/2 sm Dried hot red chile pepper or 1/4, OR
  14. Chop
  15. 1 lb Spaghetti, vermicelli, or penne
Contains GlutenEggsFish Read from the ingredients, not verified. Check labels.

Cook safely

Keep children and pets away from the hob and the oven, and keep oven gloves and a lid within reach.

  • Boiling water and steam. Turn pan handles inward, away from the edge of the hob. Lift lids away from you, and pour hot water away from your body: steam burns too.
  • Blending hot liquid. Let it cool a little first, fill the blender no more than a third, and hold the lid down with a folded towel. Start on the lowest speed. A stick blender in the pan is safer.
  • Sharp knives. Cut on a board that doesn't slip (a damp cloth under it helps), and curl the fingers of the hand that holds the food.

Method

  1. If you are using salted anchovies, rinse them thoroughly under running water and strip away their bones. Then chop them coarsely. (If you are using oil-packed anchovy fillets, simply chop them.)
  2. In a large saucepan over medium-low heat, gently sweat the garlic in the oil. When the garlic is soft, add the anchovies and cook, stirring with a fork and pressing the anchovies to dissolve them in the oil.
  3. Add the chopped tomatoes and cook just long enough to soften them and release their juices. Add black pepper and, if you wish, the pepper flakes, and cook a few minutes more to blend the flavors. Stir in any of or all of the other possible ingredients -- capers, olives, and parsley, reserving a little parsley for a garnish.
  4. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a rolling boil. Drop in the pasta and cook until almost done -- about 10 minutes. Drain the pasta and turn it into the pan with the sauce. Stir to mix well and let the pasta finish cooking in the sauce, another 2 minutes. Turn into a heated serving bowl, garnish with parsley, and serve immediately.
  5. In years past, on the night of June 24, the Feast of St. John or San Giovanni, true Baresi celebrated midsummer's eve by taking their tables outside and dining in the streets or on overhanging balconies from which they could call to each other and carry on conversations and flirtations. "True" Baresi are denizens of the old town, living in the crowded warren of narrow streets and alleys and overarching white-washed walls that still curls like a North African medina around the harbor's edge beside the beautiful twelfth-century church of the city's protector, St. Nicholas of Nyra, now of Bari. (Even among themselves, the Baresi have a reputation for thievery so it's not at all surprising that they seem to have entered Christian history in the year 1087, when a group of Barese businessmen of the time stole into the Greek city of Myra on Turkey's Agean coast and made off with the relics of the local saint, Nicholas, whom they later set up as the patron of Bari. And, yes, he was the original Santa Claus.)
  6. On this, the longest (or almost) night of the year, the traditional dish served is vermicelli, spaghetti, or penne with a simple sauce of oil, garlic, anchovies, and tomatoes. Some add capers, some hot chile peppers and parsley, some olives, either black or green, but the basic idea is a quick, fresh, simple dish that celebrates the flavors of summer.
  7. Excerpted from FLAVORS OF PUGLIA, by Nancy Harmon Jenkins. Copyright © 1997 by Nancy Harmon Jenkins. Excerpted by permission of Broadway Books, a division of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
  8. Digest V1 #667 by Rooby on Jul 12, 1997

Plating

Cookware for this recipe

  • Large pot
  • Saucepan
  • Mixing bowl
  • Blender
  • Chef's knife
  • Cutting board
  • Vegetable peeler
  • Wooden spoon
  • Spatula
  • Colander
Source Not stated: saved from a website or mailing list, rights unverified
Credit

Recipe by: FLAVORS OF PUGLIA, by Nancy Harmon Jenkins Posted to MC-Recipe. Saved from geocities.ws (http://geocities.ws/MM119501.MMF), file Recipes/geocities.ws/MM119501.MMF in the Internet Archive item cooking-recipes (https://archive.org/details/cooking-recipes).

What was changed: Read by machine from the mealmaster text: title, ingredients and method as written, columns closed up and wrapped lines joined; credit lines kept apart; e-mail addresses removed; an all-capitals title given ordinary capitals. Not rewritten.