pasta con le sarde – pasta with sardines

Last winter, while Andrew was away for work, his cousin Mike happened to be in town. Mike is an entrepreneur who lives in Boston, and if I had to catergorize the kind of person Mike is, well, he’s a bringer-of-people-together. Thus, Mike, being Mike, gathered a bunch of folks: cousins, significant others of cousins who couldn’t make it (that’s me!), and friends – for a brunch at Morandi. It turned into a swell afternoon.

Morandi, for those who don’t live in New York and might be contemplating a visit, is a great place for eating. Breakfast, lunch, dinner – they are all fantastic. But my favorite time to go there is for brunch. It’s boisterous, almost too-loud, but in a gregarious, fun-filled way, as if to remind you that hey, it’s the weekend, live a little. And so we ordered food: eggs, toast, pancakes, bloody mary’s and mimosas. There were at least two orders of Morandi’s famous ricotta fritters. When we got to the last fritter, everyone feigned a polite, No, you go ahead and take it, all the while hoping to be the lucky one on the end. While looking over the menu, out of the corner of my eye I spied pasta with sardines in tomato sauce with raisins, pine nuts, and fennel. I ordered it, and it’s been about a year now that I’ve been meaning to tell you about this dish.

Nothing about the ingredients here, together, makes sense to me. I wouldn’t intuitively put fish and raisins in the same dish, but together fresh sardines, plump raisins, toasted pine nuts, and stewed, mellowed fennel, marry beautifully. What took me so long to make this at home? Poor planning, I guess. Fresh sardines, and I really think that fresh sardines is what make this dish superlative, are not exactly an ingredient you can get in advance and keep in the fridge for a few days. It’s something you want to purchase and make that very night.

When I finally sat down last month to start looking into this recipe in earnest, I looked through many different versions. Some recipes recommended using canned fish while others stressed the importance of fresh. To be fair in my rejection of canned sardines (which I love) for this recipe, I actually made a small version and tasted it. It was okay, but nothing to write home about. I think canned sardines make one hell of a snack atop a toast, but aren’t fit for pasta here.

The other thing is raisins. Andrew didn’t care for raisins in this dish, which is a shocker, because the inside joke here is that he will most certainly suggest an addition of golden raisins to just about anything. But not, apparently, pasta con le sarde. But since pasta con le sarde is a Sicilian dish, seeing raisins (or currants) and pine nuts in it actually makes sense.

In the end, I sort of merged together two recipes: one by Mario Batali and another one that has recently been reprinted from Zakary Pelaccio’s book, Eat With Your Hands (co-authored by the awesome and wildly talented J. J. Goode). What I liked about the latter version was the use of tomato paste and fennel pollen, the latter being easily replaceable by ground fennel seeds, but since I had fennel pollen, I figured I might as well use it.*

What I got as a result was a rich and satisfying sauce that was pleasantly but not overwhelmingly (read: rudely) fishy. The dish, punctuated by delicate raisins and pine nuts, tasted, distinctly, of the sea. And after eating a bowl of it for lunch, I couldn’t wait for the evening to arrive so that Andrew and I could have it for dinner. Same meal twice in one day – I think that speaks for itself.

*(Because my awesome husband took me seriously when he was at the Brooklyn Larder last time, he wound up getting me two (!) small vials of it. Which was prohibitively expensive, but he was all, “I didn’t know: you said, “Fennel pollen.” By the way, his initial response to my fennel pollen text was “Beaver sweat?” but that’s a whole new tangent right there.)

** A Disclosure: I’ve been, on my own, a longtime fan of Muir Glen tomatoes. They are, by far, my favorite, and it’s pretty much all I use when I make pasta sauces. The kind folks from Muir Glen sent me an amazing care package including their very special “reserve” tomatoes which will be sold at Whole Foods shortly. Normally, I don’t do product reviews, but these reserve tomatoes are even better than the regular ones. Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank them for introducing me to some other small batch products they included: California Olive Ranch Limited Reserve Olive Oil (made right at time of harvest aka olio nuovo); a gorgeous bag from Fleabags (a brand I’ve loved for awhile now); beautiful spoons from Jonathan’s Wild Cherry Spoon, and my now go-to apron from Raw Materials Design. These are truly small artisan brans – and I’m excited to be getting to know them and support them in the future.