Crying over boiled broccoli.

A Puglian pasta in Sicily.

My father, a first generation Italian-American, wasn’t allowed to speak a word of English at home growing up. And yet he had never spoken more than a few words of Italian in my presence, except once a year during our pilgrimage to his favorite Brooklyn pastry shop on Christmas Eve. He would spout out a massive order, dozens of pastries, in an Italian-American-Sicilian dialect the baker understood perfectly. I always listened carefully, trying to commit the names to memory. I knew someday, it would be my turn to put in the pastry order. Sfogliatelle and pasticiotti were my favorites so I worked on those first, and went from there. Sure enough, the first Christmas after his passing, I was in charge of picking up the pastries— I nervously made it through the order, albeit with a lot of help from my pointer finger. It felt like he was right there next to me the whole time. 

When I was 23 years old, my father passed away suddenly, just two days before Christmas. I spent the month of January, back in my hometown, closing out his affairs. I was fortunate to have my closest childhood friend, miraculously in-between jobs, by my side every single day of that month, without whom I would have been at a total loss. 

While going through his things I came upon our family tree stashed at the back of his closet in an old mailer tube. There were many different versions, each hand-written on rolled-up architectural drafting paper. He worked on it over the course of many years, and many letters, with one of my cousins in Sicily, and another in California. I remember him telling me about his research years ago, but I was a teenager, and relatively disinterested at the time.

My father in Italy, Sept 1969.

We never traveled to Italy together during his lifetime, one of the many mysteries he left behind. But he made sure to tell me all about our family and how I would always be welcome there. With his passing, came my first connection to a long-lost part of my history. Even though it was already the age of email, he had always written via mail, and so I did the same. I wrote to every member of the family abroad I could find in his address book to tell them the news of his passing. I received many heart-felt replies, most in Italian, some in French, all with generous invitations to visit. The most profound in memory was from my cousin Giuseppe who finished his letter, in all caps, bold, and in English with— “PACK YOUR BAG AND COME!” 

Soon after, I signed up for an Italian class at a small language school in the Empire State Building, and booked my flight. After just a few months of study, enough to sort of communicate, a little, I was on my way, to meet a family I had never met. I was thrilled. I was terrified. I hoped someone spoke some English. 

When I finally made it to Sicily, it turned out many of my cousins spoke some level of English, thank goodness, and I had a huge, beautiful Sicilian family. They had a deep appreciation for art, travel, and never stopped talking about food— I felt immediately at home. I stayed with Giuseppe and his family in Alcamo Marina, a small beach town 45 minutes outside Palermo.

Over the course of my stay I was hosted for lavish, celebratory meals at nearly every home of every single one of my new-to-me family members. In classic southern hospitality, I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the kitchen. I did ask as many questions as my meager Italian could muster table-side, trying to understand how these simple masterpieces before me came to be. One afternoon at the home of Lia and Ciccio, Giuseppe’s parents, I shed a tear during the pasta course. It was strozzapreti in broccoli sauce, so simple, humble, and cozy— like a big, warm hug. When I asked Lia how she made it, she said, “First you boil the broccoli until it’s dead.” She continued to explain in vague detail the classic preparation of this Puglian sauce. It was one of the first meals I attempted to recreate upon my return to New York.

There are a few ways to make this dish but all versions fall within a simple framework— the broccoli and pasta are boiled in the same salted water, and all unite in olive oil, garlic, anchovies and peperoncino. You can boil the broccoli a bit longer, cook it down to a near-pesto consistency of muted-green-mush, which I sometimes do in winter, and how I originally made it. But over the years I’ve come to prefer a quicker and somewhat fresher version, luscious and creamy, with a slightly brighter green hue, the broccoli just barely still alive. I think even Lia would approve.

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Walnut Garlic Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs bring a welcome crunch to this mushy number, and deep savory notes to boot. Keep a bowl on the table so you can cover your pasta with it over and over while you eat. Feel free to try another nut here if you don’t have walnuts, or omit them entirely. Sub panko if you don’t have crumbs from old, dried out loaves laying around.

Broccoli: Peel and chop the stems, slice the floret tops like you would an onion, and chop up after to pea-sized pieces. Nothing about this has to be exact, it is a very rustic, unfussy dish, and will all be mush eventually. If you don’t have broccoli, use lacinato kale, center ribs removed, but instead of boiling the greens and pasta separately, boil them together, omit the mushing step, and serve with a long pasta like spaghetti.

Anchovies: Anchovies vary in quality and salinity. For this recipe, I recommend using Italian anchovies in a jar, that usually tend to be on the saltier side, in comparison to their tinned counterparts.

I realize not everyone loves anchovies. I remember the first time my father tried to introduce them to me. I was an utterly disgusted 9 year old. He was quite offended, and now I understand why. They are precious and something I’m not sure I could live without.

Whether you are in the anchovy club or not, you will need to pay attention to the salinity and keep tasting to make sure things are on the right path. Balancing the salinity of the pasta water with the anchovies is important and can take some practice. I tend to salt the pasta water a bit less than usual when I’m working with such a savory ingredient. If you are omitting anchovies here, you will want to salt more heavily, and continue tasting and adjusting the sauce as you go. Taste before you add each ladle of pasta water. If you find things are getting too salty too fast, sub filtered water for that last ladle to bring the sauce together, rather than adding more concentrated salted water form your pasta water pot.

Red Pepper Flakes: Or peperoncino as I often refer to them. Get to know the taste and heat of your preferred peperoncino. I am still working my way though a bag of dried whole peperoncino I brought home from Naples, nearly a decade ago. They are strong! So one tiny pepper goes a long way.

Pasta: Any short pasta will do here. I’ve grown to appreciate orecchiette with this sauce as it’s a classic of Puglia and they are one of my favorite shapes to make fresh. Rigatoni might be the first pasta I reach for after orecchiette, in case you have a box laying around. Cavatappi, penne, radiatorre, calamaratta, casarece, and, of course, strozzapreti, will also work beautifully. Frankly, probably ANY pasta will do, so don’t shy away if you only have spaghetti in the pantry.

Lemon: Sometimes I really need an acidic brightness and can’t live without a lemon zest and juice topper. Other times, I just need more olive oil and more breadcrumbs so I can bathe in this comforting one-note mash. You do you.

Pots and pans: One evening after a kitchen deep-clean, I reached for a pot instead of a pan to make this sauce—a small effort to minimize splatter on my shiny clean stove. It was a revelation to have so much space to bring the dish together making emulsification of the sauce and pasta water seamless. I never looked back and now always make pasta this way.

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Orecchiette con i Broccoli

Serves 4

Walnut Garlic Breadcrumbs

Makes 1 ½ cups

• ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

• 4 large garlic cloves, smashed and peeled

• 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs (made from grinding stale bread into crumbs)

• ½ cup very finely chopped walnuts

• ¼ teaspoon Kosher salt

Pasta

• 1 bunch of broccoli, stems peeled, sliced and chopped, florets sliced and chopped (totaling 4 cups chopped broccoli/14.5 oz/410 g)

• ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil, plus a few drizzles for serving

• 6 large garlic cloves, smashed, peeled and sliced

• 8 anchovies from a jar (or less if you must! but salt to compensate) + a splash of their oil

• ¼ teaspoon dried red pepper flakes or one small dried peperoncino.

• 1 lb. dried orecchiette pasta

• 1 lemon, zest and juice

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1. Make the breadcrumbs: Heat the olive oil and smashed garlic in a large pot over medium-high heat. Once the garlic is fragrant and starting to turn golden, about 2 minutes, add the breadcrumbs, walnuts, and ¼ teaspoon of salt. Cook until breadcrumbs and walnuts are golden, about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat, discard the garlic cloves and transfer the breadcrumbs to a serving dish to cool completely. Wipe out the pot and save it for the sauce.

2. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add chopped broccoli and cook until soft, 10 minutes. While the broccoli boils, heat 1/4 cup olive oil on low heat in the wiped-clean breadcrumbs pot. Add sliced garlic, anchovies, a splash of anchovy oil, and red pepper flakes. Cook on the lowest flame/setting for 6 minutes, or until the anchovies have melted into the oil, and the garlic is lightly browned.

3. Remove broccoli from the boiling water with a fine-mesh strainer/skimmer/spider and add directly into the oil-garlic-anchovy mixture.

4. Add orecchiette to the boiling broccoli water, and cook for 2 minutes less than the package instructions, until very al dente.

5. While the orecchiette cooks, mash the sauce. With the back of a wooden spoon, the strainer/skimmer or a potato masher, mash the broccoli into a sauce. Add pasta water as needed, 1/4 cup to start.

6. When the orecchiette is al dente, using the same fine-mesh strainer/skimmer/spider, fish out the pasta from the boiling water and add directly to the mashed broccoli sauce. Ladle up to 1/2 cup of pasta water into the sauce, and stir constantly on medium/medium-low heat for 2-3 minutes, until very saucy.

7. Serve in low bowls, top with a drizzle of your best olive oil, lemon zest, and a squeeze of lemon juice, and finally walnut breadcrumbs. Keep the breadcrumbs at the table to add liberally as you eat.

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