In John Guare’s play “Six Degrees of Separation,” there’s a scene in which a father asks a second-grade teacher, at parents’ night, why the art her students make is so especially brilliant. “Look at the first grade,” he says to her.
Blotches of green and black. Look at the third grade. Camouflage. But the second grade — your grade. Matisses everyone. You’ve made my child a Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me into second grade! What is your secret? And this is what she said: “Secret? I don’t have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them.”
I think of this scene — the father is played by Donald Sutherland in Fred Schepisi’s film version — every time I make the sort of pasta dish that’s known in our house as pasta nada. The key to a true pasta nada is deep restraint. The Zen-secret is knowing when to stop.
Pasta nada is better known to the world as pantry pasta. These are the pasta dishes you make, vastly better and less expensive than ordering out, from ingredients that are already in your kitchen.
There are dozens of books, thousands of articles and many industrious websites devoted to the making of pantry pastas. The more the merrier; I like nearly all of them. But once I heard the phrase pasta nada for the first time three decades ago — from my father-in-law, the chef Bruce LeFavour, and his wife, the photographer Faith Echtermeyer, who used it to describe their own last-minute pasta dishes — I’ve never called it anything else.
Names matter. Would you rather eat calf’s thymus, or sweetbreads? Would “The Joy of Sex” be a cultural touchstone if it had been issued under its original title, “Alex Comfort’s Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking”? A good name is the difference, as Mark Twain put it in a slightly different context, between the lightning bug and the lightning.
The word nada, from the Spanish and classical Latin, means “nothing.” It’s a word that implies renunciation, and it has a much better ring, in this context, than bupkis. If you don’t count olive oil (we don’t), the best pasta nadas employ two ingredients: Parmesan and fresh herbs. Olive oil, Parmesan and herbs are pasta’s rhythm section, and on their own they make sublime pasta nada.
Our longtime favorite, for its elegance, is sage and walnut. We tend to have a small baggie of sage in the fridge. If we don’t, we pluck a few leaves from one of the sage plants my wife, Cree, tends. Toast the walnuts in the oven. Chop coarsely or crush. Chop the sage leaves, too. This meal is worthy of any bottle of red wine.
If you make this as an off-the-cuff dinner, in a rental house or when friends drop in, people will be jolted by your minimalist dexterity. These dishes are a return to first things. A good baguette and a salad will seal the deal.
Pasta nada passes the Calvin Trillin test. The rule of thumb when ordering pasta, Trillin wrote, is that the dish “is likely to be satisfying in inverse proportion to the number of ingredients that the menu lists as being in it.”
Our next-favorite pasta nadas are lo-fi variations on the theme of puttanesca. Instead of employing each of the classic ingredients — anchovies, capers, black olives, garlic and tomatoes — try just, let’s say, black olives and anchovies.
This won’t be for everyone. The novelist Beverly Lowry wrote that the fastest thing she ever saw was “Larry McMurtry pulling an anchovy out of his mouth.” Or use just finely minced garlic and a few capers. Or good canned tuna and tomatoes. These flavors cry out to be tested in variations.
“The great restorative” — that’s what the writer and gastronome Jim Harrison called puttanesca. These pasta nada versions act similarly. Annia Ciezadlo, in her memoir “Days of Honey,” which is in part about cooking in Baghdad and Beirut during wartime, writes that because of its name — “in the style of the prostitute” — pasta puttanesca has “a residual taste of sex.” It’s earthy, honest, a little bit greasy. This is true of the pared-down versions, too.
Pasta nadas are so simple that sometimes it is a treat to make two at once — sage and walnut, and anchovies and black olives — and nestle discrete piles of each on a dinner plate. This is an inexpensive way to feel like Mario Puzo, the author of “The Godfather,” who when in his favorite restaurants was known to order every pasta on the menu, just so his friends could have a taste.
