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Vermicelli with Fish
Boil one-half pound of vermicelli in salted water, drain, and mix with two tablespoons of olive-oil and a little chopped-up parsley. Then set to one side to get cool.
Take five smelts, split them, take out the bones, and fry them slightly in one teaspoon of olive-oil.
Butter a pan and sprinkle it with bread crumbs. Then put into it one-half of the cold vermicelli. Pour over this some thick tomato sauce (one tablespoon of tomato paste cooked in two tablespoons of olive-oil). Then put in the smelts cut in two, some anchovy, a few capers, and three or four ripe olives chopped up with one mushroom. Then add the rest of the tomato sauce, then the other half of the vermicelli, and on top a layer of bread crumbs. Season all well with salt and pepper. Put the pan into a moderate oven, and cook about an hour and a quarter, adding a little olive-oil when necessary, so that it will not dry up too much.
Any fish may be used instead of the smelts, cutting it into thin strips.
A baked pasta timballo in miniature, built in layers rather than tossed. Nearly everything here works as written; the two things worth adjusting are the pasta's first boil and the length of time in the oven.
- Undercook the vermicelliThe pasta boils once, then bakes for over an hour. Drain it short of al dente, or the finished dish will be soft throughout. Tossing it with the oil and parsley while hot also keeps it from setting into a single mass as it cools.
- A moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read as around 350F (175C). The pan is covered only by breadcrumbs, so put it in the middle of the oven rather than near the top element.
- The baking timeAn hour and a quarter is longer than a modern oven needs. At a true 350F, 35 to 45 minutes is enough to heat the layers through and brown the crumbs. Beyond that the fish dries and you will be adding oil to compensate, as the recipe anticipates.
- SmeltsSmall silvery fish, sold whole and often frozen; they split and bone easily along the backbone. If you cannot find them, the recipe's own note applies — any firm white fish in thin strips, or sardine fillets, which are closer in oiliness and flavour.
- Tomato pasteThe "thick tomato sauce" is exactly what it says: one tablespoon of concentrated paste (Italian conserva) fried in two tablespoons of oil until it darkens slightly. It is a seasoning layer, not a sauce in the American sense, and there should not be enough to pool.
- Anchovy and capers"Some anchovy" is unquantified; two or three salt-packed fillets, rinsed and chopped, is in keeping with the scale. Between the anchovy, the capers and the olives the dish arrives salted, so hold back on additional salt until the layers are assembled.
- One mushroomChopped fine with the olives, it is there for savour rather than substance. A brown or cremini mushroom does more than a white button.
- Butter and crumbsButtering and crumbing the pan is the standard timballo lining — it gives the dish sides that release cleanly and a crust underneath as well as on top. Dry, fine crumbs, not fresh.
- YieldHalf a pound of pasta and five smelts serves three to four as a main course. Let it stand ten minutes out of the oven before cutting so the layers hold.
Layered baked pastas of this kind are generally traced to the timballo, the moulded pie of pasta and filling that ran through Italian cooking from grand eighteenth-century kitchens down to everyday households, shedding its pastry crust along the way and keeping only the breadcrumb lining. The fish version belongs to the coastal and Lenten end of the tradition, where anchovy, capers and olives stood in for the meat and cheese of inland versions — cheese with fish being avoided by convention in Italian cooking, and notably absent here. Smelts appear as the small fish of choice, though the closing line permits any fish cut into thin strips.