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Vermicelli with Olive-oil and Anchovies
Take one-half pound of vermicelli, boil in salted water and drain. While boiling put into a saucepan three anchovies, cut up fine, with four tablespoons of olive-oil. Fry the anchovies in the oil, then put the vermicelli into the saucepan, mix well for a few moments on the fire, then serve.
A four-ingredient sauce that lives or dies on how the anchovies are treated. The whole point is to melt them into the oil, not brown them.
- The hinge: melt, don't fryKeep the oil at a bare shimmer over low heat and stir the chopped anchovies until they dissolve into a cloudy paste, about two minutes. The original says "fry," but at low heat anchovies dissolve rather than brown; if the oil gets hot enough to sizzle and colour them, they can turn bitter and gritty.
- Which anchoviesSalt-packed anchovies were common when this was written. If you use those, rinse the salt off, split them and pull out the backbone before chopping. Oil-packed fillets from a tin work directly, and three fillets is a modest amount -- "three anchovies" of the salted sort means six fillets.
- Salt the water lightlyAnchovies bring their own salt and there is nothing else in the dish to absorb it. Use about half the salt you would normally put in pasta water.
- VermicelliA long strand, not the short broken nests sold as vermicelli in some soup aisles. In Italian usage it is generally reckoned slightly thicker than spaghetti, though English-language usage often treats it as thinner. Cook to the packet timing and have the oil ready before the pasta goes in.
- Drain, but not bone dryThe recipe says drain, but the sauce is only four tablespoons of oil for half a pound of pasta. Save a cup of the cooking water and add a splash when you toss, which emulsifies the oil and anchovy into something that coats rather than slides off.
- YieldHalf a pound serves two as a main course or four as a first course.
- Worth adding, historically plausibleA clove of sliced garlic softened in the oil first, a pinch of chile, and chopped parsley off the heat are all common in southern Italian versions of this sauce, though they are additions to what is written here.
Pasta with anchovies dissolved in olive oil is a long-standing and cheap southern Italian condimento -- a sauce built entirely from the pantry, requiring no meat, no cheese and no fresh produce. Salt-cured anchovies kept for months in their barrel or jar, which made them a common source of savour along the Mediterranean coast, and dishes like this one suited the Church's lean days, when meat and often dairy were off the table. The recipe's brevity is itself informative: it appears in an early twentieth-century English-language collection meant to introduce Italian home cooking to American readers, many of whom would have known Italian food, if at all, as restaurant fare.