Whose summer pasta is it, anyway?

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I had a good giggle yesterday morning on reading Amanda Hesser’s ‘Recipe Redux’ story in the New York Times Magazine. Hesser, bless her young heart, dates the creation of uncooked tomato sauce for pasta to the early-to-mid-’90s, citing a 1996 New York Times recipe for ‘summer pasta’ that involved as a sauce no more than chopped tomatoes, basil, garlic, olive oil, salt and mozzarella. ‘After years of thinking that all pasta sauces were long-simmered affairs,’ she writes, ‘cooks were relieved to learn they they could simply chop a few tomatoes, add some seasonings and hot pasta and -- voilà! -- dinner.’

I laughed because I had bought all the ingredients for the dish Saturday. I had the idea when I saw beautiful ripe heirloom tomatoes stacked up next to big bunches of basil at the supermarket. Now here was Hesser, saying one Pamela Sherrid came up with it in 1996.

I thought back to the year I started making that very sauce. I remember it well, because it was 1980, the year a friend gave me the just-published Time-Life ‘Pasta’ book in ‘The Good Cook’ series. I learned the recipe (sans mozzarella) and so much more from its pages, and have made it a dozen times every summer since. It couldn’t be simpler: Chop peeled and seeded tomatoes, add a little minced garlic, salt, pepper, lots of torn basil leaves and a good dose of olive oil. Let it marinate for a couple of hours, then toss it with hot pasta.

It was a life-changing recipe, elemental and wonderful, and just about every good cook I knew in California in the early ‘80s made it. (Now and then I’d throw in some diced mozzarella, but I was never completely convinced by the cheese.) With the passage of time came better and better ingredients -- great fresh olive oil from Italy and Spain and California, better dried pasta, good sea salt -- and now in midsummer, the dish is positively brilliant. Last night I made it with those gorgeous heirlooms, garlic from the farmers market, a fantastic fruity olive oil from Greece, some nice torn basil, Maldon salt and lots of freshly ground black pepper. I cooked some Rustichella d’Abruzzo pasta al ceppo, tossed it with the sauce and added some roughly chopped burrata, which went all gooey.

Try it. You’ll think you’re back in the summer of ’96.

-- Leslie Brenner

Photos by Leslie Brenner