Spaghetti All'Ubriacona

I crave Spaghetti All’Ubriacona on ski trips. I don’t know why, other than the fact that Mom cooked it for me on a ski trip once. It just feels like the perfect thing to eat after hitting the slopes. First of all, you’re so tired and cooking involves standing and stirring things. But you’re also starving and you just spent 15 minutes peeling-off a billion layers of clothing so there is no chance in hell you’re putting on a real outfit and going in public. Enter this wintery bowl of calories, which takes about 20 minutes to cook, start to finish, and is the taste equivalent of a sheepskin rug and a roaring fire. It’s super cozy and best of all, it requires wine, which means that since you’ve already opened the bottle, you might as well have a glass, right?

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The thing is mom has no clue where this recipe comes from. I did a little digging on the world wide web, and what I found was that spaghetti all’ubriaca (which means drunk spaghetti, whereas mom’s version of Ubriacona meas drunkard, just to drive the point home) is a dish you do find in Italy. Often it’s made with red wine, and doesn’t include sausage. Alternatively, there is sugo di salsiccia, which is a pasta sauce with sausage and wine, but also includes panna, a thickened cooking cream. Could this be a mash-up? Like a cronut, but invented by my mom? It’s delicious, let’s move on.

There are going to quite a few pasta recipes on this blog, so I’ll parcel out the history. For today, let’s add to the chorus and support the debunking of the culinary myth that pasta came to Italy via Marco Polo. Both regions, China and the Mediterranean, explored and developed boiling a paste made with grain, and certainly well before the middle ages. We see Mediterranean pasta predecessors in classical Greece and Rome, with laganon and itria. They refer to dough which may not have been boiled, but the names are probably closely related to pastas seen around Italy today (like lasagna!) That said, even if we didn’t know about these early pastas, we know that in 1279, in Genoa, modern-style pasta was being professionally produced, and Marco Polo did not arrive back in Venice until 1295. We know this because the written estate of a man included a basket full of maccheroni, so he clearly appreciated pasta as much as I do.

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SERVING DETAILS

4-5 Servings

INGREDIENTS

• 2 large yellow onions, finely diced
• 1 clove of garlic, finely diced
• 250 grams of good-quality Italian sausage, de-cased
• 2 cups of dry white wine
• 500 grams of spaghetti or bucatini
• Salt, pepper, vegetable oil and red chili flakes

METHOD

1. In a large fry pan or skillet, heat 2-3 tablespoons of vegetable oil over medium heat. Add the onions, a pinch of salt and reduce heat to medium low.
2. Cook the onions for about 5 minutes, until they are translucent and lightly golden but not browned. Add the garlic and cook for another minute until tender.
3. Turn up the heat to medium/med-high and add the sausage meat, discarding the casings, and another pinch of salt. Break the meat up with the back of a wooden spoon into small pieces. Allow the sausage to sear, stirring only occasionally.
4. Once the sausage is browned and a little crisp, add the wine all at once.
5. Cook the sauce until reduced slightly, about 3 minutes. It should still be still saucy but when you smell it, it should no longer smell like alcohol. A sweet and pleasant wine smell will remain.
6. Taste and add salt and red chili flakes as needed, and a few generous turns of fresh cracked black pepper before turning the heat off.
7. Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil. Cook the pasta until just al-dente.
8. Add the pasta and a splash of pasta cooking water to the frying pan with the sauce and toss for about 2 minutes over high heat, fully coating the pasta and bringing it all together.
9. Serve immediately with freshly grated parmesan cheese and more cracked pepper.