Amanda Hesser Revisits A Pasta Sauce and Seems A Little Silly to Miss Edith...

This past Sunday The New York Times Magazine section featured a recipe for Pamela Sherrid’s Summer Pasta. Apparently this was all the rage at the Times in 1996. The article comments that it was only in the early to mid 1990s that the Times began printing recipes that involved room temperature pasta sauces. The article, written by Amanda Hesser, who I shouldn’t argue with I guess, but I’m going to anyway, makes it sound as if no one in American civilization had ever heard of serving hot pasta with a room temperature sauce before then.

Miss Edith, sitting at her kitchen table, snorted as she swallowed the last of her tuna sandwich.

I cannot accept Amanda Hesser’s article. Surely she has read Nora Ephron’s minor classic Heartburn?

There are many joys to be found in this novel, but one of them is this recipe, which I remember reading when I first read this novel in the summer of 1985. (It was originally published a couple years before that.) On page 128 of my crappy movie-tie-in mass market edition of this book, there is a recipe for Linguine Alla Cecca, which Our Heroine Rachel tells the reader she and her pals weaseled out of a chef on a trip to Italy.

I cannot imagine that Amanda Hesser hasn’t read Heartburn. This is a book that was probably memorized by hundreds of journalists and would-be journalists in the 1980s, and then glommed onto by countless divorcees over the years, and then, too, noticed and read by many women who, craving more Nora Ephron (they just loved Sleepless in Seattle, the fools), picked up a copy of Heartburn thinking it’d be more of the same (it isn’t).

Hesser says that she sent a copy of the famed Pamela Sherrid pasta recipe to an Italian chef working in Manhattan and that he was initially appalled by the notion of a room temperature sauce – apparently no one in Italy does such things. But then why have I got so many cookbooks, many of them decades old, that contain the basic outline of this same recipe? I admit that I first read it in Ephron – but since then I’ve read quite a few more cookbooks, and, let me tell you, this recipe is really good and reliable, and I adore it, but there’s nothing particularly “new” about it. For that matter, I remember brother making this dish one night when he was visiting home during his college career… and he graduated from college in 1987.

Nora Ephron’s recipe is titled Linguine Alla Cecca but let’s face it, it’s just pasta with a raw tomato sauce. In a large bowl, pour about 1/2 cup of good olive oil (extra virgin is, in fact, nice here). In my kitchen, a good-sized raw clove of garlic is pressed into the oil. (Ephron has you cut the clove in half so it can later be easily removed.) Seed and chop (Ephron also has you peel) several big juicy summer tomatoes and put the flesh in the bowl. Grind in salt, pepper, red pepper flakes; tear up a lot of basil leaves and dump them in too. Then leave this to sit. You want a minimum of one hour but all freaking day is dandy, too. Then you cook your pasta and mix it all together. Ephron doesn’t talk about sprinkling Parmesan on this, but you certainly may; I’ve also melted logs of goat cheese into the pasta and sauce and that is truly delicious though it makes for a much more rich meal.

The Sherrid pasta sauce differs from Ephron’s only in this, as far as I can see: it has slightly more garlic and little cubes of mozzarella.

Please. Amanda Hesser: get over it. This recipe was not earthshattering when the Times printed it in 1996. Let’s put it this way: if I, who was not cooking at all in 1996, knew about this recipe, then anyone who really was cooking in 1996 already knew it, too.