November 24, 2020 2 of 8
Diane Seed’s The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces book has a stripped-down version of Spaghetti Vesuvio that is just canned tomatoes, olive oil, oregano, salt, and Parmesan and mozzarella cheeses.
Me being me, of course, I stripped it down farther, into canned tomato sauce with garlic, oregano, and basil, and Parmesan and mozzarella cheeses.
I also don’t really like Parmesan cheese. All I can taste and smell is the butyric acid, and the less said about that in a food post, the better. However, the sauce tastes flat without it, so I put the smallest amount of Parmesan cheese that will make the sauce more interesting (a little less than 1 tablespoon) directly into the sauce.
The recipe also says that you are to leave cubes of the mozzarella cheese in the pot with the pasta for three minutes until it starts to melt. This makes it resemble lava and gives the dish its name. I tried that, and every time I tried, my pot must not have been hot enough or something, because I still had unmelted chunks of cheese. So instead, I started topping the spaghetti with shredded mozzarella. It lacks something in terms of presentation, but it’s delicious, which is all we need here.
When I started this going through my cookbooks project, I noticed that this book lacks a recipe for Amatriciana sauce, which must have been the 101st top sauce and didn’t make the cut, I guess? I am going to try to dig up a recipe for that to make someday, but not, like, now. I’ve still got too many cookbooks to pore through.