The pasta favourite reinvented as a sauce for green beans, plus a nifty way to turn leftover bread into a rich dessert
I
talian cuisine so often references old times; I love simple food and forgotten tales, too, but I also feel the need to escape this tradition. We opened our restaurant, Trattoria della Gloria, in Milan in 2023, and instinctively refused to spend every night selling a remote and often fictional past. Instead, we explore and experiment with ancient gestures, methods and pairings to create “new old things”. That is, dishes that our grannies could have made, but didn’t.
Italy is no country for sauces – most of our meat, fish and vegetable dishes are usually served by themselves, or with just olive oil and little else. Italian sauces do exist, but they are held in captivity by pasta dishes. Carbonara, say, has become a very serious matter, calling for nothing but guanciale (cured pork cheek) and pecorino romano. It’s good, but it’s actually a very recent “tradition”: as a child in north Italy in the 1990s, I had never even heard of guanciale, and our carbonara was just fine.
Prep 30 min
