Penne alla Vodka

Between 1880 and 1921, in what is known as The Great Migration, over 4 million Italians immigrated to the United States. Having suffered decades of poverty, disease and political turmoil at home, they arrived at Ellis Island in New York Harbor with nothing; penniless, largely uneducated and lacking trades. They took the jobs nobody wanted. Hard, dangerous work. They built the subways and the skyscrapers. They opened shops, humble restaurants and sold produce from pushcarts. Some settled in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and New Jersey, but mostly they found community, turned slums into neighborhoods, in lower Manhattan and by mid-century, Italian Americans had transformed New York city. The five blocks of Mulberry Street north of Canal became Piccola Italia, Little Italy as it is known today.

Suffering all the indignities that ignorance and prejudice can sustain, for more than a half-century Italian immigrants were treated as second class citizens, just like the Irish, Germans and Chinese who had preceded them and the Jews and Latinos who would follow. History tells us that foreigners to this country have always had to overcome bigotry, racism and xenophobia. It is a story well told. The immigrant’s tale.

When I was in high school, we were taught that America was a melting pot. A place where people from all walks of life, ethnicities and races, would melt together, abandoning their individual cultures and assimilate into a singular society. As my education continued, I came to understand that the melting pot metaphor is incorrect, if not ridiculous. More harmful than inspiring. Not because it's fundamentally wrong, that’s self-evident, but because it forces us as a society to see failure where we should be measuring success. America has never been and will never be a melting pot.

I would suggest that America is better imagined as a jigsaw puzzle. A jigsaw puzzle is a process of sorting. You begin by grouping individual pieces by similarity, color mostly. Little by little individual pieces become clusters, clusters become larger groups, until eventually links are found, key pieces with common features that connect disparate groups. It’s a slow, frustrating process but ultimately, an image takes form. Eventually we behold a beautiful picture. This is how we assimilate. We come together around a common cause, but we never stop being individual pieces. Where one group ends and another begins is discernible, but not important. Our bonds are strongest when the puzzle is complete, but those bonds are forever breakable. We never entirely put aside our customs, our culture or our languages. Recently, a group of I.C.E. officers in plain clothes and unmarked cars descended on a shopping mall in San Jose, in search of ‘criminal’ illegal aliens. My backyard, so to speak. Similar raids took place in New York, Chicago and Colorado. There will be more. A ‘migrant facility’ is being built at Guantanamo Bay with the capacity to hold 30,000 people. Having declared a national emergency at the southern border, the U.S. military will soon be deployed there. The border wall gets longer each day. It seems the war on immigrants has escalated.

My kitchen staff is entirely Hispanic. That’s not unusual. Sixty-five percent of all kitchen workers in California are Hispanic. Some are recent immigrants; some are native born and some have been here for generations. They or their families came mostly from Mexico, but also from Central and South America. Every immigrant story is unique, but it’s correct to say that these families have suffered great hardship to make the journey to this country.

My kitchen manager, Santiago, has worked with me for nearly twenty years. He is as talented a cook as I’ve ever met. As hard working as the day is long. He came to this country as a young man with his brothers. He raised a family in this country and last year celebrated the arrival of his first grandchild. His story would be too long to recount here, but it’s a unique tale of sacrifice, failure and ultimately, success. He has earned my deepest admiration. I could not do this without him.

Hilda, my pasta cook, suffers from nerve pain due to chronic diabetes. Her doctors’ visits force her to miss work occasionally, but I’ve never heard her complain. The other day she made ‘flautas’ for staff meal. And even though she knows I’m on a diet; she will not stop feeding me. I wish I could resist, and I wish I could make Salsa Verde as well as she does. Que rico!

Fernando began as a pot washer but quickly graduated to the pizza station. He doesn’t speak a word of English, but he will soon enough. He’s a smart kid. He has two young children and a wife in Guatemala, and he speaks to them every day on his break. You can see the delight on his face. It must be so difficult to be so far away from the people you love.

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I have spent my entire life immersed in and sympathetic to the immigrant experience. Forty years working alongside decent, hardworking people who love their kids, pay their taxes and struggle to get ahead. I have come to love and respect them. Who wouldn’t? It is sad, if not sinful, to once again, see immigrants vilified. Shockingly portrayed as rapists and murderers or as hordes of unwashed masses storming our southern border to take and only take from the bounty of this country. Criminals and drug dealers, really? I cannot understand such ignorance.

So, what does all of this have to do with Penne alla Vodka? Well, everything and nothing, but this missive needs a closing. There's a lot more I could say about the contribution immigrants have made and continue to make to this country. But our nation’s history recounts those contributions well enough. This is a recipe, not a book report. I could tell you that every time I make Penne alla Vodka, Salsa Verde, Pad Thai or schmear cream cheese on a bagel, I’m paying my tacit respect to the immigrants who have suffered and overcome and blah, blah, blah... But that would be B.S. the fact is, I’m just pissed off. I’m afraid that something I hold dear, liberty and justice for all, is being threatened.

When I began the Recipe of the Month Club, I told you that recipes were precious to me, and each was worth more than just an email address. Well, it’s payback time. I have a simple request: the next time you’re at the car wash, getting coffee, a mani-pedi or in a restaurant, have a look around and see the people who are serving you. I mean really see them. That’s my payback. My hope is that as we begin to fix what’s broken in this great country of ours, we stop seeing the villain in the faces of the heroes. Stop placing blame on the innocent and start placing value on all the extraordinary individuals, immigrants and native born, who do the heavy lifting. The jigsaw puzzle isn’t finished yet.

The miracle of Penne alla Vodka is it’s simplicity. The vodka sauce can (and should be) prepared ahead of time, in quantity, and held refrigerated or frozen until service. The sauce is prepared in a flash with simple, readily available ingredients. You’re going to need a scale and a bar blender - essential ingredients in my kitchen. I find that a 50/50 blend of Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano-Reggiano is the perfect cheese to garnish the finished dish. Either cheese will work. Get the good stuff. When it comes to choosing pasta, I remain a huge fan of the Barilla and De Cecco brands, which are on every supermarket shelf these days. If you want to dig a little deeper, try Rustichella d’Abruzzo. Any tube-shaped pasta will work for Penne alla Vodka. Fusilli is also fun.

Oh, and you may be wondering where the vodka is. This may be blasphemy, but I confess that I intentionally left it out of the recipe. Rest assured; I didn’t do this in haste. I’ve prepared this recipe many times, with and without vodka. I tried using vodka early in the cooking process, allowing the alcohol burn off, as most recipes suggest, and I tried adding vodka at the very end of the recipe so that the alcohol would remain volatile. I tried a little bit of vodka and a lot a bit of vodka and in every attempt, the addition of vodka simply and certainly made no difference in either the flavor or the aroma of the finished dish. It’s a myth. Go figure. Might I suggest a Vodka Martini, served alongside your Penne?

Vodka Sauce

Yields 6 cups / 8 portions

45 grams olive oil

45 grams shallot, peeled, coarsely chopped

65 grams peeled garlic

150 grams water

250 grams tomato paste

15 grams salt

½  tsp. sugar

1 tsp. tabasco

½ tsp. red chili flake (more if you dare)

½  tsp. ground white pepper

350 grams water

120 grams cream

240 grams marinara sauce (store bought is okay)

1. Place the olive oil, shallot, garlic and the first quantity of water into a bar blender.

2. Purée until smooth.

3. Add the remaining ingredients to the blender. Purée until smooth.

4. Separate into meaningful portion sizes (3/4 cup per main course serving).

5. Refrigerate or freeze, as appropriate.

6. Yes, that’s all there is to it.

Penne alla Vodka

Four (Generous) Main Course Servings

1 lbs. penne pasta, dry

3 cups of the Vodka Sauce

2 oz. butter

½ cup fresh basil, coarsely chopped

as needed Parmigiano-Reggiano or Pecorino Romano cheese, grated

as needed good quality olive oil

1. Cook the penne in salted water until al dente. Drain but do not rinse. Toss lightly with olive oil.

2. Place the vodka sauce, butter and basil in a sauté pan large enough to accommodate the sauce and the pasta.

3. Bring the Vodka Sauce to a simmer. Reduce heat.

4. Add the cooked pasta to the sauce.

5. Cook until the pasta is heated through, and the sauce has thickened slightly. Add a bit of (pasta) water if the sauce gets too thick, it should be the consistency of heavy cream.

6. Turn off the heat and add a bit of grated cheese. Toss well.

7. Plate the pasta. Garnish with more grated cheese and drizzle of good olive oil.

   
   

   

   
   

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Facebook @HowiesArtisanPizza  Thanks again for cooking along with me and inviting me into your kitchen. — Howie