pasta alla nora

DeCecco pasta packages always have a recipe on the back of the box. A few of them have found their way into the dr bob food files, but like most of the stuff there, never got used. Penne alla norma is one of them. An eggplant pasta sauce from Sicily. Who knows what "norma" means (certainly unrelated to "Norma Jean", for example)¹. Of course we do make eggplant pasta sauces but for some reason always improvise.

This time the new sister-in-law had made a really tasty eggplant side dish. Confirming her promise as a source of delicious new family food ideas. So the eggplant recently acquired with pasta in mind was recruited for this experiment the following night. We called her up for her ingredient lineup. It was simple. And it was good.

We used cavatelli because we were experiencing a glut from hoarding hand carried high quality Puglia pasta from Italy inspired by exaggerated US prices for the stuff (orecchiette and cavatelli). Gnocchi would have been an equally valid choice, and if we can trust DeCecco's cardboard box recipe, penne as well.

ingredients

1 lb penne, cavatelli, gnocchi, whatever
1 large eggplant, skinned, cut into 1 cm cubes
2-3 T olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic (1 big one)
1 big can pelati (peeled Italian plum tomatoes)
1 T tomato paste stirred into pelati liquid
allspice
red pepper (not too much)
black pepper
salt
1/3 c freshly ground parmigiano

instructions

  1. Get the pasta water boiling and cook the pasta al dente when the water is ready, with salt.
  2. Prepare the eggplant.
  3. In a large chef's pan if you have one, sauté the onion and garlic in olive oil until softened, then dump in the eggplant cubes and cook say 5 minutes.
  4. Dump in the pelati and the tomato paste and the spices and cook for about 20 minutes or so. Check for spices.
  5. Mix in the cooked drained pasta and parmigiano if your pan is big enough or vice versa if not.
  6. Serve with some extra cheese on each serving.

notes

  1. A few days later the last Book and the Cook Show of the 20th century added "The Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink" to the dr bob team cooking library, a prize that had been wanting for years. It seems that pasta alla norma may have been created to commemorate the Bellini opera Norma (1821). Who would have thought an answer to this question would come so soon?
pstanora.htm: 28-mar-1999 [what, ME cook? © 1984 dr bob enterprises]