Cavatelli e Rucola

the Pugliese pasta of the stony fields: wild rocket boiled in the pasta water with a potato to bind it, dressed with garlic browned in oil and finished with chilli and pecorino

Origin: Puglia, Italy

From the journey of Rocket.

This is cucina povera in the exact and unsentimental sense of the term. Wild rocket grows across the Murge and the Salento all year round, in field margins, on drystone walls, and through ground too poor for anything cultivated, and it was therefore free in a region and a period when very little was. The dish is built from that fact: a handful of foraged greens, a potato, some flour and water made into pasta, a clove of garlic, and oil. Nothing in it was bought. What lifts it above its origins is that boiling transforms the plant. Raw rocket is volatile and sharply peppery, and that pepperiness is a fragile thing which disappears the moment it meets heat. What is left behind is quite different: deep, faintly bitter, almost nutty, closer to a cooked chicory or a turnip top than to anything in a salad bowl. Cooks meeting the dish for the first time are usually surprised that it does not taste of rocket at all in the sense they expect. The wild plant is what makes it work. Ruchetta selvatica is markedly hotter and more resinous than garden rocket, and it retains enough character after boiling to carry a plate of pasta; the mild broad-leaved rocket of a supermarket bag reduces to something thin and grassy. The potato is not padding either, being cooked to collapse and stirred through to give the sauce its body, since there is no fat in the dish beyond the oil.

Ingredients

Pasta

  • 400 g cavatelli, or orecchiette
  • 1 large floury potato, peeled and cut into small dice
  • 300 g wild rocket (rucola selvatica), coarse stems trimmed
  • 1 tbsp coarse salt, for the water

Dressing

  • 6 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
  • 4 cloves garlic, sliced thin
  • 1 whole dried peperoncino, crumbled, or 0.5 tsp chilli flakes

To serve

  • 50 g Pecorino Romano, finely grated, to serve
  • 1 pinch sea salt and black pepper

Method

  1. Bring a large pan of well-salted water to the boil and add the diced potato. Cook for eight minutes, until it is soft enough to crush against the side of the pan.
  2. Add the cavatelli to the same water and cook according to the packet, but two minutes before the end throw in the rocket and push it under.
  3. Whilst the pasta cooks, heat the oil gently in a wide frying pan with the sliced garlic and the chilli, and let the garlic turn pale gold. Take it off the heat before it browns.
  4. Reserve two ladlefuls of the cooking water, then drain the pasta, potato, and rocket together and tip them into the frying pan with the garlic oil.
  5. Return the pan to a medium flame and toss hard for a minute, adding the reserved water a little at a time and crushing some of the potato against the side of the pan, until everything is glossy and loosely bound.
  6. Season, take off the heat, and serve at once with grated pecorino.

Notes

Wild rocket is strongly preferred and the dish is noticeably thinner without it: look for the narrow, deeply cut leaves sold as rucola selvatica or wild rocket rather than the broad soft leaves of ordinary bagged rocket. If only mild rocket is available, use half again as much and add the leaves one minute later. Orecchiette and cavatelli are used interchangeably across Puglia and either is correct. Some households add a few anchovy fillets to the garlic oil, which makes it a much richer dish and is common around Bari; others finish with toasted breadcrumbs in place of cheese, which is the older and poorer version. The dish does not reheat well, the greens going drab and the sauce breaking.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
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