After the wild sugar excesses of the last week, we all needed something savoury as an antidote…
Despite being only 100km from Rome, Abruzzo is one of Italy’s little known regions. A hidden gem, if you like. It is sparsely populated and rarely visited by tourists but boasts stunning mountain and sea views with a correspondingly rich repertoire of robust mountain dishes and an abundance of seafood specialities.
In Abruzzo sheep and goats are farmed up on the mountains, grazing on Alpine meadows during the summer and driven down to the lowlands to over-winter. As other regions of Italy revere the pig, so do the Abruzzese treat their sheep.
This lamb sauce or ragu is in the tradition of Abruzzo but with one notable exception: I completely forgot to add some crushed dried chilli which turns up in almost all savoury dishes in the region.
The traditional pasta shape would be maccheroni alla chitarra or guitar pasta. (Thin sheets of pasta are rolled over a box strung with thin wire to create square-cut spaghetti.) I used fusilli lunghi pasta which looks like a very long piece of coiled telephone cord (from when phones still had cords!) or like a terrible late-eighties spiral perm. I picked it up as it looked fun and because, like bucatini, it was hollow inside meaning that it would soak up loads of flavour from the ragu. (The pasta shape is from Campania, but I figured that the Abbruzese wouldn’t be too upset as it tasted delicious!)
This is a rich, mellow sauce with beautifully tender lamb. I liked the texture of the chopped as opposed to minced meat—it made the sauce more robust. This is a very simple, delicious and cheap pasta dish—useful with a recession looming—that I’ll be certain to repeat throughout the winter.
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