COURGETTE, SAUSAGE & SAGE CAVATELLI
a recipe inspired by my favourite restaurant in New York City.
Hello lovely readers!
Welcome back to another issue of How I Cook+.
Thanks so much for being here and supporting the newsletter, I was thrilled to receive such lovely feedback for last week’s Jerez issue. I’m going to lean into that style of (more creative) writing more often, I thoroughly enjoy and was so pleased to hear that you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.
This week, we’re travelling back to my time living across the pond in Brooklyn. For those who don’t know (probably 99.9% of you), I spent a year studying at Brooklyn College in 2015/2016. It was a pretty transformative year. I was 21 and in a brave new world across the pond. I got my first kitchen job and spent far more time there than I did at school, scraping through my degree by the skin of my teeth whilst carving a path into the wild world of restaurants, cooking, eating and obsessing over food.
During that year, I found what would become comfortably one of my favourite places to go and eat. A restaurant that would inform my cooking taste and habits for the future.
Enjoy,
B x
“The best meal I had on the job? It was in the garden of Frankies 457 on a summer evening. Nothing was wrong. Everything was right. It would have been nice if it could have gone on forever.” - Sam Sifton, ex-restaurant critic for the New York Times
It’s a close, late-May evening in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. The strings of fairy lights draped across the courtyard of Frankies 457 Spuntino glimmer and sway in the breeze as flies dumbly swat around them, charmed. I’m sat across from my friend Frank (not one of the two eponymous owners, Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli, but a Frank nonetheless). In the twilight, just behind him, I see the F Train zip by the garden, chitter-chattering, carrying its glum freight towards Manhattan.
We’re drinking cold Italian beer, it’s a warm evening and the first sip is an elixir. I’ve just moved apartments, for what I hope is the last time this year. Frank is one of the few people I know in the city and the only person I know with a car, so after some persuasion he has, in just one trip, moved my two bags of clothes and one bag of books from Crown Heights to Bushwick. He reminds me that I could have taken an Uber, I remind him I’m buying dinner.
The menu is short and direct, a tight lineup of comfy Italian American staples (meatballs, broccoli rabe, sweet sausage with peppers) and a handful of less familiar players. Frank orders meatballs with pine nuts and raisins, I take cavatelli with sage and brown butter, not having a clue what I’ve ordered beyond the fact that it’s a kind of housemade pasta. We snack on marinated olives with orange and fennel seeds, spitting the pits into our palms, cosplaying as middle class Brooklynites. The Filone arrives (a classic Italian yeasted loaf) with a ramekin of grassy olive oil. I’m told by the waiter that “the olive oil is ours”, as he brandishes a finger at a pile of very chic looking tins stacked up by the wall of the garden. Each reads in gold lettering “Frankies 457 Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil”. This place must be serious.
Franks meatballs land with a thud and my pasta swiftly follows. I stare down into the bowl and feel a waft of freshly sizzled sage hit me. The cavatelli are like tiny little gnocchi, there are what look like hundreds of them, plump and glossy. I slide in my spoon, the chewy nuggets of dough are lubricated with a slick of nutty, rich butter and lemon juice, slivers of sage nestled within the tangle. Fat coins of hot Italian sausage wade their way through the mass, fighting for attention. It’s a marvelous plate of food, the pasta dough is enriched with what I’m later to learn is ricotta.
I’ve never eaten a pasta like this before, for the first time it seems complete, not needing a mountain of umami rich parmesan or the juice of a lemon. I eat the bowl slower than usual as Frank has a similar, more meatball-forward experience.
We don’t say much, bar asking our waiter for some more bread to mop up the sauce. As Frank rips a piece in half, I sit back, I feel good. Frank sighs as he spills olive oil on his shirt.
Frankies 457 Spuntino is many things. It’s warm, familiar, delicious, alive. It’s popular, approachable and effortlessly cool. This last quality is partly down to it’s affable founders. The Frankies are semi-legendary figures of NYC hospitality, rubbing shoulders with chefs, musicians and creatives around the world, calling the most of them friends. This of course helps the restaurants’ vibe, but I really think it’s down to the food, the mechanics and the ethos of the place, it moves with a certain elan. I remember my first meal at 457 with incredible clarity. It was one of those meals that entirely altered the way I thought about food. I can more or less map these moments out in chronological order, the first being a meal at The Square in 2012 (after which I was very much enamoured by fine dining, this wouldn’t last too long, a few years at best), the next, a sandwich inspired by a Vietnamese soup from a bodega in the East Village of Manhattan (I had never eaten a single bite with more flavour and texture in my entire life, a whole world of stuff-between-bread possibility was thrown open).
I treasure these little moments and remember them fondly as I make decisions in the kitchen up to this day. Today’s recipe is an approximation of the little bowl of pasta that has stuck in my brain for so many years, and a celebration of my favourite restaurant in New York City. A version of cavatelli with sausage and sage, with a few extra bits thrown in that speak to the kind of cooking I enjoy now. I finish mine with raw courgettes, replace butter with olive oil and emulsify the sauce with light, milky mascarpone cheese and lemon juice to lift everything up. I think it’s rather nice… I wonder what the Frankies would think?
FRANKIES 457 COOKBOOK
The cookbook from the restaurant. This is an excellent piece of work and it really does what is says on the tin. I love the idea of a book being a “kitchen companion” or a “cooking manual” it conveys a real sense of usefulness and essentialism and is loyal to the Frankies’ commitment to simple, ingredient forward cooking, devoid of pomp or any semblance of ‘trendy’ cookery. These two know what they like, and like what they know.
Within the pages you’ll find recipes for sweet potato ravioli with cheese broth, sweet and sour baked eggplant and spaghetti with clams. Classic Italian cooking, with just enough of an American spin (and a tiny bit of French technique sprinkled throughout) to make it their own.
The Frankies have a knack for writing outside of the food. The story of their meeting is a good one, and beautifully told, I won’t spoil it for you. The book is also leather bound with embossed gold lettering, has gold wrapped pages and a scarlet page ribbon. I mean, come on…
CAVATELLI
Following that bowl of pasta at 457, I thought about these chewy little nuggets for ages. You can find this shape in many forms all over Italy, and I’m not going to get too bogged down in who made what, where and who made it first, but it is supposedly traced back to Puglia region. Cavatelli itself means “little hollows” in Italian, referring to the little dimple in the back of the pasta. You might hear them also called gnocchetti sardi or malloreddus. They’re all pretty similar, and this versatile little pasta marries well with heaps of different sauces. A simple tomato sauce with salted ricotta or lots of pecorino is delicious, a brothy seafood sauce with clams and braised squid works wonders, too. I love the texture of cavatelli through a meat ragu, they’re robust enough to stand up to the sauce and deliver a really hearty plate.
I’ve carried this pasta shape through a few different restaurants with me over the years. We put it on the menu at Marion in Melbourne, I rolled thousands at Cin Cin and a squid ink version made it onto the plates of 64 Degrees. The Frankies make a ricotta based pasta dough, but I prefer the robust texture of a simple semolina dough, it has a really distinct chew that I can’t get enough of. They’re hilariously easy to make, with or without a cavatelli machine.
BEEBO CAVATELLI ROLLER
In the old country, nonnas would spend hours cranking out these little pasta nuggets, but the Italian-Americans were industrious and crave efficiency, shrugging off the shackles of tradition in favour of a machine that would do the job for them. Along with the dawn of the microwave, the dishwasher and the electric carving knife, Italian-Americans also had the cavatelli roller. All praise the industrial revolution!
The Frankies recommend using one of these, specifically this brand, Beebo. I imagine that’s because they’ll be making thousands of these a day. Cranking them through a machine is childs play and about 100x faster than rolling them by hand. When I put these on the menu at Marion, it sold really well and the chefs would spend hours hand rolling the little pastas, shooting me dirty looks as their thumbs slowly cramped up. We really ought to have bought a few of these…
You can’t buy these new anymore, but you can keep an eye on eBay or marketplace and usually scoop up a vintage one for just shy of £100. There are contemporary versions, but they use plastic rollers, the Frankies insist on the wooden roller variety.
THE FORK TRICK
If you don’t fancy forking out for a cavatelli machine (I hear you…) and you don’t have a gnocchi board (again, quite a niche piece of kit), you can make cavatelli using just the tines of a fork. The goal is to create ridges on the outside of the pasta, a textured surface that’ll cling onto liquid and encourage your pasta to have a togetherness with the sauce. You can use anything to achieve this really, a cheese grater, a colander, the back of a piece of lego. Anything that’ll leave a distinct mark on your dough’ll do.