Tastes of Spring
Spaghetti Primavera: One Portland chef looks to reclaim pasta primavera, using the fresh Northwest ingredients we have at our fingertips.
By Lizzy Caston
ONCE THE DARLING of hot-spot dining establishments and the “it” dinner-party entrée of budding gourmets everywhere, pasta primavera has fallen on hard times. Ubiquitous to the point of boring, the dish shows up these days on the menus of cafeterias and chain restaurants; in grocery-store aisles, you’ll even find frozen TV dinner versions. Compromised as it has been by gluey white sauces and freezer-burned veggies, it’s no wonder this dish has become the laughingstock of serious chefs.
Enough is enough. It’s time to reclaim pasta primavera and return it to the respected status it once enjoyed: as a well-tuned symphony of texture and taste, inspired by the sweet, tender vegetables we have on hand each spring.
Such a transformation, however, requires digging up the dish’s roots. Pasta primavera’s origins are debated to this day, but the most popular story goes like this: During a trip to Canada in May 1976, Sirio Maccioni, an Italian chef and owner of New York City’s opulent French restaurant Le Cirque, improvised for a group of friends a simple pasta with a light cream sauce and whatever veggies his hosts had on hand. The entrée was a hit, and Maccioni christened it pasta primavera, or “spring pasta.” One of the diners that day was Craig Claiborne, a food writer for the New York Times, who subsequently raved about the innovation to colleagues back home, one of whom eventually wrote about it in a review of Le Cirque. Maccioni, knowing a good thing when he found it, made primavera a standard off-the-menu item for those in the know, and it is still served at the restaurant to this day. Home cooks embraced and began embellishing Maccioni’s formula, starting in 1977 with a recipe for “spaghetti primavera” that Claiborne ran in the Times.
A dish with this much original appeal deserves a second chance. So we asked one of Portland’s most skilled pasta impresarios, Tommy Habetz, the executive chef at Meriwether’s, to help us rescue pasta primavera from its slump. For his recipe, he chose ingredients available in Portland’s farmers markets–such as leeks and ramps (wild onions)–as well as morels and asparagus, iconic foods of the Pacific Northwest. By omitting the tomatoes and cream usually found in the classic recipe, Habetz says his version “is more local, lighter and more modern.”
Pasta primavera, buon giorno. And welcome back.
Published: May 2007
