Photo Credit: Ari LeVaux
Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli. — Pete Clemenza
If you’ve seen The Godfather, you’ll remember the scene when Pete Clemenza shows Michael Corleone how to make spaghetti and meatballs. Clememza was, without a doubt, the smoothest character in the story, after the Godfather himself, Don Vito Corleone. And he was probably a better cook. That scene definitely improved my pasta.
Sometimes jovial, sometimes grim, Clemenza was poetry in motion as he mixed business with pleasure, be it as a wedding dancer, a chef, or at his day job as an orchestrator of executions. It was, in fact, right after dispatching Pauli, a traitor, while pulled over in some tall grass near the highway, that Clemenza brought the cannoli, presumably ricotta-stuffed, to a room full of angry men, and proceeded to feed them. The Don, set up by Pauli, was in the hospital with gunshot wounds. The men were preparing for war.
Clemenza pulled Michael Corleone aside to give his future boss a bit of unsolicited, if solid advice on cooking pasta and communicating with his girlfriend. “Come over here kid learn something. You never know you might have to cook for 20 guys someday. You see, you start off with a little bit of oil. And you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it you make sure it doesn’t stick. You get it to a boil you shove in all your sausage and your meatballs. Add a little bit of wine. And a little bitta sugar. And that’s my trick.” At that moment in the story, Sonny burst in. “How’s Pauli?”
Clemenza kept stirring his sauce. “Oh Pauli? Won’t see him no more.”
Back in Missoula, Montana, meanwhile, a certain Dadfather had problems of his own. No gunshot wounds to speak of, thankfully, but his two sons weren’t behaving in a manner befitting the children of a sensitive chef. They purported zero interest in dinner, from my kitchen, at least. Other kitchens had take-out, take-and-bake pizza, macaroni and cheese and Chef Boy Ardee, to name a few improvements to my cuisine. At my house there is no dessert until you finish your salad, and the cooked food is often too chunky.
So the Dadfather had to dig deep up the sleeve of his white, sleeveless undershirt, similar to the shirt he imagined Clemenza wore. And that is where he found Clemenza’s trick. Using fresh tomatoes, as it was summertime, he channeled Clemenza’s trick, taking measures to ensure the spaghetti was thick with meatballs and the sauce was not chunky.
It was a pasta they couldn’t refuse.
Pasta Clemenza
This dish really hits the pasta spot. You’ll feel like you’re at a wooden table in Sicily. Serve it with a lusty red and eat it until you feel as round as Clemenza.Serves the whole Family (say, six)
- 5 pounds fresh tomatoes. I used Oxheart Paste Tomatoes from my garden.
- 2 heads of garlic, whole cloves
- ½ cup olive oil
- 1 teaspoons salt
- 1 large onion, minced finely
- 1 cup red wineHerbs: oregano, thyme, and sage, about ¼ cup of fresh, chopped, or two tablespoons worth of dried
- Four Italian sausages (or 20 meatballs)
- One pound of dry pasta (they used boxes in the Godfather. I use bags of fancy pasta, dried in cold air and imported from Italy)
- Six quarts water plus 1 tablespoon of salt (or stock)
- 2 more cloves of garlic½ cup grated Parmesan or Romano cheese
- Optional: Fresh basil leaves as a garnishOptional: hot red pepper flakes
Trim and core the tomatoes and slice them in half, tip to core. Lay them on baking sheets, with garlic interspersed, drizzled with a few tablespoons of oil and a teaspoon of salt. Preheat the oven to broil. Place the sheets in the oven. Rotate the trays every five or so minutes so they all cook evenly until the skins, facing upward, begin to wrinkle and start to blacken—about 20 minutes. Remove the trays of tomatoes. When they are cool enough to work with, pull off the skins.
Fry the onions in ½ up of olive oil in a heavy bottom pan. When they are translucent, add the tomatoes and the water in the baking pans. Add the herbs. Simmer for about an hour, stirring often to make sure it doesn’t burn (if it burns, don’t scrape the burnt crap into the sauce—change the pot).
Season to taste with salt and perhaps more herbs. When it tastes good, turn it off and let it cool to room temperature. Blend it until smooth, and then filter out the seeds with cheesecloth or a thin mesh strainer. You now have a velvety smooth not chunky sauce, much more than you need to cook a box of pasta. The sauce freezes well in quart freezer bags, stacked flat on their sides.
Heat the salted pasta water (or stock) and cook the pasta al dente. Don’t worry, it will cook more in the sauce.
While the pasta cooks, cut each sausage into five pieces and fry them in enough oil to coat the pan. Brown them as much as you like. They will cook more in the sauce later on.
Toss the noodles in olive oil and crushed garlic and add them to the pan with the meatballs. Sauté for five minutes. Add two cups of sauce per pound of pasta (or whatever seems right with the amount of noodles you made). Simmer the noodles and meatballs gently in the sauce until the noodles are to your liking. Garnish with grated cheese, fresh basil, red pepper flakes if you like, and serve.
