Pasta alla Gricia

I featured this little group of recipes in my New York Times column and in The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, but it’s so instructive, important, and wonderful that I felt it belonged here as well. All (well, almost all) the variations begin with bits of cured meat cooked until crisp, around which are built a number of different sauces of increasing complexity.

Most people insist that the “genuine” meat for these recipes is pancetta—salted, cured, and rolled pork belly. Panc