Pasta alla Checca

This is a simple dish that I learned to make when I lived in Genoa in the early eighties, where we called it simply “pasta dell’estate” (summer pasta) or “pasta alla salsa cruda” (pasta with raw sauce). It’s a dish that both of my friends, Gianni (who had grown up in a peasant family up in the Apennines) and Alberto (who was a “city boy” from Santa Margherita), knew from childhood, so I was surprised to see that a famous Roman restaurant critic and historian credits the dish to a chef in Rome in 1972! In David Downie’s excellent Cooking the Roman Way (HarperCollins, 2002), he says that the dish disappeared along with the chef in the mid-1980s. I had lunch with the eminent art historian John Pope-Hennessy in Rome in 1983 and was shocked to see the dish offered on a menu as “pasta alla checca.” Downie explains that “Romans love making off-color remarks.” They even name some of their favorite dishes after body parts and functions. Actually, this is true throughout southern Europe: There are French cheese crottins, or turds; merda de can (dog shit gnocchi) in Nice, and all sorts of puffy foods called nun’s farts throughout the region. But the Genoese are very proper folks, and I never heard any foods called by such vulgar names there.