Fusilli primavera

A surprising pasta dish from the Monzù of Naples

I had always thought of “Pasta Primavera” as a modern American invention, probably a product of the rage for “northern Italian” food in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember reading about it years ago in some gourmet magazine and asked Angelina to make me it for me. “What’s that?” she replied with a bemused chuckle. And in all my years there I’ve never actually come cross it in Italy, either.

So imagine my surprise, as I was leafing through my trusty copy of the classic La cucina napoletana, when I found a entry for fusilli primavera, described as the “personal recipe” of a well known chef named Gerardo Modugno. So even if there is no shortage of faux Italian dishes called Pasta Primavera, a truly Italian version of it really does exist, I realized. Or at least it did in the kitchen of a certain upper class Naples household in the mid 20th century.

For the most part, Italian cookery is about dishes that use a limited number of best-quality ingredients, simply but expertly prepared. I’ve written about how you should be wary of the authenticity of supposedly Italian recipes with a long list of ingredients and multiple steps. Well, my friends, this recipe is an exception that proves the rule. It calls for many ingredients and entails lots of different steps—and mind you, this is my streamlined version of the original… !

But we shouldn’t be too surprised. This version of Pasta Primavera comes out of the tradition of French-inspired chefs that labored in the kitchens of the 18th and 19th century Neapolitan nobility, a class of chefs called the monzù. Modugno is apparently still alive and claims to be the last of the monzù. (More on them in the Notes below.) So no, this is not a quick and easy weeknight dinner dish, but it is truly, authentically Italian, steeped in culinary history.