dear cooks,

Faith Willinger has spent three decades exploring Italy, traveling from the Alps to Sicily to track down the best restaurants, regional cooks, winemakers, and food markets. Along the way, she’s made many friends, eaten lots of tasty meals, and collected a wealth of authentic Italian recipes. Now, in Adventures of an Italian Food Lover, she pays tribute to her friends and to the food and wine she’s enjoyed in their company.

Here’s Faith to tell you about the Iaccarinos and their recipe for spaghetti with walnuts and anchovies:

I met Livia and Alfonso Iaccarino in the 1970s, when they were struggling restauranteurs and I was staying in Positano at Le Sirenuse. They had traded Alfonso’s inheritance—an interest in a grand hotel near Sorrento—for a building that had once been Alfonso’s grandfather’s pensione in the village of Sant’Agata sui Due Golfi. At a moment when regional southern cuisine wasn’t taken seriously, Alfonso and Livia dreamed of a world-class restaurant that would showcase local ingredients skillfully prepared, elegantly presented, and paired with fine wines. They named their restaurant Don Alfonso, after Alfonso’s grandfather. I fell in love with the restaurant and its owners. They showed me their organic vegetable garden, which hugged a cliff overlooking the sea, the groves where they grew olives for their own extra virgin, and the dairy that made their mozzarella and hand-churned butter. They argued about which regional wines they wanted me to taste.

Livia and Alfonso were joined eventually by their sons Ernesto (in the kitchen) and Mario (in the dining room), and Don Alfonso became the first restaurant south of Tuscany to garner well-deserved praise from Italian and international publications. They collected wine, which they stored in an amazing cellar of Etruscan origins with a medieval well at the bottom. Many southern Italian restaurateurs were inspired.

Because customers begged to buy their pasta (a special selection from nearby Gragnano), tomato sauce, and other fine regional products, they opened a shop across from the restaurant with a comfortable cigar lounge, library, and selection of fine distillates sold by the glass or bottle. I can’t live without their tomato purée, with intense hyper-tomato flavors.

To represent the Iaccarino family, I at first thought to include the restaurant’s vaunted “Vesuvius” timbales of rigatoni, served there with three different sauces—it take two days to prepare and many pages to explain. But at the end of the day I chose a much simpler, homestyle pasta, a dish I enjoyed at a family dinner on the night before Christmas.

Don Alfonso 1890
Corso Sant’Agata, 11
80064 Sant’Agata sui Due Golfi (NA)
Tel.: +39-081-878-0026
Fax: +39-081-533-0226
info@donalfonso1890.com
www.donalfonso.com
Closed Mondays. June 1–September 30: Tuesdays lunch only.
Usually closes for 2 months in the winter, usually January–March.

spaghetti with walnuts and anchovies

Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 3 garlic cloves, sliced
• 2 whole salt-cured anchovies, filleted, or 4–6 anchovy fillets
• 3–4 tablespoons coarsely chopped walnuts
• Chili pepper to taste
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley
• Coarse sea salt
• 14–16 ounces spaghetti

  Heat the extra virgin in a large skillet and sauté the garlic over low heat until it barely begins to color. Add the anchovy fillets and, with a wooden spoon, mash them until they dissolve into the oil. Add the walnuts, chili pepper, and parsley; stir to combine and remove from heat.

  Bring 5 to 6 quarts of water to a rolling boil. Add about 3 tablespoons of sea salt, then add the spaghetti and cook until it offers considerable resistance to the tooth, approximately three-quarters of the package-recommended cooking time. Drain the pasta, reserving 2 cups of the starchy pasta cooking water.

  Add the spaghetti to the sauce in the skillet along with 1/2 cup reserved pasta-cooking water, and cook over high heat, stirring with a wooden fork, until the pasta is cooked al dente, adding a little more pasta water as the sauce dries.

happy cooking!

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