How to Rule the World: Cacio e Pepe

At first glance one might get the idea that preparing Cacio e Pepe is very simple indeed. And it is simple enough, when you know what the hell you are doing. Alas, in the world of pasta, timing is everything, so there are, in the wise words of Mickey Rourke, at least fifty different ways to screw it up even if you are a genius. Of course, Mr. Rourke is referring to WARNING CONTAINS SPOILERS killing a man and making it look like arson, in Body Heat. But the same rule, people, applies here. Cooking some legendary pasta that actually turns out well is totally comparable to getting away with murder.

After years of perfecting my pasta cooking abilities, I have finally started tackling the classics. Cacio e Pepe seemed simple enough, at first, but I overlooked the simple yet elegant concept of beginner’s luck when I first made it. I was so over the moon getting it right, when most recipes came with some words of warning that went along the lines of "Yes, it does seem like the easiest recipe in the book but", that I immediately placed myself in the top five of all-time best pasta cookers, giving myself a little pat on the back as I gorged on huge helpings of this new favorite dish.

But not so fast, mister. Just like William Hurt’s hubris comes back to haunt him in terrible ways in the aforementioned classic film noir, my arrogance led to trouble, too.

Self-confidence is a tricky business. We all need it, no one wants to hang out with someone who is constantly feeling sorry for herself and goes on and on about how they are nothing and can do nothing – oh, wait, there is a vague resemblance here to a certain Mrs. Dalloway who is an acquaintance of mine, you know, not a personal friend or anything, she is just someone I sort of know through mutual interests, and she has bad days, sometimes, and well gosh-darnit if that isn’t exactly how she sounds then! – but at the same time, no one stands a pompous ass. Continuing with the Body Heat analogy, you want to handle yourself like Kathleen Turner, not like Richard Crenna, that demeaning and bossy and self-important husband of hers. Remember, he was the poor bastard who bit the dust because he could not even for a second fathom the idea that the gorgeous, legs-up-to-here, get-me-bodied, reckless-daughter-of-Lauren-Bacall wife of hers might not only have real killer brains underneath that seductive and magnificent head of hers, but also that that steamy, irresistible woman might be a real killer.

Stupidity is not unlike high-handedness or cockiness. To get away with murder, one must not only be able to speak in the beyond sexy voice like Ms. Turner, but also keep a humble and alert mind. William Hurt was overcome with desire and ideas of omnipotence, and that, my friends, was his undoing. To make a decent Cacio e Pepe, one must stay en garde always. One must become Kathleen Turner, and not leave a single thing unattended.

I have stated elsewhere that I am what one might describe a slow starter. Like my grandmother before me, I must always have a moment to think about things before I begin, otherwise the matter at hand will every time be doomed to fail. For instance, hearing stories on the perfection that is kale made me extremely cautious of it, and I shied away from making dishes out of it, or even buying it from the store, for years. Kale was, for the longest time for me, the vegetable equivalent to what we, Mrs. Dalloway and myself, refer to as the Harry Potter Syndrome.

The Harry Potter Syndrome, of course, means keeping one’s distance from an extremely popular phenomenon for no other reason whatsoever except that the phenomenon is so popular it starts to develop an air of dubiousness and distaste around it. The new hot thing is everywhere, on cereal boxes and pen cases and backpacks, it is so heavily advertised and praised all around as the second coming, that without bothering to check out if the thing itself is worth all the hubbub, one decides to ignore the whole thing, and even develops a vague but distinct dislike for the thing, and resistance, like an anti-force field, begins to grow around one, like an aura of negativity, towards, say, the enormously popular books on the Boy Who Lived, or the Twilight franchise, or Reese Witherspoon.

A lot of things can’t live up to the hype, this is true. But some things can. I was already an adult when the Harry Potters hit the bookstands, and, having no real prejudice one way or another, I read all the available books in a fine frenzy with the rest of the world when I should have been studying for my philosophy exams. The problems began after this. When praising the story that was at that point still in the making, so many school mates and friends of mine denounced the whole series as insignificant to their lives, children’s books – I mean WTF?, or otherwise somehow insufferable or hateful, I, after a few failed attempts to get people interested in them, became aware of a pattern and let it go, leaving them to their ignorance. This was the first time I saw the Harry Potter Syndrome in action, and one of the few times I have been the one on the side of progress instead of the Oh, I don’t even wanna hear about it -opposition, as much as it pains me to say this.

As time went on, I realized it was the younger demographic more than anyone else, those young adults who had been kids themselves when J.K. Rowling introduced her boy wonder, who were the most resilient in their antagonism. And I get it, I do. No one wants to be force-fed something everyone else is doing, just because everyone is doing it. I know I sure as heckfire don’t. If birds do it and bees do it, why the hell do I have to do it, we ask.

As years have progressed, I have seen the Harry Potter Syndrome happen in many an instance. I have witnessed it happen both in myself and in others, especially having my singular vantage point, doing what I do for a living. Any popular thing, a movie, a hot new artist or a new album, a new popular book, a clothes brand. I am just a guilty as the rest of them. Many times I am so sick of the trailer of a new hit movie I have already seen roll on TV and elsewhere about a thousand times, I simply cannot bear the idea of actually going to a movie theater and seeing two hours of the same. No way, no siree. Just the other day, as I was conversing with my punk-listening, skate-boarding barber for eight years about the brand-new shopping mall in our town, I asked him if he had already been in, he answered, exasperated: “Hell no. All those clothes stores? I mean Superdry? I fucking hate it. There is nothing for me there.”

And here lies my problem with kale. Kale came to signify to me what Superdry signifies to my full-body tattooed hair-cutting conversationalist. Kind of the way Ms. Witherspoon sneers in Big Little Lies how her ex-husband’s new yoga instructor wife probably wants to serve them organically grown kale from her vertical garden, I, too, considered it for a long time the epitome of food snobbery, and a half-assed attempt to sort the true vegan wheat from the riff-raff who part-time on red meat, part-time on chaff. “Yeah, I had a kale omelet yesterday, it was so delicious!” or “Go vegan! We got kale!” or “Did you already try the kale spaghetti?” I would be like no I didn’t, and you can shove it up your I don’t know. So, in conclusion, for years, since I wasn’t really sure how to use it or what to do with it, kale became, for me, the Harry Potter of the produce stand.

Then one day I was doing some grocery shopping at my nearest supermarket. Having recently mastered Cacio e Pepe, I was sailing the vegetable section with guns blazing, ready to take on any challenge. I was now the Kathleen Turner of my life, parading my extraordinary skills in front of anyone and needing the whole aisle for my super-confident food heroine strutting. I was all for peeling and cutting artichokes, boning a duck, swallowing raw eggs, caramelizing those pears. And then, right in front of me, there it was. Kale. Just what the doctor ordered.

Alright, honey, you and me, outside, right now, I said, grabbing the bag in my shopping basket. Let’s see if a thousand food bloggers and gourmands are right about you.

Needless to say, of course they were right. I made the very easy kale pasta, a recipe I found online, with lots of garlic, and the juice of two limes instead of one lemon, since limes were all I had in the fridge, and I am telling you, it was so good I almost died. If food was an orgasm, the kale pasta would be a 9.4., considering the ultimate 10 on my all-time delicacy pleasure list were the plums I had at work about seven or eight years ago. They were just dark plums, anyone could have bought them at the store, and I was in a hurry, so I just sliced some on top of some salad, and the outcome was so climaxic that Weaver, who was having her lunch at the same table, asked me if she should leave and give me some privacy. I know perfectly well what Miss Patty meant in the Gilmore Girls pilot episode, when she urged Rory to try one of Doose’s plums, saying were better than sex.

The trick to getting the deceptively simple Cacio e Pepe turn out good is in the stirring. Every recipe will tell you that, but do you listen? I thought I did, but I didn’t. Like with making a pancake, you cannot cheat on the stirring. Once the pasta is done and drained, and you have got all your ingredients ready and on the go, first drop the mass back into the kettle that is now sitting on the counter. Some say one should use a room temperature dish so that the cheese won’t start separating so easily, and there is truth to this advice. However, I blame the one time it happened to me on my lazy, perfunctory stirring. I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t being quick enough, I was high on my Cacio e Pepe hubris, and therefore became the William Hurt in the story and paid the price.

Here’s what you do. While the pasta is cooking, grate the pecorino, this time the heap can be considerable. Also, prepare the black peppers. For roasting the tiny ingredients on the dry pan, you might want to remove your fire alarm from the kitchen. Trust me, once the ground peppers begin to heat up and start attacking you – thank you for the expression, Swinton – they will be so furious the entire pan will start smoking, and if you didn’t remove the fire alarm like I told you, you will know it by now. Also, never forget to save a mugful of the heavily salted cooking water. While I always recommend this no matter what kind of pasta you are making - it is never a bad idea to have some handy just in case - making this dish it is especially important, the key to success, even.

So, the pasta goes back in. Chase it with the peppers, and now! The hard part. The idea is to gradually add the water and grated pecorino and stir the pasta like there is no tomorrow every chance you get in order to create a smooth, gravyish kind of texture. The whole dish should be one beautiful, cheesy sauce, moist but not too watery, with the cheese definitely not separated, and not too dry.

And there you go. Just three ingredients, four if you count the water, how hard can it be? Get it right, and you are the Queen of Pasta.

My mistake was to first stir the dish by using two wooden spoons and sort of lift the pasta very gently here and there, the way I usually stir my cheese into the mix. Don’t do that. Be aggressive. Use force. Discard the second ladle and just use one large wooden fork. That way you can really whip it fiercely to create that creamy texture, no second room temperature dish required, and the food itself remains nice and hot. If you managed to cook the pasta al dente, and of course you did, even the more aggressive whipping won’t destroy it. Still, don’t violate your food. If you start smashing up your dish, you will get mashed pasta, and that is not the idea, now is it?

Mastering Cacio e Pepe gave me confidence to tackle the much-discussed and enormously popular kale, which has rapidly become another favorite ingredient of mine. A lesson, folks. The Harry Potter saga is excellent literature. Reese Witherspoon is all kinds of wonderful, and even more so, because she is never crass or mean. Big Little Lies blew my brains out, so hard in fact that I had to watch it twice and counting. I swallowed the Twilight books in one enormous gulp during a few especially rainy weeks one fall many years ago, and I will always remember both the books, and that period of time, fondly. I was deep into reading the Sookie Stackhouse novels at the same time, and enjoying these two very different takes on vampires and vampire mythology simultaneously was a sincere sensation. A true Buffy girl at heart, though, I had problems with both series of novels, but that was part of the charm, for me.

Not wanting to leave you high and dry, before I vanish into the night in my white dress, saying I really do love you, then turning and disappearing from view just before the boathouse explodes, here is the most joyful and mouth-watering kale pasta variation of mine that will hopefully be as good for you as it was for me:

Cook the torn kale, sans the rigid stems, for about seven to ten minutes, on a deep pan in lots of olive oil, I think I use as much as three quarters of a vintage coffee cup. Add three or four cloves of garlic at about four minutes. I never use an actual watch for this, or for anything pasta-related for that matter, so the minutes are an approximation. Just don’t let the garlic overcook or burn. While doing this, cook the pasta. Grate the cheese. For this dish I have always used parmesan, but this is a question of preference, I think. Once everything is ready, save a little of the salted cooking water just in case, drain the pasta, and toss it on the pan now removed from the burner. Add some black pepper, I use it on this dish scarcely to not overwhelm the other tastes. Squeeze in the juice from the two limes. Add the cheese. Mix well. Use the cooking water, if needed. If Body Heat is on, watch it while eating.

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