Recipe - Pasta with Ricotta and Cinnamon

Un updated traditional recipe from my childhood

This pasta is inspired by a recipe that my Nonna used to make hen I as a kid. I modified it a bit as I find the traditional one can get a little dry and “lumpy”. I also used a ricotta made with buffalo milk and a 60 months old parmigiano for an extra flavour boost. You can use regular ricotta and any parmigiano you have but remember, as I always say, the quality of the ingredients is what makes Italian food, and this is no exception. I also used a more modern technique, and instead of grating the cheese on the finished plate, I incorporated it into the ricotta with an immersion blender adding a tiny bit of milk to create a kind of “crema”. The buffalo ricotta is tangy and creamy and it marries perfectly with the sharp umami of aged parmigiano. The pasta is finished with cinnamon (yes you read right cinnamon!). Cinnamon is very traditional and adds an interesting and quite subtle exotic colour to the dish. You should know that cinnamon was one of the most common spices found on savoury dishes from 18th and 19th century Italian cookbooks, especially on pasta. This might seem a bit odd as we tend to associate cinnamon with sweet food nowadays, but it’s still pretty common as a spice for savoury dishes throughout the mediterranean area. Maybe just a little reminder on how taste and traditions can change very rapidly! 

A version made with linguine

Is this a traditional recipe? Can I still consider it the same as my Nonna’s recipe? I want to raise awareness that so many Italians are obsessed with the concept of tradition and the idea that a recipe goes unchanged for hundreds of years and for many generations. That of course is not completely true and it’s a very simplistic idea of tradition. In oral traditions such as cuisine and music, we all consciously or unconsciously slightly modify what we learn by ear. Sometimes these changes are almost imperceptible but they are noticeable over a couple of generations. Sometimes these changes are influenced by the different environment in which we are and by more contemporary techniques and tools. Taste changes rapidly and that is totally ok, we are different people, we have different personalities, we live in different worlds to our grandparents and we express ourselves in our own way in respect of the tradition. This is what keeps tradition alive, and doesn’t turn it into a faded postcard stuck in time.

This recipe is a good example of a pasta with “cold” sauce as described on my pasta cooking technique post. Watch out for a video of this recipe coming out next week.

Serves 2 

Ingredients