Recipe - Spaghetti con zucchine fritte

spaghetti with fried courgettes

During the summer months in Sicily, my nonna would very often cook pasta con le zucchine fritte, or in Sicilian Pasta ca cucuzza fritta.

Cucuzza is a type of zucchini that you can get in Sicily for a very short period of time in the summer. These pale green zucchini are incredibly long, thin and curvy and they look like dead snakes on the market stalls. The cucuzze work in many different traditional recipes and contexts. My nonno Enzino loved them so much and every time they would appear on our table (pretty much every day!) he would announce that the ancient Romans used to say: “Addi salem addi pepem, semper cucurbita est”. The macaronic Latin would then be translated into Sicilian: “Cunzala come voi, sempre cucuzza è!”. 
This roughly translates as: “no matter how you cook it or dress it, it’s alway gonna be cucuzza!” I never really questioned him with the meaning of this saying, but I always assumed that he was praying zucchini’s versatility and that it meant that no matter how you cooked it it was always going to be really good.

I certainly can’t find any cucuzza here in Ireland, but you can make this very simple dish with any type of zucchini (courgette? Squash? If anyone knows the difference with all these terms in English please do let me know…), but beware that most dark green zucchini are quite bitter and watery. If so you can treat them like eggplants and let them rest for 30-60 minutes sliced and covered in salt in a pasta drainer with a weight on top. This method helps to release most of the bitter water content, and they also fry better and absorb less oil. Make sure that you rinse them and pat them dry before frying. You can use rock salt for this procedure so that it will be easier to remove it after resting time.

The pasta is basically cooked as a very simple “Aglio e Olio” but I have modified it slightly to use a more modern cooking technique. I basically finish cooking the pasta directly in the sauce while emulsifying the oil with some starchy pasta water in order to achieve a creamier texture.

If you have access to Ricotta salata (Sicilian salted hard ricotta) you can grate a bit of it before serving the dish, if not pecorino or parmigiano will work too.
Another optional nice touch is to add a bit of hand torn fresh mint to the finished dish.

Pasta con le zucchine fritte

Serves 2