Pasta salad: grim or glorious?
This much-maligned dish is definitely glorious, but only when it's a mayo-free zone. And the real beauty of it is all in the making.
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How do we all feel about cold pasta salad? A bit meh? Does the grim claggy stuff sold at service stations spring to mind? The ones that snap your fork and taste of regret? Versions with the chew of a flip flop and so gluey their only flavour is mayo? I get it. But pasta salad, so maligned in the UK, deserves some fresh PR.
For an article I’m working on, I’ve been researching the health benefits of pasta in the context of the low-carb diet age we now found ourselves in. In the process I was reminded of something I’d forgotten I knew. Just like potatoes, pasta develops resistent starch when it cools down, which makes it slower to digest and therefore less likely to cause blood sugar spikes.
I mention this merely as an aside - we should all go forth and tuck into spaghetti prepared any way we damn well like because pasta = joy. But that forgotten fact reminded me that when properly put together, pasta served cold in a salad makes easy, tasty and cooling hot weather food.
Like granita and cold showers - to borrow a phrase from Rachel Roddy - pasta salad really only makes sense in the summer. But pasta sucks up flavour best when it’s hot, scooped straight from a boiling salty bath into the ‘condiment’. (This is the Italian term for anything that dresses another ingredient for flavor, including the sauce for pasta.) But there’s a workaround if you wish to eat pasta cold.
As Roddy explains in the headnotes for Lumache all’inslata (Lumachi with tuna, beans, tomato and basil) in her wonderful An A-Z of Pasta , she avoided using the term insalata di pasta (pasta salad) to describe the dish. Rather, she preferred the term all’insalata because the pasta condiment was cold and prepared “like a salad”.
Raw onion (mellowed with a soak in water, if pungent) is mixed with tinned tuna, cannellini beans, chopped tomatoes, ripped basil, capers and olive oil and left to rest for a bit. Hot drained pasta (snail-shaped lumache is Roddy’s preference here) is then tipped into the cold condiment, tossed and left to cool for at least 20 minutes before serving. I adore this idea.
It’s a technique found in Silver Spoon, the Italian cookery bible, in a recipe for Fusilli in Insalata. Peeled, seeded and chopped tomatoes, torn basil leaves and a peeled garlic clove are combined in a bowl, seasoned well and drizzled with good extra virgin olive oil. Hot fusilli is then tipped in and tossed with the condiment, and then other bits and bobs are added: tuna, black olives and diced mozarella. (The garlic is removed before serving.)
In his wonderful new book Vegetables,
has a beautiful recipe for summer pasta salad, made along similar lines. Hot pasta is tipped into a bowl of fine summer ingredients and allowed to cool. Utterly delicious, and not a smear of mayo involved. (I’d thoroughly recommend the book: it’s full of easy and delicious recipes that are doable on a Wednesday night - my yardstick for a book I know I’ll use regularly).
Pasta isn’t always introduced to salad ingredients while it’s still hot. Italian cook and food writer
(do subscribe to her Substack newsletter Lessons from Tuscany, it’s full of warmth and wonderful recipes) tells me salads made with cold pasta (as distinct from hot) are popular in Italy, too. “When my mum makes a cold pasta salad for our Sunday gatherings it’s a happy day,” she says, adding that these types of pasta dishes are reserved for informal rather than special occasions.“Probably the most important fact is that they are not coated in mayonnaise, just doused with extra virgin olive oil, and a mix of various ingredients, from a simple cherry tomato and basil verion, to a more elaborate mix of canned tuna, hard boiled eggs, olives, capers and pickled vegetables, along with cubed cheese or mozzarella,” she says.
They might be served on their own as a main in the peak of summer, or as a first course in a more structured meal, Scarpaleggia says. The key is to cook the pasta specifically for the salad, which means running it under cold water once drained, so it doesn’t overcook in the residual heat.
My cold pasta salad below is inspired by the classic marriage of roasted red peppers, black olives and anchovies. I love to serve it with jammy eggs (the ones in the image are overcooked, as I stupidly attempted to cook them in the same pan as the pasta and I didn’t juggle things adeptly).
The result is salty and mildly sweet from the peppers - a perfect summer combination - and made more substantial and agreebale with the smooth jammy eggs. Fusilli ranks among my favourite pasta shapes because the twists hold sauce so well, be they hot or cold.