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Rapini-to-riches tale: A New York chef’s recipe inspires a fresh take on a favorite weeknight pasta

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By Leslie Brenner

For years — decades, even — the favorite weeknight dish in our household was pasta with rapini and Italian sausage. It’s easy and quick (about 5 minutes of prep), and that combo of slightly bitter greens with salty sausage and comforting grated parm is a winner. I’m not the only one who loves it — there are a gazillion recipes for it floating around out there.

At some point, we cut way back on white flour for health reasons, and our pasta consumption plummeted. We’ve tried myriad commercial whole-wheat pastas, but they usually eat like a punishment, cardboardy or gummy or both. We still eat pasta — joyfully and with gusto! — but it has become more a special treat than a weeknight habit.

Now, thanks to a dramatically better whole-grain pasta that’s new on the national market — Sfoglini Organic Whole Grain Reginetti — and a new approach to the beloved rapini-and-sausage marriage, we’ve made pasta a weeknight-at-home thing again.

In the old days, my rendition of the dish was cartoonishly basic. I’d put up a big pot of salted water to boil, trim the rapini, drop it in the boiling water, leave it 3 or 4 minutes, pull it out with tongs, shock with cold water, and cut the stems into large pieces. Next I’d heat olive oil in a sauté pan, crumble in and brown some Italian sausages, add a little garlic if I wasn’t feeling lazy, boil pasta (usually penne or farfalle) in the water that had turned green from the rapini, and while the pasta was boiling, toss the rapini in with the sausage and cook for a minute to pick up the flavor, along with a big pinch of Aleppo pepper or chile flakes. Sometimes I’d add a splash of white wine. Once the pasta was done, I’d toss it with the rapini and sausage, grate some parm on top and pass more parm with it at the table.

Farfalle with rapini and sausage, the old way. This one was made by a family member, who fancied it up with shallots.

A recipe in Missy Robbins’ 2021 magnum opus, Pasta, made me fall in love all over again.

The Robbins recipe — Orecchiette con Cime di Rapa — is the Puglian grandmother of my old favorite weeknight pasta. But as the New York chef explains in her headnote, in Puglia, the rapini (cime di rapa) is paired not with sausage, but with anchovies. Orecchiette, or “little ears,” is the traditional pasta shape for the dish — a tradition I generally left by the wayside, as I’m not a fan of store-bought dried orecchiette; hence, my use of penne or farfalle.

As an anchovy enthusiast, I was keen to try Robbins’ version — which I did posthaste. I didn’t wait until I had time to make handmade orecchiette as the recipe directed; I grabbed a box of farfalle I had in the pantry. Wow — what a fabulous dish, and so completely different than my eons-old approach. Robbins has you pull off all the rapini’s leaves, chop them finely, chop the stems and florets pretty small as well, and braise it all so the rapini breaks down into a “kind of ragù.” The anchovy, aided and abetted by grated pecorino romano cheese, supplies abundant umami. Toasted bread crumbs add garlic-flavored textural pizzazz. So damn good!

Finely chopped rapini leaves

Meanwhile, a New York-based chef friend introduced me to the Sfoglini pasta, which has beautiful texture and excellent flavor. I hadn’t realized I could find the product (from a company also based in New York) in my neighborhood Whole Foods. How great would it be, I asked myself, to adapt Robbins’ rapini-into-ragù technique to my old favorite recipe, using the whole-grain reginetti? The ruffly shape of the pasta would be perfect with this sauce. I’d use Italian sausage instead of anchovies, crumbling it a little more than I used to, and swap Parmigiano Reggiano for the pecorino romano. Sure, finely chopping the rapini leaves and toasting bread crumbs would add a few minutes to my old standard, but I suspected the upgrade would be worth it.

And it is!

My recipe takes a bread-crumb short-cut, using store-bought plain ones rather than starting with a country loaf. You’ll be left with enough extra crumbs to make the dish again.

Whole-grain reginette and rapini

Down the rabbit hole

Now the rabbit hole part. I was not terribly surprised to learn from Robbins’ headnote that orecchiette con cime di rapa, which has variations in Puglia (sometimes it has clams, sometimes bread crumbs) features anchovies, not sausage; it makes sense, as historically it’s a poor seaside region where anchovies would be more accessible and affordable than meat. But Robbins and her co-writer, Talia Baiocchi, suggest that the combo of orecchiette, rapini and sausage is not Italian at all. Rather, the dish picked up its sausage variation on the way to America, and “ran with it to the point where most Americans assume it is traditional.”

Really? The combo of Italian sausage and rapini just seems so Italian.

I cracked my books and hit the internet, but after weeks of research, I have not found any definitive citation that tells whether pasta with rapini and sausage is traditional anywhere in Italy. Certainly the combination exists there; I have found several mentions of cavatelli with rapini and sausage, including one from Naples. And I’ve turned up several references to whole sausages cooked with rapini (but without pasta) in Puglia. I’ve also found a few one-off references to various other pastas with rapini and sausage — with maltagliati (on a site based just south of San Marino), with pici (in a Puglia-meets-Tuscany mashup recipe from La Cucina Italiana), or with cavatelli (on a Milan-based site). But altogether, I found so few references that it seems unlikely that it’s traditional.

The 10 or so Italian cooking reference books on my shelf turned up exactly nothing on the subject.

So for now I throw up my hands. Maybe someone will magically appear and supply a definitive answer, or at least a meaningful lead. (In a few days, I’m having dinner with my friend Carlo — who shed essential insight on the permissibility of putting ragù Bolognese on spaghetti. Perhaps he’ll have the answer.)

In the meantime, enjoy the pasta.