Zucchini—a familiar, easy-to-grow, and virtually tasteless green summer squash—has never been a gastronomic superstar. It is usually a fried side dish or an ensemble player in other vegetable creations, such as ratatouille. Its delicate flower, when available, can be used as a shell and deep-fried to hold cheese or perhaps small shrimp with herbs in a tasty fritter. Yet, when the actor Stanley Tucci visited Nerano, a romantic little village on the Sorrento Peninsula, at the beginning of the Amalfi Coast, for the first episode of his hit CNN eating series “Searching for Italy,” he raised a regional zucchini dish to A-list culinary prominence and lured a steady stream of Americans to a local establishment called Lo Scoglio da Tommaso. When I arrived at Lo Scoglio, in May, I’d barely twisted my first forkful of the dish in question, spaghetti alla Nerano—spaghetti spiffed up with zucchini, cheese, and basil—when I caught the eye of Ani Ozgun and her husband, Arto, who had watched Tucci’s show, also. They are the owners of the Bareburger restaurants in New Jersey, they said, and were celebrating Ani’s fiftieth birthday. Later, on the staircase up to my room, I received a friendly American-sounding hello from another visitor. I deadpanned, “Tucci?” and the man, a Kansan, laughed and replied, “Yes.” At another lunch at Lo Scoglio, I overheard a group table order in the form of “whatever Tucci had.”
Lo Scoglio, a hotel and restaurant, is a local landmark, with a commanding terrace built out into the bay. While I was there, its tables were usually packed with Italians, often very fashionably dressed; they made me feel rather dowdy in my baseball cap, droopy polo shirt, and dad jeans. Private yachts, along with more modest tourist vessels carrying day-trippers visiting spots on the Amalfi Coast, would arrive for lunch or dinner in the small bay, while a battalion of tender boats tried to haul in a catch of tourists for the various restaurants. (One restaurateur grumbled to me about the bounty that he had to pay to the boat operators to get clients.)
Years before Tucci made his program, he had visited Lo Scoglio da Tommaso. In the début episode, he explains that he became an aficionado of the local spaghetti with zucchini, which he and his wife Felicity Blunt had tried over and over again to replicate at home. They had had enough success to keep eating it weekly, but still wondered why they could never get it quite right. Tucci and his wife asked for a private master class from Chef Tommaso De Simone, of Lo Scoglio, and they saw their first mistake right away: they had been pan-frying thin slices of zucchini when it was supposed to be deep-fried.
During my stay, I wandered from Lo Scoglio down to the beach, a distance of two football fields, and discovered that there are highly individualized versions of spaghetti alla Nerano to be enjoyed. The dish exemplifies Italian cooking traditions here and elsewhere: take the simple riches of what grows nearby and make it as tasty as you can without a lot of fussiness. Its proper preparation demands greater attention to freshness and kitchen craftsmanship than to fancy ingredients. The renowned restaurant Maria Grazia, two hundred yards down the beach from Lo Scoglio, boasts of having invented the dish in the nineteen-fifties, and has framed old press stories hanging on the walls to bolster its claim. Nearby, at the small bistro Bar Yeye, the owner, Gianluca Caputo, who also runs a charter-boat service, let me in on a secret as he repainted his father’s small fishing skiff: at most restaurants, instead of ordering the expensive “primo” course of the dish, which costs in the vicinity of twenty dollars, you can order a half portion and leave more room for something else. We also discussed frankly—I hadn’t dared bring up the subject with anyone else—whose version of the dish was best.
“There is no secret” to spaghetti alla Nerano, a manager at Lo Scoglio told me, her smile and confident tone suggesting that there was one and that I was being challenged to find it. Tucci noted, in his broadcast, that he was shocked to see that a pat of butter was added to the dish, in seeming violation of the rules of Mediterranean cooking, and which contradicted what he had previously been told. (In the written version of the dish from Lo Scoglio, published by CNN online and attributed to Chef Tommaso, the butter is not formally included in the recipe but mentioned in a side comment as a way to add a little “extra decadence” to the pasta.) I peered into the kitchen to look in on the plating of the spaghetti at Maria Grazia, where staff there uses what it refers to as the “four-hands method.” The technique sounded like an advertisem*nt for an erotic-massage therapy but turned out to be a simple act of teamwork. Only family members are allowed to make the pasta: one person tosses the spaghetti and zucchini while another sprinkles in the cheese mixture, and then waiters distribute the final product onto individual plates. Speed is essential, to keep the dish piping hot when it lands on the table. Nerano also boasts one of Italy’s Michelin-starred restaurants, Taverna del Capitano, whose chef, Alfonso Caputo, runs in the international circuit of top experimental chefs. But he is not above serving a simple spaghetti alla Nerano, and he showed me the type of slotted utensil that he used in stirring the final assembly of ingredients.
As I sampled more versions of the dish, I devised my own pet theory. Moving from the western to the eastern end of the bay, the ratio of zucchini to basil in the dish declined (at least to my palate and fuzzy math). The western end, where Lo Scoglio was situated, was heavy-zucchini territory, where restaurants often served a version that might work best in the winter; at the eastern end, with Maria Grazia as the anchor point, a somewhat lighter, basil-forward version of the dish that somehow seemed more summery was favored. Tinkering with the balance of ingredients, one chef told me, was not the ultimate secret, although he approved of my efforts to investigate. He suspected that some chefs were burning the zucchini, a bit, to nudge more flavor out of the bland vegetable. He also cautioned about something as simple as the need to reduce the amount of salt that’s usually added when spaghetti is boiled; the cheeses used in the dish are pretty salty, he said, and you don’t want to overdo it. Another local told me the secret to the success of the dish was not in cooking it but in figuring out how to charge for it. The materials for a family-sized portion cost about three dollars, I was told. A local joke was that restaurant price per serving seemed to be determined by a simple formula: one dollar multiplied by the length, in metres, of the kind of boat that wealthy tourists arrived on.
Spaghetti alla Nerano
Adapted from Lo Scoglio da Tommaso and other Nerano restaurants.
Serves 4
Ingredients
6 medium zucchini, sliced into quarter-inch rounds
Sunflower oil, for frying
14 oz. spaghetti
1 clove garlic, minced (optional)
2 to 4 oz. grated cheese (such as aged Parmigiano Reggiano, Provolone del Monaco, or Caciocavallo)
1 bunch fresh basil leaves
A pat of butter (optional)
Ground black pepper, to taste
Directions
1. Take thinly sliced zucchini rounds and deep-fry in sunflower oil until golden (or even slightly burnt).
2. Put fried zucchini on a paper towel to absorb oil; let sit in a bowl for a few hours to rest (or put in the fridge overnight). Before using, dab them again with a paper towel to remove excess moisture.
3. Boil spaghetti in lightly salted water until al dente. Save a cup of cooking water after draining spaghetti.
4. Reheat zucchini in a frying pan with optional minced garlic.
5. Place half of the zucchini into a clean pot or bowl, then add a few Tbsp. of cheese and a few Tbsp. of the pasta cooking water. Stir the mixture until cheese begins to melt. Add spaghetti, the rest of the zucchini, and cheese, and continue stirring until cheese and spaghetti water form a saucy emulsion. If the mixture seems too thick, add a bit more cooking broth. If it is too thin, add more cheese.
6. Add fresh basil, butter, and black pepper, to taste.
7. Serve with sprig of basil on top—with basil flower, if you have it—in a shallow bowl.♦
