Foodie Friday: Cacio e pepe

So this is the classic Roman pasta dish and in my opinion the most perfect and elegant noodle preparation in the whole of Italian cuisine. It's traditionally served with either spaghetti or tonnarelli. I make my own fresh noodles and use hand-cut fettuccine. Because this dish wants a slightly al dente paste, if you are going to make your own pasta, then you'll want to alter your recipe slighly to get a firmer and toothier noodle. The way to do this is to add one less egg yolk and one extra egg white as well as a splsh of oil to the dough, producing a dough that is a little dry and stiff. Many very traditional recipes call only for pecorino romano cheese, but every good chef knows that if you sneak in a little cacio di roma and a little parmigiano reggiano, you get a richer and ever-so-slightly less salty taste. I do cheat and mount the sauce with a little pat of butter, which helps it all to emulsify and coat the noddles more evenly. You'll need:

2 or so tbspns whole black peppercorns
3/4 cup grated pecorino romano
1/4 cup grated parmigiano reggiano
1/4 cup grated cacio di roma
extra virgin olive oil
small pat of butter
sea salt

When you grate the cheese, use the cat's-tongue, rasp-like side of a box grater--you need the very fine grate that it produces for the cheese to melt evenly into the sauce.

Cook your noodles, whatever they are, in well-salted water until just underdone. Remove to a warm, damp bowl. If you're an asshole and drain your noodles in a colander, make sure you reserve a cup or two of pasta water for the sauce.

Heat a little drizzle of olive oil in a good sauté pan over very high heat, then add the whole peppercorns. Toast them until they start snapping and jumping in the pan. Remove them with a slotted spoon and grind roughly with a mortar and pestle. If you're an asshole and don't have a mortar and pestle, you can bash them on a cutting board with a heavy pot bottom.

Return the pan to the heat. Drizzle in a little more oil. Add the butter. When it's melted, add some of the pasta water. You probably won't even need a full cup. You just want a nice, wet pan--like, oh, say, an 1/8" of liquid in there.

Add the noodles to the pan. Throw in the cheese and the ground peppercorns. Toss together over high heat for about a minute. Serve immediately with just a tiny dusting of freshly grated pecorino romano on top.

Religion Nuance

My fellow Americans, today I come to you not as your President, but as the high holy priest of this great nation, a mere human raiment in which the heavenly investiture makes its home, a cast-off shell for the hermit crab that is the holy ghost. Today, I say to you that until we put aside our differences, we can never be the same; until we cast off all distinctions, we can never achieve the vast, self-same unanimity that is the Blarney stone of our democracy. Yea, verily, I say unto you, comity is the highest virtue. Inscribe that shit on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Teach it faithfully to your children. Speak of it when you lie down and when you wake up, at home and on your way to invade some pisspot of a country that never said boo to you. Take these words that I command you this day, crumble them up into a ball, and swallow them down.

What kind of country have we become, where we can shoot each other even as our brave men and women are overseas, shooting others? Violence is never the answer for individuals; only when it is an expression of collective national will can violence achieve its transcendent, resplendent purpose. As the bible says: "And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king's enemies. But Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines. And when his servants told David these words, it pleased David well to be the king's son in law: and the days were not expired. Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king's son in law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife." Good night, and god bless America.

Triumph of the Nerds

Max Read, one of the sexy boyslaves in Nick Denton's weird empire, has, I think, the appropriate response to a story that a couple of our commenters and correspondents also noticed. Nihilism. Kneechee! "An anarachist philosophy"! The alleged is reported to have on multiple occasions stated that "You just don't get me," and, "You don't understand." Asked why he was not bringing his girlfriend to the prom, he reminded friends that, "You don't know her," and, "She's from Canada."

Government Grammar

Lemme just put a proposition to yinz. This Loughner fellow, he thought that the federal government was trying to control his mind through the deep structures of grammar and syntax, through meddling with his conscious dream-states, and so he got himself a gun and shot a member of the federal government, plus, you know, some collateral civilians. I say to you that he is not a murderer. He is merely a victim of faulty intelligence. He cannot be held morally responsible. No one could have known at the time! I think the best result will be that perhaps, after a period of instability and uncertainty, the state of Arizona will once achieve some reasonable level of self-government, you know, for the region. It will generally be able to secure its borders, hold reasonably free and fair elections. I think if we see that outcome within the next six months to six thousand years, then it will be impossible to condemn fully the initial action, erroneous though it may have been.

Purity of Essence

One of the verbal tics that's most in evidence now is the catechismal insertion of the adjective senseless before the word violence. What kind of violence was it, Mister President? Sensless violence. You see, when you are the plenipotentiary of the world's foremost death machine, when you are ordering, literally every day, the killing of human beings, the destruction of homes, the bombing of farms and factories, then obviously you can't just go out and condemn violence. You have to condemn "senseless" violence. You can't condemn killing. You have to condemn pointless killing.

Update: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. As noted in comments, I was beaten to this joke by Mister Smith.

Andrew Jackson

Is there a bigger, more sanctimonious boob in the whole blessed world than Keith Olberman? "Violence, or the threat of violence, has no place in democracy"? Um, uh, what? Tell it to the Cherokee. Tell it to the Iraqis. Tell it to Baltimore and Washington South of the Capitol. Tell it to all the college kids who got their heads busted for rubbernecking around a G20 protest in Pittsburgh last year. We are surrounded by violence, swaddled in it. It is the pulse of our civilization.

Sheeple in a Fog

It won't go far enough to ban hateful rhetoric. We must ban rhetoric altogher. We must unite in a concerted effort to eradicate the expression of thoughts, opinions, and sentiments in language. We must embrace an unmediated primitivism through which our animal consciousness can once again reassert its preverbal, non-apprehending interaction with the natural world, the very structure of thought freed from the tyranny of verbalism. We must overthrow symbolic thought and reason, experienceing that-which-is solely as its is-in-itselfness. Only through the extirpation of the perversion of narrative self-consciousness can we triumph over hate, achieving a beatific, edenic transcendence whereby we are free to pass into pre-post-human supramorality, to lead us through to a heaven, starless and fatherless, a dark water.

Sois sage et travaille bien

Astonishingly enough, Ross Douthat appears suddenly sensible and intelligent compared to other commentators. I can't exactly endorse the conclusions of his last couple of paragraphs, but since I so often pick on the guy, I want to give credit where due.

MurderDeathKill

I haven't got anything to add beyond what Mister Smith has already said:

The great American culture medium seems to nourish, every few years, a person who just can't sleep at night until he's blown away a dozen or so strangers.

Except, I guess, to add a grim laugh to the idea that all this is caused by "violent rhetoric" in politics, which I gather to mean that Sarah Palin has told some fox on Fox that we oughta hog-tie and duck-slap those democrats like an elk on a tick on a frozen lake, as they say in the great nation of Vladivostok from whence she hails. Now, when I think of violent political rhetoric, I think more along the lines of:

The review resolved to "look hard" at what more could be done to improve economic stability, particularly on tax policy and Pakistan's relations with international financial institutions. It directed administration and Pentagon officials to "make sure that our sizeable military assistance programs are properly tailored to what the Pakistanis need, and are targeted on units that will generate the most benefit" for U.S. objectives, said one senior administration official who participated in the review and was authorized to discuss it on the condition of anonymity.

In one case, you have some vague mutterings "creating a climate" somehow conducive to violence; in the other, you have the actual verbal commission of horrific violence. "Violent rhetoric" in the former case seems to me to be exactly the sort of argument ad slippery-slope that liberals usually abhor, no different in kind from the idea that legal abortion leads directly to cannibalism and concentration camps, that letting the gays get gaymarried leads inevitably to widespread interspecies copulation.

As far as anyone can tell from his own writings and ravings, the guy who shot up the Arizona meet-n-greet was less dittohead than wild-card line on Coast to Coast AM, less Glenn Beckee than Alex Jonesian. The idea that he did what he did because Sarah Barracuda put a gunsight graphic on her homepage is just silly.