Dining Chicago

Chef John Coletta of River North’s Quartino has a new cookbook out, “250 True Italian Pasta Dishes: Easy and Authentic Recipes.” The recipes are wide ranging, and in fact, the book offers much more than pastas, and even he admits that the recipes aren’t all “true Italian” (although most of them are), but they are all very accessible to home cooks. Fresh pastas, dried pasta dishes, stuffed pastas, pasta sauces, things to go with pasta and things that aren’t quite pasta all feature in this compendium.

You can taste samples of the recipes at 10 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 16, at Quartino, when Coletta and his co-author, Nancy Ross Ryan, will discuss the history of pasta during an event sponsored by the Culinary Historians of Chicago. The talk, with pasta samples, is $5; reservations required. Following the lecture, ChicaGourmets also hosts a pasta luncheon at the restaurant, $39 with wines; advance payment required.

When Coletta — who’d been creating complex, cutting-edge cuisine full of foams and layers and exotic ingredients at Caliterra in Streeterville during the ’90s — opened Quartino in 2005, serving rustic Italian fare, I was surprised. That is, until I found out he was doing things like a half-dozen house-cured salumi, each accompanied by its own made-from-scratch condiment, elaborate spuntini (Italian snacks) and several kinds of house-made pasta. That was the Chef Coletta I knew.

John Coletta

While Coletta was cooking at Caliterra, I was more or less singlehandedly filling up the weekly food sections at Chicago’s erstwhile Lerner Newspapers (which, before the evils of Conrad Black, provided community news to the North Side). Since I was also editing the entertainment sections and writing theater reviews, restaurant reviews, editorials and a gardening column, as well as doing a few other jobs, and Lerner’s hyper-local approach meant I couldn’t rely on canned copy, I used a lot of recipes supplied by Chicago chefs.

Now, people who are paid to spend eight hours a day in kitchen don’t think about cooking the same way the rest of us do, and chef training typically doesn’t include a course in recipe writing (or any kind of writing), so these recipes often required a good deal of what I will call translation. I became adept at cutting ingredients down from massive quantities, converting weights to volume measures, explaining terms like “shock” and “chiffonade,” inserting omissions, and otherwise reworking the chefs’ instructions for home cooks.

In many ways, Coletta was a harried food editor’s dream. He did his own publicity, and every month, I’d receive a notice detailing the seasonal ingredients he’d be focusing on in the coming weeks, and offering recipes and photos. Very handy. His recipes were clearly written, precise and exacting.

But they were also pages and pages long! With lengthy lists of ingredients, some of which had to be special-ordered … from France! Other “ingredients” were elaborate preparations in themselves. To make Coletta’s cooking accessible for readers, I would adapt and simplify the dishes. Once, I printed a recipe for a “dish” that on Coletta’s menu was merely a garnish.

Coletta says that this book is aimed at the masses. Although these recipes aren’t Rachael Ray-simple, they are much shorter than those I used to get from him. Coletta being Coletta, he can’t help being detailed — so the recipes aren’t brief — however, they are very easy to follow and the results are delicious.