Recipe for Pasta Burro e Alici (pasta with creamy anchovy and butter sauce)

There are sauces that enjoy universal acclaim thanks to the Tomatometer and outstanding audience scores – sauces like carbonara, vodka and Marcella Hazan’s tomato butter sugo. These are the pastas equivalent to the fourth season of The threadOr My beautiful dark and twisted fantasy: undisputed classics. On the other end of the spectrum are the underrated sauces with smaller but passionate followers – you might call gricia and beans and greens Sobotkas or 808 and sorrow of the world of pasta. They may not top any list of all-time favorites, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve praise and respect. Pasta burro e alici definitely falls into the latter category.

The basics of Pasta Burro and Alici

Think of this dish as an Alfredo for anchovy lovers. There’s plenty of unsalted butter, salted anchovies in place of Alfredo’s parmesan, and starchy cooking water cooked into a creamy glaze, perfect for coating long strands of al dente pasta. For the real “heads of cabbage” – those who like to receive cans of Cantabrian preserves as Christmas stockings – you can stop the day there and bask in the pure happiness of salted fish. I like to add a touch of acidity to the dish with a squeeze of lemon juice and a pinch of finely grated zest. A shower of toasted breadcrumbs and chopped parsley gives the dish crunch and freshness to balance the richness of the butter and the savory punch of the anchovies.

I’ll tell you up front: this pasta isn’t for everyone. To paraphrase Mitch Hedberg, “You can’t please all the people all the time…and last night, these people were at my table.” To be honest, the only person I share meals with these days is my wife, but she made it clear early on in the recipe development process that burro e alici was not her jam. However, by slightly changing the amounts of anchovies in the recipe (I chose a range suited to a sliding scale of tastes), I took this dish to a place that can please both casual and die-hard fans of fish umami, and she admitted in the final test that it had become a dish she would eat again.

How to cook pasta, butter and anchovies

The cooking process itself is a breeze. Melt the butter, dissolve the anchovies in it, then cook the pasta a little more halfway through cooking in a little water to get that extra starch. Make an emulsion with the pasta cooking water and the anchovy butter, then finish cooking the pasta in the sauce. To keep the sauce in a perfect creamy emulsion, I keep a few tablespoons of butter to add off the heat at the very end of cooking, followed by the lemon zest and juice. The rich, flavorful sauce glazes each strand of pasta for a simple, delicious weeknight meal that doesn’t have to please everyone. But the real ones know it.

February 2021