Recipe
Pasta with sausage, fennel seeds, and cherry tomatoes
The Italian verb infinocchiare means to trick somebody, to pull the wool over their eyes, and it comes directly from finocchio, fennel.
The story behind it is about wine. Fennel seeds have a strong anise flavour that coats the mouth and flattens out whatever follows, and unscrupulous innkeepers are said to have handed round fennel seeds before offering customers a taste of the cheap stuff, on the entirely sound principle that after a mouthful of fennel almost anything tastes acceptable. Whether that ever happened at scale is doubtful. The word survived anyway, Italians still use it, and it is a rare case of a vegetable leaving a permanent mark on a language.
The seeds do exactly what the story claims, which is precisely why they work with sausage. Italian pork sausage is fatty, and fat needs something aromatic pushing back against it or the plate turns heavy after four forkfuls and you slow down without knowing why. Fennel does that better than anything else, which is why the sausages in Tuscany and Umbria arrive with the seeds already in them.
If yours do not, and outside Italy they usually do not, add a teaspoon yourself and crush them in your palm first to wake them up. That single step is the difference between a sausage pasta that tastes like a sausage pasta and one that tastes like something a person made on purpose.
Cherry tomatoes go in whole and burst under the back of a spoon after ten minutes, which gives you a sauce with almost no chopping in it. A splash of pasta water at the end pulls the sausage fat into something glossy that clings to the pasta instead of pooling at the bottom of the bowl.
- Prep 10 min
- Cook 20 min
- Serves 2
- Cost €
Method
- 1
Put a large pot of salted water on. Break the sausage meat into rough lumps and fry it in the oil over high heat without stirring, so it browns properly rather than steaming.
8 min
- 2
Add the garlic, fennel seeds and chilli and stir for a minute until the kitchen smells like a butcher's in Umbria.
1 min
- 3
Pour in the wine and let it bubble away to almost nothing, scraping the pan.
3 min
- 4
Add the cherry tomatoes whole with a pinch of salt. Cook until they collapse, pressing them with the back of a spoon to help them along.
10 min
- 5
Cook the pasta, keeping a mugful of the water. Add it to the pan with a good splash of the water and toss hard for a minute so the fat and starch emulsify into a sauce.
10 min
- 6
Black pepper, and a thread of raw oil at the table.
1 min
Variations
Grated pecorino at the end is excellent and loses the dairy-free flag. Add a handful of rocket or spinach at the last moment. Swap the cherry tomatoes for a tin of chopped tomatoes in winter. Broccoli or cime di rapa boiled in the pasta water and added at the end makes it a fuller meal. For a white version, leave out the tomatoes and add a splash of cream or a spoon of ricotta instead.