This ancient, iconic, but very simple Lazio dish, ‘pasta alla gricia‘, has been one of our favorite pastas, for many reasons, for decades. Thursday night we enjoyed one of the best ever, thanks to some guanciale I had been keeping in the freezer, an excellent Neapolitan rigatoni, which is a wine from outside that great city, and a German opera about an 8th century Asturian king (it’s okay, it’s a Schubert opera).

“Comfort food”, as Barry calls it.

• It was everything we needed for a complete dinner, and a very good one: a few ounces of very juicy cured pork cheek, 9 ounces of an artisanal dried pasta, lots of fresh New York water, a bit of Portuguese olive oil, tons of good freshly-ground black pepper, and a grating of a good cheese, also from Lazio
• the wine was an Italian (Campania) white, Feudi di San Gregorio Falanghina 2017, from Garnet Wines
• the music was Schubert’s 1823 grand Romantic opera, ‘Alfonso und Estrella’, Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting the Berlin Philharmonic