I see a bay leaf in a food photograph, or I see a bay leaf mentioned in a recipe, and I think ‘savory’; it’s not actually the definition of savory, it just happens to be the ingredient I most associate with the word.

This pasta was savory.

It started with Mark Bittman’s recipe for ‘Pasta with Savoy Cabbage. I mostly halved the ingredients he specified, and I used a very different pasta from the one he mentions.

• in my version there were 8 ounces of Sfoglini rye trumpets (organic rye flour, organic durum semolina flour, water); 2 cloves of Keith’s Farm rocambole garlic, 2 bay leaves from Westside Market, 2 rinsed salted anchovies and half of a dried Calabrian peperoncino from Buon Italia; 8 ounces of shredded Chinese cabbage from Norwich Meadows Farm; a quarter cup of white wine; a bit of dried orange/golden habanada pepper; some chopped lovage from Two Guys from Woodbridge; and I added a bit of olive oil around the pasta once it had been arranged in 2 shallow bowls
• the wine was an Italian (Veneto) white, Pra, Soave Classico ‘OTTO’ 2017, from Flatiron Wines 

• the music was a recording of Wagner’s first great success, his 1846-1847 opera, ‘Lohengrin’, which premiered in Weimar in 1850, under the direction of Franz Liszt, a close friend and early supporter [the composer wasn’t able to attend the first performance because he had been exiled for taking part in the failed revolution in Dresden the year before – see his wanted poster above], with Semyon Bychkov conducting the Cologne West German Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Chamber Chorus, and the Cologne West German Radio Chorus

[the image of Wagner’s wanted poster is from Wikimedia Commons]