Elsewhere, in my queues for posting, there’s one in the Kharkiv Opera series on a fortuitous soup, a delicious invention I will probably never have the ingredients for again. Today I write about a soup made from leftovers, but one I have every time I order the base dish, Bari pasta from the restaurant Crepevine in Mountain View CA.
As I was making the soup yesterday, it occurred to me to wonder about the name of the dish (the dish is fettuccine with a fresh salmon, spinach and Parmesan cream sauce — to which I have shrimp and salmon fillets added). I was aware that Bari was a city in Italy, but had no idea whether it had any connection with fettuccine or with salmon and spinach cream sauce; for all I knew, the name was chosen purely for its sound — it sounds crisp and Euro-trendy — or because someone at the restaurant had family from the city Bari (restaurants and their dishes are often named that way) or in honor of someone named Bari (that happens too), or specifically in honor of someone from Bari whose signature dish this was.
As far as I can tell from some rooting around, the answer is, well, complicated. Bari is the capital city of the Apulia / Puglia region, on the Adriatic Sea in southern Italy. It’s an economic center, a university city, and (most important), a port. It has local pastas, but fettuccine is pretty much pan-Italian. As for salmon, it’s recently popular there, and throughout Italy, but the fish is imported from the cold waters of Scandinavia, especially Norway. So there seems to be no sense in which Bari pasta would evoke some characteristic food of the place, and one of the other accounts must be at play here.
[Digression. The cost of Bari pasta has been shooting up, to the point where I think I can no longer afford it, even through I stretch one order into at least three meals. So this order might be my last; the blueberries and raspberries I have with my breakfast granola will probably have to go as well. These are difficult times.]
Bari soup. Take half an order of Bari pasta and dump it, sauce and all, into a big bowl. Using mongo kitchen shears, cut the pasta and seafood into roughly bite-sized chunks. Add some sriracha sauce for your level of hotness; a pile of torn-up spring greens, mostly spinach; and broth to cover (clam juice would be the appropriate match, but Bari pasta is sufficiently strong-tasting that it’s fine with chicken or beef broth). Stir for a long time to mix the components throughly, cover, and microwave.
I always have a big bottle of sriracha (you could of course use some other hot sauce) and a big container of spring greens in my fridge (so I can always make a green salad), and cartons of chicken and beef broth in the cupboard (so I can turn random stuff into a soup or stew on the spot).
I just had a second meal of Bari soup for lunch. Total yum.
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