Bigoli in Salsa

The cooking of Venice is so distant from that of Naples, although they are both Italian cities, that not a single authentic dish from one is to be found on the other's table. Bigoli in salsa belongs to Venice and the Veneto. It is a dish of the lagoon, eaten on lean days when the Church forbade meat: Fridays, Lent, vigils of feast days. The anchovies provided what the faithful could not get from beef or pork.

Three ingredients. Onions, anchovies, olive oil. And time. The onions must cook for nearly an hour until they surrender completely, becoming sweet and jammy and pale. The anchovies dissolve into them until you cannot see where one ends and the other begins. What emerges is a sauce of remarkable depth, savory and sweet and faintly briny, coating thick strands of whole-wheat pasta.

Americans hear 'anchovies' and imagine something aggressive and fishy. They are thinking of the wrong anchovies, poorly handled. Proper salt-packed anchovies, rinsed and filleted, taste of the sea in the best way. When they dissolve into sweet onions, they create umami. We did not have that word when Venetian fishermen's wives first made this dish. They simply knew it tasted right.