Come on Down to Proust's Pizza and Pasta

Is it weird to spend decades thinking about a plate of takeout pasta?

Maybe. I’d long ago made my peace with being a little bit weird—I’m not beating those allegations for a variety of reasons, regardless. I’ve come to realize, though, that food nostalgia doesn’t have to be about something as special as Grandma’s heirloom cake recipe or the finest dining you’ve ever had.

It can come in any form.

For a few years now, I’ve delighted in following the “Discontinued Foods” account on social media—first on Twitter, now on BlueSky—where a daily parade of forgotten fast-food items and snack-aisle ephemera is presented. Lately, in my attempts to spend less time on the screamy parts of social media, I’ve also begun lurking on food boards such as the “Old Recipes” subreddits. There, the typical post reads something like “my mother made this soup with saltines and oranges in 1962, it came from a cookbook with a yellow cover, does anyone remember what it is?”

This is not meant as a criticism, mind you. I find these posts absolutely endearing, and wish I had the superpower to help these poor culinary lost souls.

Most recently, though—and I swear to you, I had this newsletter and recipe that will follow here planned out weeks in advance of seeing it—this post went bonkers on BlueSky earlier this week:

My initial reaction was a bit like Jared Yates Sexton’s internet-famous “I worked on this story for a year and he just… tweeted it out”, because I was wholly planning on asking you this very question, nearly word-for-word, today.

Ultimately, though, I realized I shouldn’t be frustrated—I should be heartened, as the many, many replies and quotes to that post show that I am far from alone in pining for a relative prosaic meal.

So, let’s talk about mine.

In the late ‘90s, in the middle of my freshman year of high school, my family moved from Cleveland to suburban Columbus, Ohio. We quickly discovered a beloved, family-owned Italian restaurant in our town, and became frequent patrons there.

(I’m not going to name the restaurant, because I don’t want anything I say here to sound like a criticism of them—it’s not—but people who know the area well could probably figure it out.)

My favorite dish there was their eponymous signature pasta, a plate of hand-rolled spaghetti with chicken, mushrooms, green peppers, garlicky oil and grated cheese that I absolutely devoured every time I went. When I got my driver’s license, I started going on my own, grabbing it as takeout so regularly that they’d recognize me on the phone by my call-in order.

Then, I went off to college, and moved to New York City after graduation. The restaurant underwent a generational handoff, moved to another space, and eventually pivoted mostly toward the pizza side of their business. They say you can’t go home again, but even if I did, they’re not making my favorite dish anymore.

A couple years ago, I took a stab at making it here.

The pasta I made then was good, but it wasn’t the dish. Something was missing, and I couldn’t figure out what. A friend from high school who reads the newsletter picked up on what I was looking for, and relayed some advice from her sister who’d worked at the restaurant.

“It’s never going to taste the same, because he doesn’t have the seasoning,” she relayed, with a picture of the nearly-empty jar she had in her possession punctuating the lesson. “The food service supplier doesn’t make it anymore.”

I abandoned the idea for a while. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

Then, a couple months ago, I was planning ahead on things I might like to cook for upcoming Friday newsletters. Springtime. Spring pasta? Pasta with vegetables—ah, hell, now I want [the pasta]. It haunted me.

I tried again a month ago, and still couldn’t get it right.

How can a simple recipe like this become such a white whale? How can thousands of people quoting that post above all have their own lost loves—sandwiches, soups, desserts, a Cuban pork medallion they can’t quite get right—why are we all so prone to obsess over foods?

Maybe Proust was onto something. In Remembrance of Things Past, one bite of a madeleine dipped into tea unlocks a flood of childhood memories:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

We’re not early-20th-century Frenchmen (well, I don’t know you. I’m not), so we each have our own thing that ties us to some moment in the past.

For me, that pasta is a simpler time—even if that’s just me driving my blaring Hello Nasty in my shitty 1989 Ford1 on my way to pick up takeout, then go home and play Crazy Taxi on Dreamcast while waiting for my friends to log onto AIM.

It’s not as literary, but it’s something.

I vowed to take one more stab at it, but I had to do more research. The years the dish existed are poorly-documented on the internet these days, but I managed to find a single restaurant review from 2011 that mentioned dish, describing it with “sauteed mushrooms, onions, peppers and sun-dried tomatoes”.

Of course! I’d forgotten the sun-dried tomatoes! How could I have forgotten that? How could I have spent decades thinking about a dish that I apparently didn’t even remember well? Is memory that fallible? I gave it one more go with this fresh knowledge, and—while I can’t say with absolute confidence that I got it right—the first bite tasted right. It tasted like the dish.

It tasted like being in high school and having nothing more to worry about than if my friends wanted to hang out later or if I could get good tickets to a concert.

Do I want to go back to 1998? Of course not. (Although I could think of a few things I’d, uh, take care of if I had a time machine, but I know better than to put those in print.) I was a dumb high school kid who had no money, no idea how to talk to girls and no idea what I was going to do with my life. I’m happy now.

I can still house a plate of pasta, though, and I might just pop in for a visit every once in while.

Friends, it’s Friday at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.

Obviously, I’m not going to go through all that without sharing the recipe.

Below the paywall break—I know, I’m a tease, but I’ve got a newsletter business to run here—paying subscribers will get the full thing, which is a delicious and not-too-difficult meal to make even without the persistence of memory weighing on your palate. Beyond that, I’ve got a funky, fun cocktail, some great new music, a new book that I absolutely LOVED, and more.

(It’s like this here every week. You really should subscribe!)

Now, let’s get cooking…