Cinque Terre - Portovenere, Curry

[BillW]

Years ago I ate dinner at a small local restaurant. The waiter did not speak a word of english and as we were trying to order another waiter passed by with a plate of seafood pasta in a curry sauce!!

Yes curry sauce. I figured if the locals are eating it and it tastes as good as it smells we cannot go wrong. Needless to say it was amazing. I have looked on-line and found only one reference which was a menu from a restaurant. I have looked at many cookbooks including one specific to this area and never find any mention or recipes. .

Does anyone have any info about this?

Bill

[barberinibee]

The dish shows up in lots of places on the Ligurian coast. I've sometimes wondered if it is a holdover from when British came here in droves, and you would find British libraries, golf clubs and pharmacies catering to insular expat colonies (they've since decamped for Spain, where the beer is better, and locals have no memories of them bombing their coast). I most commonly see it with shrimp (even though shrimp is not really native to liguria) and often shrimp plus zucchini.

Here's a video with the recipe (note the use of cream, which indicates it is a fairly modern concoction, more typical of restaurant menus than home kitchens):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mvYwiF_sUU

Here's another that utilizes walnuts:

http://www.ricettemania.it/ricetta_pasta_con_curry_e_gamberetti_1559.html

Here's crab and shrimp if you're feeling flush (no cream in this one, perhaps because the recipe is from "Modern Woman"

)

http://www.donnamoderna.com/cucina/ricette/primo/pasta-secca/Penne-con-gamberi-e-granchio-al-curry

Zucchini + shrimp:

http://www.petitchef.it/ricette/pasta-profumata-al-curry-con-zucchine-e-gamberetti-fid-350333

Peas + shrimp:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com...

Anyway, if you do google searches for "ricetta pasta al curry" you'll get a bunch of hits. Google translate works pretty well for recipes if you don't speak Italian.

[barberinibee]

One more:

This one calls for trenette pasta, a Ligurian pasta, and cozze (mussels) which are specialty of the area of Portovenere. (No cream.)

http://www.donnamoderna.com/cucina/ricette/primo/pasta-secca/Trenette-al-curry-con-le-cozze

But do note that the ruffle-edged pasta pictured in the recipe is actually not trenette. The pasta pictured appears to be mafaldine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mafaldine.JPG

Ligurian trenette is closer to flattened linguine:

http://www.olcsoedeny.hu/tesztagep/tr...

[bob96]

Moules au curry is a fairly established French and Belgian mussel preparation. Wouldn't be surprised that it migrated over the border to Liguria; sometimes seafood styles do that. I think I may also have seen a mussels dish with some curry from Puglia, where cozze are very popular.