Recipe

My favorite recipe is for something simple I cannot make. Some people like macaroni and cheese for their comfort food, and Mom made that well, with shells and Velveeta and a little bit of milk, maybe a couple of times a month. But her fettucini was special - you couldn't get it at somebody else's house, it was hers and hers alone.

She has always known how to cook the pasta perfectly, so there's still a little texture but no actual crunch. While it strains in the colander in the sink, she tosses a stick of butter into a hot skillet, sizzle, sizzle. Oh, that smell of hot, hot butter browning in the pan. This is the part I can never get right, the browning. I always wind up with either a panful of melted yellow, or else it's burned.

Into a large, wide serving bowl she puts half the pasta, a generous shake of salt and pepper, a dusting of parmesan, and half the browned butter, drizzled artfully, in a zigzag pattern. Then the other layer of pasta, more cheese, salt and pepper, the rest of the butter. Sometimes, when I was a kid, she'd let me clean the pan with a slice of fresh French bread, an appetizer before the main course.

Two variations: for a while she'd toss the pasta with raw egg, letting the steaming noodles cook it as it coated them. And sometimes she'd add a cup of bright, green peas: a vegetable I hated all my life but learned to love in the company of pasta, brown butter, and parmesan.