Cacio e Pepe: a realistic purist takes over the kitchen.

The middle child—teenager for a few more weeks—has confidence in the kitchen, throwing things around with abandon. He did the same when a chair-bound infant, but they all do that, except the ones who studiously pick things apart on their plate, as if having just discovered their fingers. They will be lawyers. 

As a kind of purist (the quality jumped a generation here) he insists, for instance, that cream must not be in the same kitchen as spaghetti carbonara, lest someone combine them. (And here I was, a kitchen charlatan, disparaging al dente pasta.) In all seriousness, he understands that true purism is not perfectionism but a perceptive understanding of an original idea.

Roman standard cacio e pepe is ideal, being disarmingly simple but surprisingly tricky to execute, according to some ‘experts’. 

Cacio e Pepe

Use long pasta. The idea is to allow the strands to finish cooking in a cheesy ‘sauce’—really just a coating; an oleaginous dressing. This comprises grated pecorino, sometimes crushed peppercorns, and the water in which the pasta is cooked.

While pasta is cooking, warm crushed or cracked peppercorns in a pan and let them cool. Grate pecorino romano and combine carefully with peppercorns and a little starchy water from the cooking water to a creamy consistency. 

Add the almost-ready pasta. Fold through to enswathe it in the melted cheese and water mixture. Alchemy ensues. The water is taken up by the pasta and the dish is good enough to be eaten as it once was and perhaps still is by shepherds on a Roman hillside under moonlight while sheep stir gently in their sleep, untroubled by Italian foxes which, unlike Australian ones, apparently do not attack sheep. 

Vulpine dining habits aside, a major roadblock looms. Apparently the cheese could ‘clump' due to too high a temperature, of the water, or the pan, or the ambient temperature, I don’t know. Scientific analysis of cooking temperature has been undertaken, by ‘experts’ (who in the modern world are as ubiquitous as rabbits in the eastern Australian great plague of 1950); and one noted food publishing authority catastrophises in its prescriptions for cacio e pepe: " ... if we haven't developed the right skills and movements we could spoil everything by letting clumps form". Hold the front page.

Given that the original dish might have been cooked over a fire outside the huts of the cheese-making shepherds—who sold their produce to local nobles and legionnaire soldiers—we can presume that they used the ends or leftover pieces as a cheap and practical ingredient when combined with their meagre allocations of pasta. Clumping was probably the least of their problems.