Pasta con le sarde — Italy

Pasta con le sarde combines long pasta, most often bucatini, with a sauce built on fresh sardines and wild fennel fronds, sweetened with raisins and given crunch with toasted pine nuts. Saffron tints the sauce a warm yellow, and toasted breadcrumbs are scattered over the top in place of grated cheese, which is typically left out of fish-based pasta dishes. The dish is reported from Sicily, where it is closely tied to the island's coastal towns and is prepared seasonally, when fresh sardines and wild fennel are both readily available, roughly from spring through late summer. Numerous local variations exist from one town to the next. To prepare it, wild fennel fronds are boiled first, with the cooking water reserved to cook the pasta afterward so the noodles pick up its aroma. A soffritto of onion is built up with anchovies, then the sardine fillets, raisins, pine nuts, and saffron are added and simmered briefly into a loose sauce, into which the cooked pasta and chopped fennel are tossed. This version keeps the sauce close to the classic combination of sardine, fennel, raisin, and pine nut, finished with a generous scattering of toasted breadcrumbs for texture rather than cheese. Some households add a few extra sardine fillets to line the baking dish and finish the assembled pasta briefly in the oven, but the stovetop version remains the everyday way of making it.