Spaghetti cacio e pepe

A cheesy, peppery, satisfying pantry meal.

This is a recipe I probably should have put on my blog in the early days when I first started it 12 years ago; it’s just that it was so very simple — like aglio, olio peperoncino, both such classic and essential pasta dishes but basically in the “no recipe” category. I would never have thought that such a simple recipe would become as well known and as beloved internationally as it has in recent years. It’s not uncommon to see this Roman dish infiltrating Florentine restaurants now too, usually paired with pici pasta — the closest thing we have to Roman tonnarelli, which are like thick spaghetti.

Cacio e Pepe is one of Rome’s four classic pasta dishes, along with Gricia (pecorino and guanciale, cured pork cheek), Carbonara (basically Gricia with an egg) and Amatriciana (essentially Gricia with tomatoes) — dishes made of very few ingredients but flavours that pack a punch and truly satisfy.

We love them all but Cacio e Pepe is just a teeny step up (pepper!) from the plainest cheesy, creamy pasta that was my eldest daughter’s lifeline through her extremely selective eating phase that lasted from when she was 4 to 8 years old — it’s still a favourite, comforting food for her, but now she will venture out of her comfort zone and try new things and even order confidently in restaurants things she’s never had before. Spicier foods are slowly becoming a hit with her; it started with sweet chilli sauce, then spicy mayonnaise and now even a more than peppery Cacio e Pepe is acceptable.

So it has long been a favourite in our house (well for 3 of 4 of us at least, we have one cheese hater*) — it’s one of those dishes to make when you don’t know what to make, when you need something quickly, when you really need a trip to the supermarket but can’t get there, when you just want pure comfort and deliciousness.

Marco is undoubtedly the one who makes this best — so this is his recipe. I had to squeeze it out of him though as he does all this by eye. I also had a quick flick through Ada Boni’s 100 year old tome, The Talisman, a cookbook of about 1000 Roman recipes to reference her recipe too and it is decidedly different to modern Cacio e Pepe recipes — namely slightly less cheese and an ultra simple method but I thought it would be interesting to compare. She cooks the spaghetti with a touch of olive oil (unusual to see now in Italy I think!) and drains them, saving a bit of the pasta cooking water. Then she instructs to simply dress the pasta with the grated pecorino cheese (100 grams for 6 people) and generous pepper and “send it piping hot to the table.”

Really key to this simple dish is having plenty of boiling hot pasta cooking water to loosen the pasta and melt the cheese — and to add the cheese off the heat to avoid it turning into a clumpy mess!