Penne Rigate with Spinach, Prosciutto, and Cream

Recipe below: Penne Rigate with Spinach, Prosciutto, and Cream

Before I started cooking professionally I worked at Amnesty International for several years, first in membership, then as a caseworker, and finally as an ill-equipped writer for their newsletter. What I really wanted to do was get into a big sweaty kitchen with sharp knives, flames, and good Italian food, and that would come soon enough.

My volunteer assistant at AI was a middle-aged woman named Nancy Wilford, a proper blonde whose husband John wrote for The New York Times. I’m not sure what drove her to show up every day to stuff envelopes, lady the switchboard, and help me sort through all the  political prisoner mail that piled up like you wouldn’t believe, at least 50 percent of which was from crazy people. All the wacko stuff got jammed into what we called the microwave file. Mark David Chapman, the horrible man who shot John Lennon, wrote me a bunch of letters in a scratchy little script, insisting he was a political prisoner. There were also letters from supposed relatives of escapees from the imperial Russian Romanov family massacre. Those people were tedious. Occasionally one would even show up at the office, dressed in red and gold, cross-body sash, pointy mustache, and epaulets, and covered in medals. They really got on my nerves.

Nancy was interested in Italian food, and once she found out it was my passion we talked about it almost daily. She mentioned several times a dish that she and John were “mad for,” and maybe the only somewhat Italian thing they made at home. It was penne with spinach and cream, that’s it, frozen spinach, cream, and no salt (a high blood pressure issue, I think). She said they couldn’t get enough of it. It sounded so plain and boring it made me sad as hell to hear her going on about it. She was so in love with the simple pasta that I didn’t want to one-up her by mentioning that my Italian-American mother made something similar but included prosciutto, Parmigiano, nutmeg, garlic, white wine, and sometimes peas. I remember my mother washing the spinach for the dish in three changes of water. Remember how dirty spinach was back then?  

That was a “Northern Italian” pasta, different from the tomatoey things my mother usually served, and probably borrowed from the Pappagallo restaurant in Glen Head, Long Island, my parents’ favorite fancy place in the sixties and seventies. I think she called it pasta Florentine. Just about anything containing spinach that appeared on an Italian restaurant menu back then was called Florentine. It was a simpler time.

I hadn’t thought about this pasta for ages, and I hadn’t thought about Nancy Wilford much either, except that I’d heard she had died a few years ago, which made me gloomy and nostalgic for my unruly youth. She was nervous and giggly, but I was always happy to see her sitting in my office with her blonde flip hairdo, looking determined to do a thorough, if unpaid, job. She wouldn’t except a salary—didn’t want it, didn’t need it, she said.

A few days ago I realized my refrigerator held all the ingredients to produce a version of my mother’s penne with spinach, prosciutto, and cream. I think it must have been something like thirty years since I had last cooked this one up. So here it is, pretty much as I remembered it, and I’m happy to report it’s not just nostalgically good, but truly, truly good. I hope you’ll give it a try.