Pasta china – baked pasta with mini meatballs and lots of other lovely things, from Calabria – Italian home cooking

“Pasta china” is the name of a sumptuous, festive, baked pasta dish from Calabria, the heel of Italy, in the deep south. In the local dialect, “china” stands for the Italian adjective “piena”, full, and that’s exactly what this dish is about: a riotous affair of short tubular pasta dressed with a spicy tomato sauce, layered with marble-size meatballs, gooey cheese, crumbled boiled eggs, spicy Calabrese sausage, grated parmigiano and pecorino. Definitely, one of those Southern Italian dishes where restraint is out of the question.

It is a special dish, still very popular and prepared to mark occasions: all the big religious festivities (Christmas, Easter, patron saints days), birthdays, christenings etc … none would be the same without pasta china. 
Patience and neatness are essential here: the sauce must simmer until thick and well reduced, those meatballs MUST be tiny, a teaspoon, no more. The result is worth the effort, believe me.

Pasta china always reminds me of my childhood. Growing up, it was one of the dishes I most looked forward to and it was always a joy, albeit a rare one – I would savour it twice, maybe three times a year, generally when on holiday. You see, one side of my family is from Calabria and that’s where we would spend our summers. Some of my Calabrese relatives were excellent cooks and this dish was part of their repertoire, alongside melanzane ripiene (stuffed aubergines), parmigiana, braciole al sugo (stuffed beef rolls cooked in a tomato sauce), peperoni e patate (fried peppers and potatoes).

For me, a Milanese kid who loved to eat, growing up with a “modern” mum too busy to cook (she was headmistress at our local school), all this was heaven. After a whole year of my mum’s limited, somehow calvinistic, cooking (grilled steaks, watery minestrone, basic pasta al pomodoro – even if she also made an excellent risotto alla milanese, to be fair), to be exposed to those colourful, vibrant, often deliciously oily and generous dishes was pure ecstasy. It still is, when I make them myself. 

This is my version of pasta china, based on what I recall from my childhood and with some twists to suit my adult palate. Note how the tomato sauce is unusually flavoured with a little red pepper: this gives the sauce a kind of paprika flavour and, above all, it is the way my calabrese aunt zia Giulia (born in 1927) would always make hers – one of my strongest and most delicious food memories.

Pasta china – Pasta china – baked pasta with mini meatballs and lots of other lovely things, from Calabria
6 large portions

700g, short, chubby, tubular pasta such as penne, tortiglioni, rigatoni

For the mini meatballs:
150g each of ground beef and pork
70g bread, soaked in milk or water and squeezed
salt, pepper
a handful of grated pecorino or parmigiano
1 clove of garlic, crushed

For the tomato sauce:
2 cloves garlic or one small onion, finely chopped
4 x 400g Mutti polpa finissima or canned plum tomatoes 
a pinch of peperoncino
some basil leaves
a quarter of a red pepper
a little nduja, if you like it

For the filling:
200g provola silana (see notes), diced small
100g grated pecorino and/or parmigiano, plus three tablespoons for the top
150g salsiccia calabrese, cured hot salame, diced small; hot chorizo is a good substitute
4 eggs

A round terracotta dish 26cm x 6cm, oiled and covered with dry breadcrumbs

Mix all the meatball ingredients and rest the mix in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Make the tomato sauce: fry the garlic or onion, add the other ingredients and simmer until thick and well reduced. Remove the pepper and basil. If you like it, you could add a little nduja at the very end.

Soft boil the eggs. I like them with a fudgy-creamy centre, boiling them for six minutes. Transfer them into cold water, tap them gently with a spoon and leave them in cold water to cool further. Peel but do not slice them yet.

Go back to the meatballs. The quickest way to make marble-size polpettine is to first scoop out teaspoon-size portions of the mixture, place them on a tray and only then, when all the meat has been portioned, roll them in between one’s wet palms. They MUST be small: each one must comfortably fit into a baking teaspoon. 
Fry them in a pan, veiled with oil, shaking the pan occasionally (and cautiously) until brown all over – it is a matter of a couple of minutes. 

When both sauce and meatballs are ready, you can assemble the dish.

Heat up the oven to 220° C.

Cook the pasta for half the time the packet says – it must remain very, very al dente.
Dress the pasta with most of the tomato sauce, reserving a couple of ladles for the top.
Add half of the grated cheese and mix well.
Pour one third of the pasta on the bottom of the dish and cover with half the provola, salsiccia,  polpettine . Slice two eggs directly over the pasta and cover them with half the grated cheese.
Repeat. The last layer will be pasta only.
Cover with the remaining tomato sauce and shower it with extra grated cheese.
Bake the pasta for about 20-30 minutes, until the top is a burnished red and crunchy, with some of the bits that stick out almost burnt – they make the best treats, actually. 
Let the pasta rest, outside the oven, loosely covered with tin foil, for 30 minutes.
Enjoy.

Notes

The cheese: ideally I would use provola silana, a cow milk stretched cheese, with a mild, buttery flavour. Here in the UK, I have seen it on line, at my local excellent Italian deli and at Eataly in London. However, if too tricky to get, I am more than happy to use any mild melting cheese, from good old Bel Paese to a creamy Lancashire. Do not be tempted to use mozzarella: it goes rubbery as the pasta sits and pasta china is one of those baked pasta dishes (like lasagne) that benefits from a rest and that is best eaten warm, rather than straight out of the oven.

I have seen versions where:

broken ziti (thick, hollow, spaghetti-length pasta tubes) are used instead of short tubular pasta;

the tomato sauce is made even more savoury by cooking pork spare ribs in it, which are then eaten as a meat course;

some beaten egg is added to the meatball mix;

mortadella is used instead of the salsiccia or on top of it;

cooked peas are added to the filling;

chopped parsley is added to the mini meatballs;

the meatballs are deep fried (this is what my relatives would do).

Leftovers are spectacular if you fry them in hot oil, until the pasta develops a bronze crust. Do not turn the pasta often, keep the heat on medium-low and be patient: this is quite a long process.