Cacio e Pepe Pasta Frittata !!!!!!!

A new (pantry-ish) recipe to comfort you through January's doldrums

I have long loved Marcella Hazan’s spaghetti frittata, which is just what it seems: a frittata dense with long strands of spaghetti, the egg more backdrop than bulk. It’s a culinary mashup with the cheeky audacity of CatDog, but it achieves a sly elegance. Combining two of your kitchen’s most basic cheapo staples actually makes something far more alluring than the sum of its parts.

The whole “fried egg on pasta” thing has always annoyed me if only because it is awkward to eat—all that knife action in a bowl meant for a fork. Here, then, is a better way to weave an egg into your noodles. Like a fat puck of Spanish tortilla, it can turn a carton of eggs into a week of lunches. Unlike tortilla, this takes about 20 minutes to make, and that includes boiling water. Every few months I will make one, and find myself in the following days stealing narrow slices from the fridge every time I open it, eager for its dense comfort.

At the end of the headnote to her recipe for Frittata with Pasta in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, Marcella writes that after you’ve mastered the recipe at its simplest, as she’s written it—just toss the spaghetti with butter and parm and parsley before marrying it with the eggs—“you can improvise all you like [.…] Except for clams or other shellfish, which would become dry, any sauce that works well on spaghetti works well in a frittata.” It was just a matter of time, then, until I gave it the cacio e pepe treatment.