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While in Europe I frequently cooked this wonderful pasta recipe someone there recommended to me, but I've tragically forgotten the name! It started with spaghetti and the second word started with an M. Not marinara, not mostaccioli, not meatballs. It used a sauce with tomatoes and wine in it. It was a fairly involved sophisticated recipe, not one of the "easy 15 minute" recipes. When I try to google "spaghetti m*" I just get drowned in basic meatball and marinara results. I didn't know about it while at home in the States, I learned about it from a friend over there. (we were in Ireland, but they weren't Irish so that's not relevant. it's more a mainland Europe one)

Does anyone have any ideas about what this may have been?? Thank you all!

Edit:

Known ingredients: spaghetti, wine, tomatoes, perhaps some sort of meat? (less certain about the meat but I'm vaguely sure).

Cooking method: I believe the sauce was made just on the stove, adding the ingredients together in a pan and adding stove heat. I might be wrong, my memory is fuzzy!

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  • Beyond tomatoes and wine, what else do you remember of the ingredients and method?
    – dbmag9
    Commented May 8 at 6:03
  • Edited, thank you!
    – SuperDialga
    Commented May 8 at 6:16
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    As an aside: there are exclusion search operators in Google, so you can search for [spaghetti m* -marinara -meatball]. It doesn't turn up anything useful for me in this case, but it's a generally useful bit of knowledge :)
    – rumtscho ♦
    Commented May 8 at 6:53
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    @rumtscho I've noticed exclusion in google search is getting worse. Yesterday (coincidentally a recipe search) I fancied making a garlic mushroom sauce similar to something I'd had out, but to have with fried potato gnocchi. Despite excluding "cream" and "creamy" those dominated my results. In the end I made it up as I went along, based on a vegetable velouté
    – Chris H
    Commented May 8 at 8:42
  • @rumtscho You can also use those search operators in Bing and DuckDuckGo. I don't normally use Bing, but just had a go and that worked surprisingly well. You do need to be specific though; searching for [-meatball] doesn't exclude [meatballs], but [-meatballs] does both.
    – bob1
    Commented May 8 at 20:45

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Could that pasta be Spaghetti all'Amatriciana?

It's one of the most famous italian pasta dishes.

It doesn't start with an M but the M is the second letter. And as correctly suggested By @Chris H, and explained on Wikipedia, it's often called Matriciana in romanesco dialect.

I've seen someone use wine to deglaze the guanciale and there are tomatoes in the recipe.

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  • 3
    Good thinking. It could easily be misheard/misremembered as "alla Matriciana" (which is even correct in one dialect according to Wikipedia)
    – Chris H
    Commented May 8 at 15:40
  • My first thought, too.
    – Robin Betts
    Commented May 14 at 17:56

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