Pasta al Salmone

This is one of our favorites. It's quick, simple, delicious, and elegant. It's also half Italian and half Jewish, as we generally make it with nova lox. (Ah for the days when we could just drive across the Kosciuszko Bridge to the Acme Smoked Fish outlet. As for Russ and Daughters, Queens of Lake Sturgeon…I don't want to talk about it. Now we have to get our bargain lox pieces and ends from Trader Joe's, which is not as genuine an experience, though still good.)

Start the pasta water boiling (penne or fettucine work best) as you pour a glass of Chardonnay into the cook. Assemble the ingredients for the sauce: heavy cream, butter, and vodka (preferably lemon, with an entire lemon peel marinating in it according to the old Sardis method). Pull the lox apart into thin inch-long strips and leave it out to take the refrigerator chill off. In a wide frying pan, boil down about a half-cup of the cream until it becomes thick; lighten with a shot of vodka (if necessary, pour another into the cook, but don't add it earlier or may curdle the cream). Enrich (the sauce, not the cook) with a pat of butter, and keep it warm until the pasta is done. Drain and shake the pasta well, and throw it into the pan; toss while strewing lox in bit by bit at the last minute (you're trying to keep it from clumping up, which lox tends to do). Serve on warmed plates immediately.

You can use other types of smoked salmon for this, but make sure not to really cook it, as it will just fall into flakes - still tasty, but not as refined. And if you want the lemon flavor without the lemon vodka, you can add a bit of lemon zest instead, or additionally. But do not grate cheese on this or any other fish-based pasta sauce, an American habit that makes Italians blanch and cross themselves.