It’s been awhile since I played around with a fairly unknown pasta. Now, pasta mista, or mixed pasta, isn’t really all that unusual. Plenty of times when you have just a bit of this pasta and a bit of that pasta, you probably threw them both, or more than two, into the water to boil up. And no doubt that’s part of how the southern Italian tradition started, though most of it was economic. As dry pasta (a process that really took root in Campagna) took off, stores would buy in bulk from the fabricators and package up the quantities that their customers wanted. But there was often a little bit of this and a little bit of that leftover, plus all the pasta that broke that no one wanted. Except… people who didn’t have a lot of money, who were willing to take all the broken and odd bits thrown together.

Now of course, a century or two later, pasta mista, or misto corto, has taken on a new life as yet another of those foods of poverty that chefs have tweaked into rich people food. Most of the major brands now actually offer pre-packaged pasta mista – DeCecco, Divella, Barrilla, Garofalo, Molisana – and many more, all offer them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any of the pre-mixed ones here, so I threw together my own. I took a little bit from bags of casarecce, penne, fussilli, and added in a broken fettuccine nest, and a couple of canneloni that were cracked, so I just smashed them into shards. There is no exact mix, the idea is a handful of different shapes and sizes.

While pasta mista can basically be used for any pasta dish you feel like making, no doubt it was most commonly something pretty basic, given the economics. So this recipe, a classic from Naples, falls somewhere in the middle – a mix of basic ingredients and a couple of special ones. Pasta mista con le patate e provola affumicata – mixed pasta with potato and smoked provolone – is what we’re playing with today. We’ve got our mixed pasta, some cherry tomatoes, some diced potato, pancetta, grated parmesan and a piece of smoked provolone, onion, celery, carrot, basil, sea salt, and pepper.

We’re also going to violate some of those steps I’ve been presenting recently, as this dish is made with a different approach to cooking the pasta itself. Get a pot of salted water boiling, as always, though, we’re not going to put the pasta into it…. In a skillet start rendering the pancetta. If it doesn’t have much fat, you can add a splash of olive oil.

When there’s enough rendered fat in the pan to start cooking the other ingredients, add the finely diced onion, carrot, and celery, plus a little cracked pepper. Cook for a few minutes to start to soften them and get a little color on them.

Add the diced potato, and the cherry tomatoes, cut in half. Toss with the mixture in the pan.

Then add enough of the boiling salted water to just cover the mixture and start cooking the potatoes. Simmer for ten minutes.

Add the mixed pasta and add enough more water to just barely cover it. We’re going to cook this almost like a risotto, adding a little water as needed until the pasta and potato are both cooked.

Just like a risotto, the starch from the pasta, and in this case from the potato too, will create a creamy texture. At the end, we want to cook this down until there are only a few tablespoons of liquid left in the skillet.

As we’ve been doing, we’ll take that grated parmesan and melt it into a cream with a little of the boiling salted water. Then mix and toss it through – as always, off the heat! Taste and add salt if needed.

And, then, add in the smoked provolone, diced up, and the basil leaves torn into bits. Toss that all together, but don’t stir it up or the cheese will get stringy. We want this cheese to stay in, more or less, its cubes, just melted, so we get pops of that smoky flavor as we eat.

And, that’s our finished pasta.

Serve, with a little pepper cracked over the top.

I love the flavors of this dish. The two cheeses, the pancetta, the tomato, all give it a really lovely flavor. On the other hand, I can’t say I’m in love with the pasta. By the time the thicker pasta shapes cook to al dente, the thinner ones are basically mush. I imagine that the chefs who are recreating this for fancier venues probably cook the different shapes separately, rather than going the risotto approach – or maybe add in the thinner pieces further along in the cooking process.