A Pasta Experiment – Sybaritica

Over the years, I have come across quite a few recipes which use breadcrumbs as a component of simple, rustic pasta sauces. Until now, however, I had never tried it and the result you see above really came about as a last minute idea with leftover ingredients.

I recently bought some very nice veal cutlets. I wanted to use breaded cutlets for a Veal Parmesan Sandwich idea I am working on but I had a whole cutlet leftover and decided to have it with pasta. As always, whenever I bread cutlets (or anything else) I had extra beaten eggs and seasoned breadcrumbs leftover and so, instead of tossing them (as I usually would), I saw a way to use them…

These are the cutlets as I was frying them. There were two other smaller pieces as well and, after breading them, I had about half a beaten egg and possibly a third of a cup of breadcrumbs still unused.

While my spaghetti boiled, I sautéed some garlic and bok choy leaves in a little oil and butter along with some rubbed sage.

When the pasta was done, I added it to the pan and stirred in the egg. Immediately, I added a quarter cup or so of the starchy pasta water and just as that was absorbed I added the breadcrumbs and tossed everything with some grated Parmesan.

Anyway, the result was very good and I wish to explore using breadcrumbs again like this as the texture is very nice. The bok choy also worked very well, I thought. Cabbage is quite often paired with pasta in the northern, alpine regions of Italy (A Swiss/Austrian influence, I expect) and this too bears further experimentation.