Pasta with pumpkin, spinach and thyme sauce

This recipe for pasta with pumpkin, spinach and thyme sauce takes barely 30 minutes to prepare and is surprisingly delicious for something that is so easy to cook with relatively few ingredients. Ideal for when you need to pull something impressive together with little time on your hands.

Literary notes

With recent clement weather in London and veggies in the fridge that needed to be used, I thought of this dish of pasta with pumpkin, spinach and thyme sauce that I haven’t cooked for ages, even though it used to make regular appearances on my table.I guess it’s about timing. While it is certainly a dish brimming with freshness evoking spring, I associate it with the coming of autumn, though a Southern Italian autumn, which is basically a Scottish summer.

Decades ago when I was knocking about with a vaunted American writer who lived in Italy and who was a valued mentor to me, we drove along the Amalfi coast, heading to Salerno to meet some friends of his. On the way we stopped at a little osteria in Cetara for lunch and both opted for this wonderful dish. I won’t go into all the details, but I was dispatched to go and use my charms to sweet talk the recipe out of the proprietoress. He told me that they would embellish and lie to him because he was a bit of a local celebrity but that I was suitably guileless enough to get the truth out of them.

I complied. The rather intimidating woman who lorded over the kitchen looked at me as if I were mad.

“Zucca. Spinaci. Timo. Un po' di vino, un po' di panna….Qual è la tua domanda?”

And it really turned out to be that simple: pumpkin, spinach, thyme, some wine and some cream. And of course, onions—lots of onions—which I guess she didn’t even mention because everyone knows that onions are the base on which pasta sauces are built. The formidable Signora then proceeded to rattle off the recipe at breakneck speed, looking at me with a baffled stare, as if she were teaching an adult to boil an egg. It was the first time I had to make such little effort to wheedle a recipe out of a proud Italian and certainly notable for her having no interest in going into those special secrets and details I have found so many in Italy want to share when you express your appreciation for their cooking.

Still, it meant that we were on our way in good time and it's also great news because you can pull together a delicious lacovegetarian meal in under 30 minutes.

I’m using a small Hokkaido pumpkin here, because that’s what was in the fridge. But, you can make it with any pumpkin variety as long as it is on the firmer end on the spectrum. Softer varieties that contain a lot of water are okay to use, but you may need to cook them down in the sauce a little longer before adding the cream to avoid it being too thin. I would also use a slightly larger quantity if using less dense pumpkin varieties because I find their flavour is not as strong as firmer varieties.

I was originally served this dish with fusilloni, one of the signature pastas of the region around Salerno, and I would always default to it if I can, because it’s larger than fusilli and the tighter corkscrew curls make it great for sauces clinging to it. Unfortunately, it’s not widely stocked in London, so I have got my hands on the biggest fresh fusilli I could find instead. Another pasta popular in Salerno Province that is widely available around the world is linguine and it is also great with that.

Cream of the crop

Although there is a fair amount of cream in this sauce and it certainly thickens a lot while you cook it, it doesn't use any thickening agents such as flour or cornflour, nor does it have any cheese cooked into the sauce. If you cook it in these ratios and add these (fairly large) quantities of pasta to the sauce, one of the things that is wonderful about it is that it will coat the pasta beautifully with what nets out as a fairly thin sauce dripping with the flavours. There will certainly be a creamy note, but it is in no way a heavy cream sauce. It's the perfect sauce with cream for people who are not keen on thick creamy or cheesy pasta sauces.

Salad counter(point)

I am serving it here with a simple salad of cucumber, fresh orange segments, and mixed leaves, focussing on leaves that have a pastoral, peppery or bitter flavour as a contrast to the sweetness of the pumpkin. I usually default to doing the thing of eating the salad after the pasta without even thinking about it, but I always take it to table with the pasta for those who prefer to have it as an actual side dish. I’m not snobby about such matters of etiquette… well, okay, sometimes I am.

This version is for 3 to 4 diners, depending on appetite and whether you do it with any bread or antipasti. But, you can do the math if you want to cater for a larger group. It scales in a a fairly straightforward way.

While I don't recommend freezing the sauce—cream sauces can do odd things when frozen—once the pasta is cooked into the sauce, it lasts well in a container in the fridge for a couple of days. I mention this because the recipe uses greater ratios of pasta than various other recipes on here and I usually find I have leftovers, whether for tasty lunches or one of those nights when you want to binge-watch your favourite new streaming series and not think too much about cooking as you pad about in your lee-shure wear...

3 top tips to get this recipe right:

• The key with this dish is the proportionally large quantity of onions and to really take your time to fully soften them in a generous amount of white wine, only adding the garlic when the onions begin to soften. Avoid increasing the heat to speed it up. It really pays off in the end.

• Make sure that you use fresh thyme, not dried. And avoid the temptation to add additional herbs, especially not dried oregano. I have made both mistakes in the past and it flattens the magic of the thyme in this dish.

• When adding the cream, ensure that the heat remains low. You want it to barely simmer; bubble a bit here and there, and thicken, but you absolutely want to make sure it doesn’t boil. You’re not making pumpkin panna cotta! (which is, incidentally, a great recipe in its own right).

Shopping list

for the pasta with pumpkin, spinach and thyme sauce

• Approx. 370g (fresh) fusilli (or fusilloni or linguine)

• 2 large red onions (or brown); diced

• ½ a small, firm pumpkin; approx. 200g, cut into wedges

• Approx. 170g fresh young spinach

• 4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped, not grated or crushed

• 4 to 5tbspns virgin olive oil

• Approx. 350ml dry white wine

• 150ml single cream

• 5 or 6 sprigs of fresh thyme; leaves stripped from the stems

• salt and pepper to taste

• grated Parmigiano Reggiano  (or Grana Padano) for use at table (optional)

for the side salad

• mixed leaves

• 1 fresh orange, peeled and segments cut into pieces

• ½ a small cucumber, peeled and cut into pieces

• Freshly ground black pepper

• Balsamico and extra virgin olive oil to dress

Cooking Method

the pasta with pumpkin, spinach and thyme sauce

1. Cook the pumpkin first. Cut into thick slices, scrape out the seeds and sinews with a spoon. Boil in salted water—the image above is misleading because following Mrs Beeton’s “rules”, one first brings the water to the boil before adding vegetables grown above the ground. Cook until a fork passes effortlessly through the pumpkin

2. Once cooked, drain and scrape away any remaining sinews and spoon the flesh out of the skin. Return the cooked pumpkin to the pot and mash. You can do this some time earlier or even the day before and save overnight, covered in the fridge

3. In a large pan with a lid, heat the olive oil on a low-medium heat. Once hot, add the onions, stirring. After approx. 3mins, add half of the wine and stir in. Cover and reduce to a low heat, stirring occasionally

4. After another 4 or 5mins, when the onions start to soften and much of the wine has cooked off, add the garlic and stir in. Cook briefly until the aroma is released. Then, add the remainder of the wine and stir in. Re-cover and gently simmer until the onions are fully soft. NB: if the liquid cooks off before the onions are fully softened, add dashes of water to keep it moist until the onions fully soften

5. Add the lemon juice and pulp, the mashed pumpkin and the fresh thyme leaves and stir in. Stir regularly until the ingredients are fully heated and begin to bubble

6. Add the cream, gently stirring in over a low heat. You want it to cook slowly, the occasional bubble popping up but not really simmering. Be patient, stirring gently: the cream will naturally start to thicken. When it thickens, add the spinach and stir in. Once the spinach begins to wilt, season with salt and pepper to taste

7. Add 3 or 4tbspns from the water in which the pasta was boiled into the sauce. Then add your drained al dente pasta to the pan and stir in, ensuring the sauce covers all surfaces. Once done, remove from the heat, cover and rest for a minute

8. Plate and take to table with the salad and a suitable hard cheese—such as Parmigiano Reggiano or Grana Padano—that can be grated over the top if desired.

Alternatives

This is a lactovegetarian dish by default. But, it would be a lot more challenging to make it vegan version and frankly I haven't even tried. As stated on numerous occasions, I don't have the knowledge of what plant-based substitutes for cream may or may not work well and I have never tried them. I would simply do another sauce for my vegan guests.

I've never attempted a pescatarian version, though I am mildly curious to try one because I don't think I have ever experienced a dish with pumpkin and thyme that also deployed seafood. Oddly, I think it could work if, for example, using fairly large pieces of lobster meat or langoustine. That may sound crazy if you haven't tasted the sauce, but this in a unique sauce in which the gestalt adds up to something very different from the sum of its parts.

For diehard carnivores, yes, of course there is no reason to prevent you putting in pancetta (or even pieces of sausage) in the early stages of cooking. I have tried both and I have two comments: firstly, it turns it into a distinctly autumnal dish in which those spring flavours are overshadowed; and, secondly, I simply don't think it as good as other dishes with similar ingredients that do it better, such as this one.

Pairings

While I certainly cannot remember the specific wine with which I first had this dish, I do remember that it was a Campanian Fiano. I remember that because it was a varietal with which I really was not familiar at that time. I have spent years trying to track down its unique mineral notes also exuding pears and melon.

I think the wine with which I have enjoyed it most is a Laura De Vito Arianiè Fiano di Avellino, though I can't for the life of me remember the vintage. I also enjoyed with a Cantina Cinque Terre Bianco (2016, I think) which was an unexpected combination of citrus notes, an obvious acidity, and also vegetal notes. But, it was also very palatable. The biggest problem with Italian wine is that Italians drink most of it before it can be exported, so it's not always easy to access some of these less obvious wines outside of Italy, nor, indeed in some parts of Italy itself.

Thus, through trial and error, I have learned that this dish works really well with French wines in the Pouilly-Fumé or Pouilly-Fuissé ballparks. This becomes obvious when you actually taste the dish. There is something in its vegetal and unexpected flavours and what the onions do here that works very well with the flinty notes of the former, for example.

I have never been tempted to try this dish with a red wine so I really have nothing useful to offer on that topic.