Planning a Trip to Italy? Eat Where the Locals Do
The best meal in Italy rarely happens at a restaurant with an English menu. Here is what to eat — and where to look — in six Italian cities.
Creamy Pasta. No Cream
In Italian cooking, cream is rarely the answer. These five recipes show how legumes, blended vegetables, and a little technique do the job better.
Most creamy pasta recipes in the American kitchen start the same way: a splash of heavy cream, a handful of Parmesan, done. Italian home cooks rarely work like that. The creaminess you find in a bowl of pasta e ceci or pasta e piselli doesn't come from dairy — it comes from the pasta's own starch, from blended legumes, from vegetables cooked down until they lose their shape and become something else entirely. The result is richer, more complex, and considerably more interesting than anything cream can do.
These five recipes prove the point.
Creamy Pasta and Chickpeas
Pasta e ceci is one of the oldest dishes in the Italian repertoire — humble, filling, and deeply savory. The creaminess here comes from a technique: part of the chickpeas are cooked with the pasta, releasing starch directly into the liquid, while the rest are blended and stirred back in at the end. A finish of Grana Padano and good olive oil pulls everything together. No cream required — or missed.
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Creamy Bucatini with Zucchini and Mint
Cashews are not an Italian pantry staple, but they do something remarkable when boiled and blended with zucchini: they produce a sauce that is velvety, neutral, and completely plant-based. Nutritional yeast stands in for cheese, mint lifts the whole thing, and the bucatini — thick, hollow, built for clinging — carries it all. Fresh and unexpected in the best possible way.
Creamy Pasta and Peas
Spring peas have a natural sweetness that intensifies when cooked briefly and blended. Here, fusilli gets tossed in a vivid green pea cream, finished with stracchino — a mild, spreadable fresh cheese from northern Italy — and Grana Padano. The stracchino melts into the sauce off the heat, adding creaminess without weight. It is the kind of pasta that tastes like the season.
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Vegan Lasagna
Sunday lasagna without meat, without béchamel made with milk, without eggs in the pasta — and yet this is not a dish of absences. The lentil ragù is slow-cooked until it reaches the depth and texture of a proper meat sauce. The béchamel is made with rice milk and margarine. The pasta sheets are whole wheat. Layer by layer, it builds into something genuinely satisfying, the kind of dish that makes you forget what it doesn't contain.
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Creamy Tomato Pasta
Chef Cesare Battisti of Ratanà in Milan — a restaurant with a devoted following that includes Stanley Tucci — makes his creamy tomato pasta without a drop of cream. Datterino tomatoes are cooked down with scallion and lemon zest, then blended into a smooth, bright sauce. A small knob of butter and a pinch of smoked tomato peel powder finish it. The result is a tomato pasta unlike any other: silky, complex, and quietly unforgettable.
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Leave the Cream Out
Cream is not the enemy — but it is a shortcut, and shortcuts have a cost. These five recipes take a different route: patience, technique, the right ingredients cooked the right way. The creaminess you get at the end is earned, and it tastes like it.
Related: 8 Italian Pasta Salads That Make Dinner Easy / Italian Pasta Hacks That Actually Work / Bolognese Is Just the Beginning: The Italian Ragùs You've Never Tried
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