Instructions: Ah, primavera, when in Italy a young mans fancy turns to thoughts of amore! and whether one is Italian, young, male, amorous or any or none of the above, spring is an appropriate time to reflect on pasta primavera, a dish that taste buds of all backgrounds can easily fall in love with.

Vegetables, mostly those associated with spring (asparagus, baby carrots, snow peas, etc.) plus a few available all year (broccoli, tomatoes, mushrooms, etc.), are the key ingredients.

While pasta primavera has an obvious Italian heritage - it is pasta, after all - youd probably go hungry if you asked for it in Italy.

So, where did the dish with the specific name "pasta primavera"

come from?

According to John Mariani, co-author (with his wife, Galina) of "The Italian American Cookbook" (Harvard Common Press), the first pasta primavera was created 27 years ago by Sirio Maccioni, neither in Italy nor the United States, but in Canada.

Several other cookbooks say as much, and Maccioni, an elder statesman of the food industry and owner of New Yorks posh Le Cirque 2000 Restaurant, agrees.

We called him at Le Cirque to find out more. In an elegant Italian accent, the Tuscan native elaborated:
writers in Nova Scotia. We had been there almost a week and had been eating a lot of the local lobster and fish. They were wonderful, but after four or five days, we began tiring of them. So I volunteered to prepare something different."

Maccioni first thought of making a version of fettuccine Alfredo, but he came across a number of springtime vegetables while acquiring ingredients.

"They looked beautiful, so I decided to incorporate them and lighten the sauce a bit. The dish went over well and a lot of people asked for its name.

Well, it had none, but I had to call it something. Since it was spring, I said, spaghetti primavera, the first thing that popped into my head." (Later, for alliterative reasons, he changed it to "pasta primavera.")

In any version, pasta primavera is more than vegetables. It also has a sauce and, of course, pasta.

The pasta in most recipes we found is of the long variety (such as capellini, fettuccine or spaghetti). Some chefs prefer shorter ones (such as penne, farfalle or orecchiette).

The pasta commonly is topped with a cream sauce and the vegetables. The cream may make the otherwise healthy dish problematic for some. Sauces based on ingredients other than cream are not unheard of, though, and may be substituted.

Clearly, pasta primavera is subject to multiple interpretations. Like an oft-told joke, the most recent version can be quite different from the original.

Most newer recipes use fewer vegetables and some now include meat or seafood.

(The original is vegetarian.)

Cookbook author Mariani frowns on meat additions. "Thats the American way, I guess, to add more protein to every dish," he says. "But it contradicts the basic idea of pasta primavera. It should be a very light dish and probably wont be with meat."

Maccioni, himself, is less dogmatic: "I cant stop others from using the name pasta primavera, and they can make it any way they choose. I wish theyd keep it simple and fresh though, because it should reflect the newness of spring."

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