Elizabeth Hewson’s pandemic-era cookbook, Saturday Night Pasta, was born out of a self-care ritual she created to combat anxiety. She’d attempted other methods for coping with stress and anxiety, such as yoga and exercise, but it wasn’t until she began making fresh pasta at home that she found something that actually worked.
“Making something from scratch and enjoying it proved to be a reaffirming, soul-restoring experience,” Hewson writes in the book. “It gave me a new brightness … I felt good. I had switched off. I was calm.”
It became a bit of a movement, with people across the country taking to social media to upload photos of themselves making pasta and adding the Saturday Night Pasta (SNP) hashtag. Merch and lockdown packs followed. And now Hewson, who is also head of creative for one of Australia’s leading restaurant groups, Sydney’s Fink Group (Bennelong, Quay, Firedoor), is making things easier for time-poor home cooks with an SNP product line, starting with a Dirty Martini pasta sauce.
“It’s zesty, briny with a bit of punch, just like a Dirty Martini,” Hewson tells Broadsheet. “Let’s face it, the world has lots of pasta sauces but if I was going to do one, I wanted to do something different.”
The sauce riffs off the classic (and trending) vodka pasta, incorporating Archie Rose Native Botanical vodka, Toolunka Creek olive brine and lemon myrtle leaves (“to carry those native botanicals through from the vodka,” says Hewson), plus sun-ripened Roma tomatoes, basil, rosemary and lemon.
“It’s great on its own, but I do love to serve it with a splash of cream and a knob of butter at the end. Fat just helps bring pasta sauces together,” says Hewson.
The sauce is Hewson’s recipe but is manufactured by Lucia’s Fine Food in Adelaide, an offshoot of Adelaide Central Market institution Lucia’s Pizza and Spaghetti Bar.
“It’s much harder creating something on a large scale – lots of tasting and adjusting is needed so it was great to have a voice there,” says Hewson. “They produce their own delicious sauces, which is one of the reasons I was drawn to working with them. Cooking a five-litre recipe is very different to a 50-litre recipe, but Lucia’s were able to preserve everything in my original recipe … They work on a relatively small scale and were there to hold my hand through the process.”
The SNP range also includes a packet of pipette (which translates to “little pipes”), a short, rounded, dried pasta with ridges to capture the Dirty Martini pasta sauce in all the curves and crevices. “The shape perfectly marries the sauce … I wanted to create a shape that wasn’t seen much in Australia. In Italy it could be referred to as gomiti [elbows] or there is another similar shape called lumachel [snail].”
The pasta is made by L’Abruzzese, also based in Adelaide. “Like Lucia’s, they are Italian and have been making pasta for over 40 years using great-quality Australian flour,” says Hewson. “They use bronze dies – a superior way of cutting pasta – and air-dry it, which helps preserve its nutrition, texture, shape and taste.”
Hewson plans to release more products in due time. “But first,” she says, “another new baby to join the mix in early March. This one’s of the kicking and screaming type!”
Hewson’s SNP products are currently available at DRNKS, online, and at select stockists in Melbourne and Sydney.
Additional reporting by Sarah Norris.
