Sauce with peas & ham without tomatoes
( Sugo piselli e prosciutto senza pomodoro )

This recipe of ours derives from a traditional sauce, very famous all over Italy.
Clean celery and onions, wash them and chop finely. Put them in a little saucepan together with all the dried aromatic herbs, wine and a little ladle of water. Bring to the boil, pour in frozen peas, season to taste with salt and keep on cooking, half-covered, stirring now and then, until peas are tender and cooking juice is retired. Add cubed ham only few minutes before the end of cooking. When you switch off the gas, pour in olive oil. Stir accurately: your sauce is ready!

Note

• - You should choose a short pasta (penne, rigatoni, fusilli ...) but you could also dress noodles with this sauce. In this case your sauce shouldn't be too retired and you should increase olive oil.
• - The original recipe is a little different from this one. In fact you should fry lightly chopped onions, celery, fresh marjoram and parsley in olive oil and then add ham in order to let it flavour with all the other ingredients. At this point you should pour in wine, let it evaporate and add a little ladle of water. You should bring the mixture to the boil and at this point add frozen peas and complete the preparation. On the contrary we prefer not to fry lightly because this isn't a good thing for our liver and to add olive oil only at the end of cooking for preserving all its nutritive values. Besides we use other aromatic herbs.
• - In spring you could use fresh peas; in this case you should buy about 700 g (1 2/3 lb) fresh peas and shell them.
• - If you are in a hurry and you have to prepare a quick first course, you could use 1 400 g can peas. In this case cooking time is very short (very few minutes) and, if you have a short egg pasta (garganelli, farfalle ...), you could prepare a first course in only 15 minutes.