Girasoli, the pasta that turns toward the sun

Sunflower-shaped pasta filled with asparagus, finished with a slow white lamb ragù. Our dish of the week at MyCaffé, this week only.

In Italian, girasole means sunflower. Split the word and you find the reason: gira il sole, “to turn toward the sun.” It’s what the flower does all day in the fields, tilting its face from east to west to hold onto the light. We didn’t time the girasoli to arrive the same week the sun did. It just happened that way, and now we’re carrying bright yellow plates out to the terrace and trying not to read too much into it.

Each piece is a round of egg dough with a fluted, petalled rim, pinched by hand so the edges fan out like a flower mid-bloom. Lay a few on a plate and you have a small field of them, the kind you’d pass on a road through the Tuscan hills in July.

Inside is white asparagus, the pale spring kind grown under mounded earth so the sun never reaches it. A flower that lives for the light, then, wrapped around something raised entirely without it. On the plate none of that matters: sweet, nutty, softer than the green spears, tasting of nothing but the season. We don’t dress it up.

Over the top goes ragù bianco di agnello, a white lamb ragù. White because there’s no tomato in it. In Italy, lamb is spring meat, the dish that comes to the table around Easter, and cooking it in bianco keeps it soft-spoken: lamb simmered low with white wine, a soffritto of carrot and onion, a little rosemary. No red sauce shouting over the top. Just tender lamb, a few bright dice of carrot, asparagus tips, and enough silk to pool at the rim of the plate.

It’s a dish that only makes sense right now. Lamb and asparagus both peak in spring, the sunflower belongs to the tall light of summer, and the sun, for once, is playing along. So eat it outside if you can. That’s how it wants to be eaten: a plate of small suns under the big one, an espresso to follow, the afternoon in no particular hurry.

Which is the MyCaffé way regardless. We’re not somewhere you pass through quickly. Drag a chair into the light and let lunch take as long as it takes.

The girasoli are here this week only. Once the dish of the week turns over, they go back to the field. Come while the sun is out.