Doesn't it seem odd to you, in a recipe that should be Italian (coming from Naples), to find a good, solid German word in the ingredient list? Marille is the German word for apricot (well, really it's Austrian.)

But that is not what this recipe is asking for.

We found your recipe online, and if you read it carefully, you find yourself cooking pasta between the addition of the sesame seeds and the olive oil – which is where marille is in the ingredients list.

Marille is the name for yet another Italian pasta shape. It was designed in 1983 by Giorgetto Giugiaro, an industrial designer for Fiat and Alfa Romeo. That shape of pasta was said to look like an ocean wave, but it apparently is was not a great success and we have not been able to find it on the market. It certainly is not available in this country.

What is odd is that the pasta in the photo accompanying your recipe looks a lot more like fettuccine than the short, ocean-wave pasta marille is or was. We would suggest using bowtie pasta or some other flat, short shape to replace the missing marille, but apparently fettuccine will work just as well.

We did search, by the way, for a recipe that combined veal chops with apricots, but came up empty-handed. So much for Italo-German fusion cooking….