Saturday,
September 15, 2007
You Think You Know Pasta?? Think again!! -
Atlantic Monthly
The
ANNOTICO Report
PASTA:
Where
It Came From and How It Got Here
Who
Makes the Best Pasta, and How
How
to Cook Dried Pasta So You Can Taste It
Is
Fresh Pasta Better?
Sauces
With and Without Tomato
Atlantic Monthly
September
15 2007
Originally:
July 1986
Where It Came From and How
It Got Here
The idea that Marco Polo
brought pasta from
The first clear
Western reference to boiled noodles, Perry says, is in the Jerusalem Talmud of
the fifth century A.D., written in Aramaic. The authors debated whether or not
noodles violated Jewish dietary laws. (Today only noodles made of matzoh meal are
kosher for Passover.) They used the word itriyah,
thought by some scholars to derive from the Greek itrion,
which referred to a kind of flatbread used in religious ceremonies. By the
tenth century, it appears, itriyah in many
Arabic sources referred to dried noodles bought from a vendor, as opposed to
fresh ones made at home. Other Arabic sources of the time refer to fresh
noodles as lakhsha, a Persian word that was
the basis for words in Russian, Hungarian, and Yiddish. (By
comparison with these words, noodle, which dates from sixteenth-century
German, originated yesterday.) In the twelfth century an Arab
geographer, commissioned by the Norman king of
Even if pasta is
not quite as old as the Italians would like, it has been securely documented in
The Marco Polo
myth has refused to die. Italians accuse Americans of promulgating it,
beginning with an influential article in a 1929 issue of Macaroni Journal
(now Pasta Journal), an American trade magazine, which has inspired
countless advertisements, restaurant placemats, cookbooks, and even movies.
(From 1919 on, Macaroni Journal occasionally published articles
purporting to give the history of pasta, usually?though not always?labeling
the less plausible ones as lore. The 1929 story began, "Legend has it . .
.") In the 1938 film The Adventures of Marco Polo, Gary Cooper
points to a bowl of noodles and asks a Chinese man what he calls them. "In
our language," the man replies, "we call them spa get."
In the centuries
after Marco Polo's voyage pasta continued to be a luxury in
This somewhat gamy
procedure was not used for other kinds of dough, but commercial pasta dough has
never been normal dough. The flour used to make it?semolina?is granular, like sugar, and has a warm
golden color. Semolina makes a straw-colored dough
that must be kneaded for a long time, which is why it has always been far more
common in commercial than in homemade pasta. Semolina is milled from durum
wheat (Triticum durum; durum
means "hard"), a much harder grain than common wheat (Triticum vulgarum),
which is used to make ordinary flour. (The harder the grain, the more energy
required to mill it.) All durum makes firmer cooked pasta than common flour
does, but not all durum is alike in hardness or quality. The kind of durum
milled into semolina and how a manufacturer makes and dries the dough determine
the firmness of the pasta when it is cooked.
Durum wheat was
suited to the soil and weather of
Englishmen went
home full of
Macaroni came to
Other factories
opened, the price went down, and by the Civil War macaroni was available to the
working classes. Books of the period indicate that the common way to serve it
was cooked until soft?usually
at least half an hour?and baked with cheese and
cream. Macaroni and cheese, then, like many other dishes that the English
brought to the Colonies, can be considered an old American dish. In the
mid-1880s, according to Karen Hess, the food historian, cookbooks published as
far from the East as
The huge wave of
Italian immigration that began toward the end of the century was ultimately
responsible for pasta's becoming a staple of the American middle class, but at
first the immigrants put the rest of America off the very idea of pasta. From
1880 to 1921 more than five million Italian's came to
The Italians
ignored the advice to eat right. They cultivated any land they could and grew
vegetables and herbs that they could not find in
The Italians did
change their eating habits, although they did so of necessity, not because
nutritionists told them to. They ate fewer varieties of fruit, vegetables, and
cheese than they had been used to, because of the trouble and expense involved
in obtaining what they liked. They ate much more meat, because it was extremely
cheap and plentiful by their standards. They acquired a taste for cakes and
rich desserts. They also ate more pasta, which, because of its cost, had been a
holiday dish for many southern Italians. The seasonings they used were
primarily the classic ones of
For whatever
reasons, what became Italian-American cuisine started with a base of Campanian food, minus many kinds of vegetables and cheeses
and plus a lot of meat. Thus the rise of spaghetti and
meatballs, a dish unknown in
Although hundreds
of small pasta factories opened in urban Little Italys,
Italians preferred to buy imported pasta, however expensive, because it was
made from durum wheat. (American farmers did not grow durum until this
century.) The First World War brought imports to a halt, and between 1914 and
1919 the number of American pasta makers rose from 373 to 557. Sales were
helped by a new generation of food scientists, whose discovery of vitamins
prompted them to recommend eating pasta. Pasta was also cheap at a time when
food prices were rising. Recipes for spaghetti and tomato sauce started turning
up in women's magazines. American millers found a new use for flour, the
consumption of which had decreased as the population moved to cities and began
eating "better" diets, which were not based on bread. The millers
sponsored "eat more wheat" campaigns in the early 1920s and promoted
macaroni as "the divine food" (referring to the word's supposed
derivation from the Greek word for "blessed"). Pasta makers began
using durum wheat, which they advertised as being higher in protein than soft
wheat (it is, but not by much). Campbell's, Heinz, and other manufacturers
brought out canned macaroni with tomato sauce, joining Franco-American, which
in the 1890s had begun to sell canned spaghetti, stressing that it used a
French recipe. Cooking pasta long enough to can it safely institutionalized
what was already a long-established practice, one for which Italians still
deride Americans?overcooking
pasta and thus robbing it of its savor and interest.
Now it was
acceptable to promote Italian food, even if the pasta was mush and the tomato
sauce was full of sugar and salt. One typical recipe for tomato sauce omitted
garlic and consisted of canned tomato soup with. Worcestershire sauce added. In
1927 Kraft began marketing grated "Parmesan" cheese in a cardboard
container with a perforated top and suggested that the cheese be served as a
topping for spaghetti with tomato sauce. Spaghetti sales outnumbered those of
egg noodles and ran a strong second in popularity to elbow macaroni, called
simply macaroni, which was already conventional in salads.
The efforts at
promotion worked. Annual per capita consumption went from near zero in 1920 to
3.75 pounds by the end of the decade (as compared with fifty pounds in
Just when pasta
was becoming almost as ordinary a meal in
Mussolini did not
ban pasta. Rather, he initiated the growing of durum wheat in central and
northern
Who Makes the Best Pasta,
and How
I recently visited a number
of pasta factories in
Luckily, I was
able to see the manufacturing process on a scale that made sense to me?at the small and delightful
factory of Martelli, which many cognoscenti consider thebest exporter of pasta in
I arrived on a
Saturday afternoon to find Dino and Mario Martelli
and their wives, Lucia and Valeria, packing maccheroni.
The women wore yellow aprons that matched the packages. These four are the only
employees. Dino and Mario's father and uncle started the business in 1926 by
buying out a local pasta maker. Today the brothers use the same equipment the
company had in the 1940s, before high-temperature drying tunnels became
popular. The Martellis make only four shapes?spaghetti; spaghettini, or thin spaghetti; maccheroni;
and penne, diagonally cut ridged tubes named for quill pens. The Martelli factory has only one "pasta line," as
the machine that mixes, kneads, extrudes, and dries dough is called. The one at
Martelli is small?about eight feet high, seven feet wide, and eighteen
feet long.
The brothers
mixed a batch of dough for spaghetti to show me the process. They buy durum
from
Mixing and
kneading take from thirty to forty minutes at Martelli,
as opposed to the twenty usual in other factories; the Martellis
say that long kneading improves flavor. The dough is forced at great pressure through
holes in one of four dies, each of which is shaped like a big hockey puck; the
choice of die determines the shape of the pasta as it is extruded. If pins are
suspended from wires in each hole the pasta will be hollow after it is forced
through the die; the hole is bigger where the dough enters than where it
leaves, so the two sides of the tube are joined as the dough streams out. If
the holes are notched where the dough enters them, the pasta will be curved.
The Martellis use only bronze dies, because the
rough, porous surface these create makes for better sauce absorption.
Teflon-lined dies, which most manufacturers use today, produce pretty, polished
surfaces that don't hold sauce well. The Martellis
are careful not to apply too much pressure or to allow th e temperature of the dough to rise too high during
extrusion, lest the proteins in the semolina be denatured, making the cooked
product soft.
How long and at
what temperature pasta is dried are also important to
the quality of cooked pasta. The Martellis use an
automatic dryer only for the first stage of drying, which lasts about an hour.
The pasta stays in the tunnel for several more hours to enable the humidity in
the center and on the surface to equalize. The brothers then carry it on poles
or screens to one of several drying closets, which have appealing doors of wood
and glass. Other manufacturers send the pasta through another and much longer
tunnel for between six and twenty-eight hours, often at temperatures so high
that they risk denaturing the protein. At Martelli
the pasta stays in the closets, which have curved, tin-lined walls to
distribute air from small fans at the top, for two days or more (the pasta left
to Naples winds could take as long as a week to dry). The comparatively low temperatures
greatly improve flavor, according to the Martellis,
who claim to be the only manufacturers left who use d rying
closets. They doubtless are the only manufacturers to dry pasta in closets that
have a view of miles of Tuscan hills and valleys interrupted only by grapevines
and castles.
When the pasta is
dry, it travels through what looks like a laundry chute to the adjacent
building, where it is packed and crated. The Martellis
don't cut the spaghetti and spaghettini; as a sign of
their craftsmanship they leave it rounded where the strands have hung on the
poles. The shop's production is small, but the family claims to like it that
way. Martelli pasta is a luxury item in
My visits to
other factories in
Fini makes only egg pasta. The
dough is extruded in long sheets that are then either cut into long ribbons,
which are sold dried, or punched into shapes that are filled and shipped
frozen, to be sold either frozen or thawed. The fillings are made with the same
quality of Parmesan cheese and meats that Fini sells
separately (the company opened at the turn of the century as a purveyor of
cured meats and sausages).
The differences
between Fini and Prince, one of the largest
manufacturers in the
The Pasta War
Between
the
How to Cook Dried Pasta So
You Can Taste It
Italian brands of pasta,
whatever they cost, taste better, I think, than most American ones?they have a clean, slightly nutty flavor and above all
a texture that stays firm until you finish eating. Taste and texture make all
the difference in pasta, but judging by what most American restaurants and home
cooks serve, they are unknown attributes of pasta in this country. Many people
are surprised to learn that dried pasta can have any flavor at all, let alone
stay firm and taste lighter than what they are used to. I recently advised a
woman who regularly served truffled omelets and
caviar and blinis to her children while they were
growing up to buy an imported Italian pasta, something
she had never done. The brand she found at her supermarket was Spigadoro, a commonly distributed import whose quality
Italians rank solidly in the middle. "I was so knocked out by the
difference that I kept cooking a little more until the box was gone in one ni ght,"
she reported.
Italians
criticize Americans for adding soft flour to pasta, and with reason. One
American manufacturer boasts in block letters on its packages, "SEMOLINA
plus FARINA" (farina is a blend of common wheat flours). This, as one
importer of Italian pasta put it, is like boasting about mixing diamonds with
rocks. Pasta made with common flour, which is less expensive than semolina,
leaves the cooking water white with starch, and quickly turns soggy on the
plate, even if it is drained when it seems to be what Italians call al dente?literally,
"to the tooth." Italian manufacturers almost never add common flour
to pasta: the practice is illegal and a company must go out of its way to
cheat. American manufacturers can add flour or not as they please, because
there are no laws restricting them to semolina. Even so, many American
manufacturers, such as Prince, Ronzoni, and Hershey
Foods, which markets six brands of pasta, use only semolina.
You can't tell
from looking through the cellophane much about how dried pasta will cook or
taste. It should have an even buff color; gray could mean the presence of soft
flour. Don't be alarmed if you see tiny black spots. Semolina is milled much
more coarsely than ordinary flour, and flecks of bran usually show. A finely
pitted, dull surface is far preferable to a glossy one. It suggests that the
pasta was made with a bronze die and will hold sauce better.
The regions in
Gauging portion
sizes trips up nearly everyone. The standard portion in
To cook pasta you
need a lot of water, so that it will come back to the boil soon after you add
the pasta, so that there will be more than enough water for the pasta to absorb
(pasta usually doubles in volume when cooked), and so that the pasta will keep
moving as it cooks and not stick together. Start with a gallon for the first
quarter pound and add one quart for each additional quarter pound. When the
water reaches a rolling boil, add a tablespoon of salt for each gallon of
water, which will season the pasta (you can add lemon juice if you prefer to
avoid salt). Cooks differ on whether or not to add oil to the water to prevent sticking.
Italians think that it makes pasta absorb water unevenly. Harold McGee, the
author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore
of the Kitchen, finds this unlikely, and also thinks that oil won't keep
the pasta from sticking unless you add it to cooked pasta. But he does say that
oil reduces the foam on the surface and helps preve nt water from boiling over.
Barbara Kafka suggests in her book Food for Friends that you put several
tablespoons of oil into the pot just before you drain it; this will discourage
sticking without making the pasta so oily that the sauce slides off.
Add the pasta all
at once. Bend long pasta into the water with a two-pronged cooking fork or a
wooden spoon. Separate any kind of pasta, so that it doesn't stick, before the
water comes back to the boil, and keep it moving as it cooks. The water should
be at an active, if not passionate, boil. Don't leave the room.
(Italians say
never ever break long pasta as you add it?you
should learn to eat it like a man. This means not twirling it against a spoon,
a practice fit only for milquetoasts, but instead securing two or three strands
with a fork and twirling them against the edge of a plate. This is accomplished
more easily in the wide, shallow soup bowls in which Italians serve pasta, but
it is quite possible to do on a flat plate. There will be dangling ends. Accept
them.) Start timing when the water comes back to the boil. Test after three
minutes for dried pasta with egg or five minutes for dried pasta without. The
only sure way to test is by biting into a piece. If you wait until it sticks
when thrown against a wall?a custom I had always
assumed was Italian but can find no Italian to own up to?it
will probably be overdone: Breaking a piece apart to examine the interior is
also chancy. Pasta is done when the color is uniform, but since it continues to
cook after you drain it, you nee d to know exactly how tiny a dot of uncooked
dough should remain in the center before you drain. I have never seen an
Italian cook hold a piece of broken pasta up to the light. Everyone tastes the
pasta he is making until it is slightly firmer than he wants it to be, and then
drains it.
Rather than drain
pasta in a colander, Italian cooks usually lift it out of the pot with tongs or
a strainer. In this way the pasta stays wet, so that as it finishes cooking out
of the pot, it has water to absorb; otherwise it would stick to itself
immediately. If you intend to make pasta with any frequency, look for a pot
with a colander insert, which will enable you to lift all the pasta out at
once. Ignore instructions to add cold water to the pot to stop cooking, because
the water left on the drained pasta won't be hot enough to evaporate and will
make the pasta slimy. For the same reason it is a bad idea to rinse the pasta
after it is cooked?a
cardinal sin in
After cooking, good
pasta should look moist rather than gummy. All the pieces should be separate
and have a uniform texture, but they won't if you undercook the pasta. The
water should be clear. If it is floury, there was ordinary flour in the pasta.
Save some of the water the pasta was cooked in. Even if it looks clear it will
have some starch, which can be useful for thinning a sauce and binding it at
the same time. The cooking water can also be useful for adding to the pasta as
it finishes cooking, in case you drained it too much.
However you drain
cooked pasta, transfer it right away to a warm bowl. The plates should be hot
too. Now is the time to add some oil or butter if you are afraid that the pasta
will be sticky. This is also the time to add hard grated cheese if you are
using it, because it will melt evenly. Don't use too much?a teaspoon or two per portion should suffice?and think twice before using any. Cheese is
contraindicated for many sauces. When it is used, it is as a seasoning. The
best is Parmesan, and the best Parmesan is Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Some cheese stores try to pass off Argentine cheese as the real thing, but it
is salty and flat by comparison with the nutty, dry, mellow original. (American
Parmesan does not bear even a passing resemblance to Italian.) Look for "Parmigiano-Reggiano" on the rind: it is stamped on
every square centimeter. Buy small pieces with rind on?they will keep better?and
grate only as much as you need. It is difficult to find a good version of the
other co mmon grating cheese?pecorino Romano, which is made of sheep's milk.
Add about two
thirds of the sauce you intend to use and gently stir it in. Don't lift the
pasta two feet over the bowl as you stir, or it will cool off. And don't add
too much sauce. It should just coat the pasta, with no excess at all. Pasta
doused in sauce revolts Italians, who when they see it suddenly understand why
Americans say that pasta is fattening. (A recipe for baked ziti in Pastahhh, an NPA newsletter, calls for one and a
half pounds of meat, one pound of ricotta, a half pound of mozzarella, and two
cups of white sauce for one pound of pasta?American
abundance carried to a perilous extreme.) Two tablespoons of a thick sauce or a
quarter to a third of a cup of a liquid one should suffice per portion. Put the
last spoonful on top of each serving, so that the diner can see what the sauce
looks like and have something to do.
Another way to
mix sauce and pasta is to drain the pasta when it is harder than al dente
and heat it for no more than a minute with the sauce. This is helpful for
fish-and-wine or stock-based sauces, which do not coat pasta readily: the pasta
will absorb sauce as it finishes cooking.
Don't waste a
second trying to make the plate look any better. Pasta dishes should be served
immediately and thus do not lend themselves to presentation, which may be one
reason why the French came only recently to pasta. For example, when you see a
photograph like one that appears in The Joy of Pasta, showing spaghetti
surrounded by a neat circle of carrot batons and slices of artichoke sprinkled
with red pepper flakes, you can be sure that the dish tasted terrible. It took
too long to arrange. Gourmet, which recently ran a picture of a plate of
homemade pasta on its cover for a story called "Pasta ` la Francaise," resorted to pretty china and carefully
strewn sprigs of dill to make it look nice. You need never worry about serving
a beautifully composed plate of pasta?only
about being served one.
Is Fresh Pasta Better?
Most American books on
pasta give plenty of good recipes for dried pasta but say outright that the
really classy kind?the only
kind fit for showing off the most luxurious and painstaking sauces?is
fresh. Pasta shops and high-priced lines of fresh pasta have reinforced this
idea. Fresh pasta, however, is another kind of dish altogether and one that
many discerning people don't prefer. The legions of Americans making pasta by
hand may be the same people who made French bread fifteen years ago. Both
practices are anomalous to Europeans. French housewives never make bread; they
buy it. And very few Italians make or even buy homemade pasta
anymore.
I asked a
fashionable Milanese woman, Lucia Mistretta, about
fresh pasta; not only is she an excellent cook but her husband, Giorgio, writes
restaurant reviews and guides. Without missing a beat she gave me the authentic
recipe for egg pasta as prepared in the region of Emilia, which is famous for
it (100 grams of flour to one egg), and cited regional variations and
alterations for filled shapes. She then explained that she always serves dried
pasta, even at dinner parties, because it's what she thinks of as true Italian
pasta, and that nearly everyone she knows, even in Emilia, considers fresh
pasta a rare exception to the rule of dried. "If it's a rainy Sunday and I
can't think of anything better to do, I might make fresh pasta," she said.
"And if I told my guests that I had made pasta by hand, we would all
understand that I meant with the rolling machine."
Even after
mastering fresh pasta, which takes patience, you might well decide that dried
is more interesting to eat, besides being a great deal more varied and less
time-consuming to prepare. Still, if you ever want a lasagna with the proper
very long, thin, wide noodles, or a delicious filled pasta, or if you want to
try sauces using wild mushrooms or game?examples of
many that are traditional only with fresh pasta?you
must learn to make your own.
Exotic fillings
in bright-colored pastas are an area of fierce competition among chefs all over
the country. For example, within a ten-minute walk of my house, in Boston,
which is neither in nor near an Italian neighborhood (and is distant from any
center of gastronomic innovation), there is a traditional Tuscan restaurant,
the Ristorante Toscano,
where Vinicio Paoli makes tortelli
filled with wild boar; a fresh-pasta shop, Pasta Pronto, where Richard Bosch
makes lobster ravioli (news a few years ago, now standard), and a nuova cucina
restaurant, Michela's, where Todd English makes
tomato agnolotti filled with goat cheese, wild leek,
and porcini mushrooms. I have responded to the challenge of having so many
talented cooks in such close proximity by putting filled pastas to one of their
most important tasks?using up leftovers. Even subjected
to such an indignity, ravioli, say, or tortellini are always impressive.
Once you have
made pasta that is neither mushy nor rubbery and you have experimented with the
ways different shapes and thicknesses combine with different sauces.
. . the end of this sentence is not "you'll never accept
substitutes." You'll accept substitutes gladly, if you can find good ones.
But only after you have succeeded in making fresh pasta will you be able to
judge what's available commercially.
I made pasta
every night for a few weeks and became proficient. It was an uphill struggle. I
got myself into trouble by insisting on learning how to perform each step
without the aid of a machine. The hardest thing to learn to do by hand was
rolling out the dough. Marcella and Victor Hazan, in More
Classic Italian Cooking, are so persuasive about the superiority of
hand-rolled pasta that I was determined to experience for myself the small but
crucial variations in thickness, and the enhanced absorption of sauce they
promise. Luckily, a master pasta maker agreed to let me watch him. At the end I
came to a few conclusions about what should and should not be done by hand.
Sandro Fioriti,
a chef from
The results of
the many comparisons we made pointed to the absolute necessity of doing one
thing by hand?and to my joy,
it wasn't rolling. It was cutting. Fioriti put two
dishes of tagliatelle in front of me, one cut by
machine and one cut by hand. They had both been rolled by machine. He ladled a
bit of tomato sauce over each. The sauce stayed where it was over the hand-cut
noodles, which slowly but surely absorbed it when I mixed them. The sauce on
the machine-cut noodles immediately slid to the bottom and wanted to stay there
even as I tossed the noodles. I felt like I was watching Brand X in a
paper-towel commercial.
Fioriti explained. The rolling
machine works like a wringer. Pasta dough is rolled between two steel cylinders
that can be adjusted so that the sheet becomes progressively thinner. The
rollers have some play, in order to accept a thick ball at the beginning (at
the machine's widest setting it completes the job of kneading). The rollers do
not compress the dough and make its surface slick, as many purists argue. What
does do this, Fioriti explained, is using the
machine's cutting attachment, because its serrated rollers have no play at all.
All of the pasta at Sandro's is rolled by machine and
cut by hand, and purists say they like it.
You can buy a
rolling machine, then, with a clear conscience, if you promise never to use the
cutting attachment. The brand with the best reputation is Imperia; Atlas is
another good one. Buy the machine that makes the widest sheet, even if it is a
bit more expensive (rolling machines cost from $20 to $40), because it is much
more convenient. Machines come with a removable crank and a C-clamp to anchor
them to a counter. Electric extruding machines don't work the dough long
enough, and the pasta they make is often gummy and unpleasant.
At home I was
able to reproduce the results that Fioriti had
achieved. The pasta cut by hand, whether it was rolled by hand or by machine,
absorbed sauce, and the pasta cut by machine repelled it. I couldn't see much
difference between the pasta stretched by hand and the pasta stretched by
machine. Yes, there were variations in the thickness of the hand-rolled pasta
and yes, they were noticeable. But I don't think they were worth the effort of
stretching and swearing at the dough. The uneven edges and different widths
that result from hand-cutting are artistry enough.
I pass on two pieces of
advice for making homemade pasta: the first few times you try, have something
else ready for dinner, and don't work in front of strangers. For good recipes
turn to More Classic Italian Cooking, by the Hazans,
The Fine Art of Italian Cooking, by Giuliano Bugialli, and The Authentic Pasta Book, by Fred Plotkin?my favorite book on pasta. Plotkin
offers very good (and largely authentic) recipes, written for one or two
portions, which I find a great convenience, and a running travelogue that could
make anyone long for
There are many
variations, of course, to the basic pasta dough. Of the colored pastas, which
are beginning to look like paint samples, I condone green, because you can
taste the spinach in it. Red is suspect, on the grounds of being trendy, but Plotkin does have an appealing recipe for tomato-and-carrot
dough in his book. Anything else is out of the question. Don't be misled when
you see beet pasta or squid-ink pasta on a menu. There will be beets or squid
ink in the dough, all right, but only for the color. You won't be able to taste
them at all, unless they also appear in the sauce (yet both have flavors worth
tasting, especially the briny, musky, rich flavor of squid ink).
Handmade noodles
come in three basic widths. The widest measures about a quarter of an inch and
is called tagliatelle (tagliare
means "to cut") in the north and fettucine
(from the word for "ribbon" or "band," the kind used for
tying cartons) in the south. The next widest measures at most an eighth of an
inch and is called tagliarini, tagliolini,
or, incorrectly, linguine?the
name properly refers only to dried pasta. Narrower cuts are rare because
they're not easy to do by hand. The finest of all is called capelli
d'angeli or angel's hair. For whatever noodle you
choose, allow five or six ounces a portion; fresh pasta contains much more
liquid than dried and portions weigh more before cooking. The classic sauces
for fresh pasta are cream and butter and cheese, or a simple tomato sauce, or
any ragu. The idea is to display the noodles, and the
usual way is with a rich sauce without sharp flavors or hard textures.
Fresh pasta cooks
in anywhere from a few seconds after the water returns to a boil for thin
noodles to ninety seconds for very wide ones. Several minutes more will be
necessary for fresh pasta that you have allowed to dry by storing it, covered,
out of the refrigerator. The noodles should not taste like raw dough and should
have only a hint of a bite. Don't expect them to be al dente. The danger is letting them become soggy or having them outright
fall apart.
The central
question of fresh pasta is, Is it worth it? I ask
myself that every time I sit down to another bowl of it, and the answer is that
I don't like homemade noodles that much. There is a certain
purity to eating fresh pasta, in biting into something uncoated and uncrusted yet distinct. I don't long for this sensation,
but you can certainly feel proud of yourself for having achieved it.
For perfectly
acceptable dried egg noodles that you can lie about having made fresh, look for
the Italian brands Fini or Dallari,
or Al Dente, made in
The best reason
to make pasta at home is that doing so lets you choose your own fillings for
ravioli, tortellini, and many other shapes. I'm always proud of myself when I
bite into a filled pasta I have made. The tenderness
of the pasta against the savory, sometimes chewy filling seems suave and
satisfying. Most filled pastas require no sauce at all, just a bit of melted
butter and herbs. Plotkin gives helpful instructions
on cutting and filling different shapes, an elementary procedure; so do Bugialli and Hazan. They also
give recipes for fillings, though these are easily improvised.
Unfortunately,
there are few commercial filled pastas to brag about.
Most of the boxed ones rely on cheddar cheese for their fillings, which is
cheaper and easier to use than ricotta or Parmesan. Two Italian companies have
been experimenting with more elaborate filled pastas, using cheese and
vegetables, because the
Sauces With and Without
Tomato
Italians have codified
which sauce goes with which pasta, and the code allows for a good deal of
exchange. Luigi Veronelli gives a short outline in The
Pasta Book, which was recently published here. In the broadest terms, long
shapes go with tomato sauce and short shapes go with meat and vegetable sauces.
Here are some more-specific and breakable rules for sauces that go with dried
pasta without egg. For long thin pastas, such as spaghettini
and vermicelli (which are nearly identical) and linguine and trenette (also nearly identical): fish and seafood sauces.
For these pastas plus thicker long pasta, such as spaghetti, perciatelli (from the word for "pierced," because
it is hollow), and bucatini (thicker than perciatelli, also hollow): cream, butter, and cheese
sauces; tomato sauces; sauces with strong flavors such as hot pepper, garlic,
anchovies, or olive paste. For short pastas, such as rotini
(spirals), ziti, penne, and rigatoni (big ridged tubes), and hollowed-out
pastas, such as lumache (snails), conchiglie
(shells), and elbows: meat sauces and vegetable sauces, because the shapes
catch meat sauce and enable yo to pick up chunks of
vegetable and pasta at the same time. For very short pastas: sauces with dried
peas, lentils, chick-peas, or fava or other beans
(the combination of pasta and beans is usually found in soup). For flat pastas,
such as farfalle and rotelle
(wheels): sauces with cream or cheese or delicate vegetable sauces?such as ricotta and spinach, asparagus, and puree of
winter squash with nutmeg.
Many of these and
similar guidelines make sense. But it appears that the real reason there are so
many shapes of dried pasta without egg, especially the hundreds of fanciful
ones, is less to enable pasta to go with specific sauces than to provide
variety in something that Italians eat once or twice a day. "It's like
shoes," Eugenio Medagliani, a manufacturer and
retailer, of cookware, explained to me at his store in
It is less easy
to codify the hundreds of Italian pasta sauces. Most books on pasta are
arranged by type of sauce?for example, the scholar
and food-magazine editor Vincenzo Buonassisi's Nuovo Codice della
Pasta, which contains more than 1,300 recipes, and Veronelli's
book. These books also have chapters on filled pastas and pastas baked with
sauce. I was taken with an explanation of the families of pasta sauces which
appeared in CIAO, a bimonthly newsletter on Italian food written by
Nancy Radke (a year's subscription costs $14; write
to 136 Sky-Hi Drive, West Seneca, New York 14224), and I have used it as well
as the books as a basis for the list that follows.
Most Italian
pasta sauces call for olive oil rather than butter or cream, which is good news
for anyone concerned about cholesterol. Recent studies claim that olive oil is
more healthful than any other fat. Use a light, medium-priced olive oil for
cooking and add a dash of expensive imported olive oil just before serving (two
excellent brands are Ardoino and Mancianti).
Ragu is the most
famous sauce and the one we think of as spaghetti sauce. A good ragu takes a long time, as readers of Marcella and Victor Hazan's Classic Italian Cooking know?the
ragu it offers takes at least three and a half hours
to cook, and the Hazans recommend five. Many ragu sauces were once made with large pieces of meat
braised until they fell apart, but now almost every ragu
sauce uses either meat in small cubes or ground meat. Like stews, ragu calls for cheap cuts, which benefit from long cooking.
All kinds of meat and poultry are used, and also unsmoked bacon (pancetta) and sausage. A ragu starts with a sautied
mixture, called a battuto, of onion, carrot, celery,
parsley, and sometimes garlic and herbs such as sage and rosemary. The meat is
then added and browned very lightly. Wine and sometimes milk are added and
slowly evaporated. In most ragu sauces the next
ingredient is tomatoes, which are cooked down slowly, but sometimes wine and
broth are the onl y liquids. The sauce can be
thickened with tomato paste or grated cheese or both. Sometimes it is enriched
with cream. It is served either with fresh pasta, which absorbs it well and
thus shows it off, or with short tubes of dried pasta, which trap the sauce in
their ridges and holes.
Fish sauces also
start with a battuto, sometimes just with garlic and
often with hot red pepper flakes. Seafood is then added and heated until it is
barely cooked. If the sauce is to be white, white wine is added and evaporated,
and after the addition of an appropriate herb, such as basil, oregano, or mint,
the sauce is ready. If the sauce is to be red, the seafood is reserved on a
covered plate while the tomato is added and cooked down; then it is heated
briefly with the sauce before being mixed with pasta. Many new recipes start
with butter and call for cream at the end, a French influence of which most
Italians disapprove, on the grounds that it masks the flavor of the fish.
Cheese does not go with fish sauce.
Vegetable sauces
are among the richest in variety. The battuto often
includes hot red pepper and a large dose of olive oil and, if the recipe is
from the south, anchovies. Although tomatoes are often used as the base of the
sauce, they are not essential. Often the liquid is broth. For example, try a
sauce with a sliced and sautied onion with hot pepper
flakes, and blanched broccoli florets, or blanched slices of zucchini and
carrot, or cubes of grilled eggplant and olives (I'm getting into the territory
of the Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza, and Calzone Book,
which seems to start every recipe with something grilled). This is another
group that has had to withstand the butter-and-cream brigades, whose decisive
victory was pasta primavera, a dish of disputed paternity popularized by the
New York restaurant Le Cirque. Italians make many dishes with pasta and
vegetables but almost never use so many vegetables in one sauce, and they
rarely bind the sauces with cream, as the F rench
chef at Le Cirque does. Last year The New York Times published the
"definitive" recipe for pasta primavera as it had evolved during ten
years of popularity at Le Cirque. Many people spent hours preparing the seven
vegetables it called for, and seemed pleased?for weeks I heard reports from people who asked if I
had made it yet. I never intend to make it, although I would love to order it
in situ. At home I'll stick to one or two vegetables at a time.
Much as I
disapprove of adding tomato by rote to every sauce, tomato certainly is useful
for filling out sauces and for dressing pasta on its own. It is, after all, the
basis of most Italian sauces, even if Italians claim that Americans rely too
heavily on it. The standard tomato sauce (pummarola)
typically begins with onion and perhaps a bit of garlic softened in olive oil.
Carrot added to this mixture will counter the acidity of canned tomatoes;
celery adds body. If you like, you can add a bit of white wine after the
vegetables have softened, and cook until it is evaporated, but this detracts
from the fresh flavor of the sauce. Then add tomatoes?with their liquid if you're using canned?and fresh basil if you can find it. Oregano is an
herb used only in the south. It is by no means automatically paired with
tomatoes, the way parsley or basil is. If you are intent on adding it, add only
a pinch. Simmer the sauce for no more than twenty minutes. Puree in a food
mill. Many f amous sauces start with this sauce and
add just a few strong ingredients: puttanesca uses
anchovies, olives, and capers; Amatriciana uses pancetta
and hot pepper.
Italians do put
cream in sauces, although many of their white sauces are based on balsamella, or bichamel?the sauce of milk, flour, and butter?and
many others use butter and cheese. Some common white sauces are simply melted
butter and herbs, and melted butter and cheese, and combinations of soft and
hard cheeses. Cream sauces frequently include ham, peas, mushrooms, or sausage.
Aglio-olio, or garlic-oil,
sauces usually involve hot pepper and garlic sautied
in oil until it colors lightly but not until it browns (browned garlic would
make the sauce bitter). These are not served with cheese if cooked, though they
are if uncooked, as in pesto (made with basil and pine nuts and Parmesan
cheese) and tocco de noxe,
a walnut-and-Parmesan sauce that has lately become fashionable. Aglio-olio sauces are usually served with long strands of
pasta that allow excess oil to drip off. Radke
counsels against bows and corkscrews and other shapes that can spew oil
unexpectedly onto your shirt.
Perhaps the most
welcome group is uncooked sauces, which can recall summer at any time of year.
The best-known is probably fresh tomatoes and basil and olive oil, perhaps with
cubed mozzarella. A good and little-known one is olive oil, lemon juice,
parsley or basil, and, if you like, hot red pepper or garlic; this sauce is
usually served with spaghetti. Olives, anchovies, and capers are the usual
condiments for uncooked sauces. A source for elegant and easy sauces that
require little or no cooking is Cucina Fresca, by Evan Kleiman and Viana La Place. These two
I nominate for
consideration in future books an invaluable group?larder sauces that can be assembled with no notice. Aglio-olio belongs at the top of this list, and olive and
anchovy sauces next. Many food shops now stock olive paste?finely chopped olives steeped in olive oil. A bit of
this makes an excellent pasta sauce. I find that almost any kind of leftovers,
with a little doctoring that might involve a sautied
onion or a few herbs or some tomato paste or stock or cheese, can be turned
into a pasta sauce?not an authentic one, perhaps, but
one I would serve with a trumped-up Italian name and no apologies.
That so many cooks are
putting things in and over pasta which no Italian would recognize or go near
with a fork should not be cause for scorn or even raised eyebrows. Many Italian
chefs, too, are experimenting with pasta, and causing controversy. The
difference, of course, is that they have been eating pasta all their lives and
that they have long experience with appropriate ways to treat it.
Americans have
taken some wrong turns on the road to making pasta the national dish. The most
conspicuous error is overcooking, which began so early and has become so
customary that it will probably be the last to go. One sign of hope is the
decline of canned pasta, which made the softest possible version seem normal.
Dried pasta becomes more and more popular every year?sales have risen by an average of four percent
during each of the past ten years. Importers such as Todaro
and De Luca report increasing sophistication among their customers, who want
more and more variety in the shapes and colors of pasta. Perhaps most
important, pasta has become popular all over
Given enough
time, Americans might be responsible for the next classical era of pasta. They
have already established serving pasta as a one-dish meal all over the world?even among middle-class Italians, who speak of it no
longer as a sign of bad breeding or poverty but as an American-inspired
convenience. Per capita consumption of pasta is still only 11.2 pounds a year
in the
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198607/pasta.
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