This is a book of good times to have with pasta.
I never get tired of pasta, any more than I get tired of bread. I eat it when I’m exhausted and want a quick meal that will give me a lift. I eat it when I’m in an ambitious mood, looking for something pleasant and different to compliment a guest.
When I want something spicy, I toss spaghetti with warm olive oil, garlic, and anchovies. When I want something voluptuous, I bake elbow macaroni in a cheese-rich béchamel sauce. And, when I’m fed up with complicated foods, I fill a bowl with piping-hot green noodles and cover them with icy tomatoes and scallions in a sharp vinaigrette.
Pasta is always the same, yet always different. It has a comforting familiarity, with its pale golden color and chewy, wheaten taste. And then there are all those amusing shapes, and the thousands of ways to sauce them: from avocado to zucchini, or from plain butter and cheese to purée of frogs’ legs.
It’s always different because we find pasta recipes in nearly every country in the world. I should say right at the start that this isn’t an Italian cookbook. It’s a collection of worldwide noodle dishes that I like and like to make. There are Italian recipes in it. But there are also dishes from Germany, France, China, and Greece. There are a kosher-style noodle pudding and an English macaroni dessert.
In my own life, pasta didn’t begin as an Italian food at all. I must have been six or seven before I ever ate spaghetti, but I was eating Chinese noodles long before that.
They were given to me by Let, the Chinese chef who worked for my mother. He used to make a soup that was a rather weak chicken stock absolutely full of noodles, ham, scallions, and thin strips of egg that he had beaten up, cooked in a thin pancake, and then sliced into strips.
We went fairly often to Chinese restaurants in Portland, and I loved the chow mein and fried noodles. It was nothing like the chow mein on beds of crisp little twigs that you get now. It was more like lo mein. The noodles were boiled and then quickly fried so that they were brown and crispy on the bottom, and they would be covered with shredded vegetables and cubes of tofu.
I didn’t have Italian noodles until I was in school, when we started going to a pretty good Italian restaurant that served “family-style” meals at great long tables. They’d bring you a little antipasto and then a dish of pasta. The menu never varied, and it was always fifty cents. They made a good tomato sauce, and one with butter and fresh herbs, and a version of carbonara. The sauces were nothing complicated, but it was great fun, and I just loved it; and, after all, what can you do for fifty cents?
Oddly enough, when I began to cook pasta myself, it was in the German style. That was because my mother had close friends who were from a German family, and they used noodles a lot in soups and with stews. They had one wonderful dish for which they took all the lesser parts of the pig—the backbone and the tail and such—braised them, and served them with sauerkraut and noodles. That was fun.
The point of all these reminiscences is to show how, even in a small American city at the beginning of this century, there were several quite distinct traditions of cooking with pasta.
I don’t know where the historians will eventually tell us pasta started. I’m sure, however, that the old romantic notion that Marco Polo came back to Venice from China toting the secret of spaghetti has been pretty much debunked.
My guess is that we will never find a starting place for pasta, because it will turn out to have popped up in several different places, all quite independent of one another, and then to have been carried along the trade routes by camel, ship, and peddler’s pack.
You just have to look at rice noodles and mung-bean noodles to see that the Oriental tradition is quite separate from ours. Or to consider the very early Bulgarian pasta—lumps of dried dough that horsemen carried in their saddlebags and grated into pots of boiling milk at the end of the day’s ride.
We do know that there is a long history around the Eastern Mediterranean of making simple wheat doughs for boiling. We know that noodles were being sold in Greece as early as the fifth century. Pasta in Italy probably started in the south, as part of that whole Mediterranean culture. We know that the Romans grew wheat in Sicily; and what better way is there to preserve wheat flour than to make it into a paste and dry it?
Yet the first Italian references to pasta are terribly offhanded. A legal document mentions that someone has inherited a basket of macaroni or a sieve for draining noodles. Or a saint’s legend tells how the devil was foiled in his scheme to fill a virtuous man’s pasta with dirt. It seems that the saint was present at that meal. When he said the blessing over the food, the dirt was transformed into sweet ricotta, and everyone enjoyed a good dinner. What a wonderfully Italian miracle that one was!
It’s just because pasta is part of the cooking of so many different cultures that we don’t have to feel bound by the rules of any one country when we cook it. That’s why I’ve made no attempt in this book to be particularly classical or traditional. My aim here, as in all my books and teaching, is to encourage pleasure and individual taste in the way we eat.
Of course there are well-established rules in Italy about the right way to serve and eat pasta. These are customs that have grown out of centuries of experience, and they have the authority of a lot of good eating behind them.
In the question of matching pasta to sauce, for example, the Italians can be very specific. Marcella Hazan says to use thin spaghetti for seafood sauces, regular spaghetti for cream sauces. Giuliano Bugialli says you should try always to serve pesto sauce on trenette, a flat, narrow noodle.
But we’re Americans, with a whole melting pot of cultures behind us, and we don’t have to do things the classic Italian way. We can do as we please.
When we pick a pasta to go with a sauce, we feel free to experiment and discover what appeals to us. Once we’ve chosen our sauce, we try to imagine how it will taste. What pasta would go well with it? Will it take a chewy ziti, delicate angel hair, or ricelike orzo?
We may find, eventually, that certain pastas seem right with certain sauces. That tubular shapes, like penne, and envelope shapes, like seashells, seem right when a sauce has tiny bits of meat or fish to be caught in the spaces. That fine, slender noodles seem proper with thin tomato sauces. That we want a good chewy twist to stand up to a cold pasta salad full of cheese and broccoli.
But you shouldn’t take this on anyone’s authority, least of all mine.
Instead, consult your own taste and style, and feel free to experiment. Take chances. We Americans have been intimidated for far too long by other people’s opinions on what we should eat.
We’ve been even more intimidated, I think, in the area of table manners and propriety. Pasta is not a mannerly food to eat. And I remember when hostesses in this country were so insecure and etiquette-conscious that they would break up noodles into inch-long pieces before they cooked them, and would choose elbow macaroni over spaghetti so that their guests wouldn’t risk the crime of slurping at the table.
I think we’ve gotten over that kind of tearoom niceness, but now there is another worry people have about eating pasta, which is of not doing things in the proper Italian way. They worry about whether the Italians use bowls or plates, and whether it’s proper to serve a soupspoon along with the fork as a help in picking up the strands, and how to avoid slurping up the last inches of long noodles.
To which I say that it’s time to stop worrying and start enjoying.
Shallow bowls are nice to have, and they make it easier to pick up the pasta. But, if you don’t have them, then plates are fine. Remember that the Chinese hold a small bowl under their chins and shovel the noodles into their mouths with their chopsticks.
Do you serve a spoon alongside your spaghetti? Italians say that only children, the infirm, and the ill-mannered use soupspoons as props for their forks when picking up pasta. I think spoons serve a more important function, that of getting up the sauce left at the bottom of the bowl. I’ve often wiped up the last flavorful puddle of oil and garlic with a crust of bread, which was a good, if starchy, solution. But if you have a soupspoon, you can capture the last cream-covered peas and prosciutto, the last basil-flavored tomato sauce or capers in olive oil from the bottom of the bowl.
As for picking up the pasta, use the spoon if it helps. The Italians have perfected a technique for picking up long noodles on a fork. They stick the fork into the mass of pasta and twirl it around one or two times until they have a neat amount of pasta wrapped around the tines. One warning: experienced eaters are careful to start with just a few strands of noodles on their forks, or else they wind up with a package that is larger than their mouths can accommodate.
How do you deal with the short strands that are left hanging from your mouth? Without embarrassment, certainly. It’s bound to happen when spaghetti is cooked just right, because only overcooked pasta is soft and pliable enough to form a tidy package around the fork. A few luscious strands are bound to hang loose, and must be taken into the mouth as skillfully as possible. If you slurp them, so be it. Because the truly best way, the only classical and true way, to eat pasta is with gusto.
