An a-Z of Pasta

The painful truth is the star side of the box grater is the best one. It produces fat crumbs that melt differently to those made by a microplane, and this is particularly important when the crumbs are an ingredient in, say, cacio e pepe.

Who better to mirror the changing shape of a country and society than a newly industrialized industry that made shapes. I’d love to travel back in time and eavesdrop on the conversation about which shape best honoured a newborn princess or a victory abroad, how best to extrude a car radiator, wheel, aeroplane propeller or flying saucer.

While classic ridged penne are the widely consumed favourites, and Italy’s second most sold shape, there are penne variations. Bigger pennoni (my favourite of the family), and in descending order of size siblings, pennette, pennine and pennettine, also mezze penne, half sized, which are ideal with peas, lemon and mascarpone.

Like pepper-dusted decorations, the lozenges the size of small loaves hanging in Italian salumerie or delis are guanciale, whole pig cheeks cured in salt. Look at a cross-section and you will see guanciale is mostly fat, streaked with pink meat. But what gorgeous, seasoned fat! That renders into sweet, rounded melted fat and a nugget of meat.

1 litre of boiling water and 10g of coarse salt (5g of fine) for every 100g of pasta. I find it useful to have a pasta pan so familiar I know the water levels for 3, 4 and 5 litres, and a spoon that holds 10g of coarse salt. If as a rule you cook a 500g packet of pasta it is not a bad idea to weigh out 50g of coarse salt as an example, then stare a

What we know is that between 902 and 1165 during the overlapping Arab and Norman rule of Sicily the art of drying pasta, tria, was evolved and industrious. We have the enchanting description by the Arab geographer Al-Idrisi in 1154 as part of a book documenting the geography and rituals of the island he authored for Sicily’s then Norman king, Roger

Pasta, from the word impasto – a magma of flour and liquid – can be made from any flour; the Italian pasta lexicon includes shapes made from chestnut flour, acorn flour, rice flour, corn flour, broad bean flour and buckwheat. The hard king and tender queen, though, are hard or durum wheat semolina flour and soft wheat 00 flour.

Historians suggest the first written source of something like a ravioli was in the Liber de Coquina, ‘The book of cooking/cookery’, maybe the oldest medieval cookbook, dated around 1285–1304. Within its appendix is a study of Arab gastronomy from 1100 noting a sambusaj, a triangle of pasta filled with ground meat. This date coincides with the end o

Cheese is not simply an ingredient, but an enabler, bringing things together. Penne and peas are not particularly well matched, either physically or emotionally, but give them a handful of grated Parmesan or a spoonful of ricotta, or both, and the next thing you know they’ve eloped and got married.