An a-Z of Pasta

Busiate is still a homemade shape, one which varies according to the cook. At the Anna Tasca Lanza cooking school, for example, rather than a pierced rope busiate is more like a ringlet or a ribbon round a maypole. It is also a factory-made shape and one worth seeking out, the long spiral the most magnificent sauce-catcher imaginable, especially wi

Sumerians are thought to have first domesticated the wild seeds of eight neolithic founder crops – barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch, flax, emmer wheat, einkorn wheat

Like many early rolled forms, fusilli was traditionally a feast-day shape. When I quiz my Sicilian parents-in-law, the daughter of a tomato farmer and son of a baker, about pasta, and especially when I try to entangle them in (my) nostalgia, they remind me that as children they, like 80 per cent of Italy’s then rural population, ate mostly vegetabl

There are two pots of salt by the cooker. One of sale grosso, coarse, rubbly sea salt ideal for salting pasta water, in it a spoon that holds almost exactly 10 grams. The other pot is of sale fino, fine salt, also sea salt, for everything else. I am a great believer in adding little, often, that is adding tiny, cautious pinches of salt throughout c

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

the consumption of cereals has four stages. The first is that it is consumed like any other wild fruit or berry, raw. The second is that it is toasted or boiled. The third is that it is milled. The fourth is that the milled cereal is kneaded with water, creating a mass of dough that can be shaped and cooked. Archaeological evidence shows all four o

it is a marvellous ingredient, seasoning, binding, giving richness, bringing everything together.

People who cook pasta well use the formula, even if it looks as if they are freewheeling, 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.

Recipes serve 4, except where noted otherwise. Regarding the quantity of pasta, a sweep through Italian guidelines and opinion finds the general advice is 60–100g of dried pasta, 100–120g of fresh pasta, 120–150g of filled pasta, 100–130g of gnocchi per person. The lower end of this range can seem modest, until you remember that pasta is often serv