An a-Z of Pasta

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.

Pecorino simply means sheep’s milk cheese and there are hundreds of varieties from all over Italy, the ancestors of which are some of the most ancient cheeses. In this book, however, I mostly refer to pecorino romano, sharp, salty, undeniably sheepish, also persistent, ringing in your mouth and stinging the tiny cut on your tongue long after the cr

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

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

For the most part, peperoncini are used moderately for gentle heat and spice in Italian cooking. The most common way of cooking with them is to add a small piece (say 2.5cm) of fresh or dried peperoncino (generally whole but sometimes chopped or crumbled), along with the garlic to the olive oil, then fry both gently to coax out flavour and heat – l

fusilli, single or double spiral, is the third most popular shape in Italy.

In 1944, aged 41, Mafalda was one of the millions killed in concentration camps.

The way pasta is cooked in Campania and Naples is beautiful choreography. Often, pasta is removed from the boiling water – usually with a spider sieve – before it reaches the desirable point of al dente. This means that the last minutes of pasta cooking are done in with the sauce. In these last minutes, usually in a pan large enough to really jolt

In 1902 Princess Mafalda of Savoy, the second daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III, was born. This shape is named for her, one of several designed to commemorate the House of Savoy, which was on the Italian throne from Unification in 1861 until the end of the Second World War. Conquest was also given a shape, tripolini, taking their name from the I