“What is your favorite shape of pasta?” my friend Marietta would ask her guests as she went around the room asking each person face to face. They would answer earnestly, and when she was done she’d turn back to the kitchen where her decision, already made, was boiling away in a big pasta pot. She would say to everyone, or no one, “Just because I asked you what your favorite shape was, doesn’t mean you’re going to get that. You’ll get the one I like.”
My experience with Italians and Italy is that they have a favorite pasta. They have a favorite everything which perhaps explains why or how their culture has survived longer than any other in Western Europe. Waverly Root wrote that “Italians have given longer continuous conscious intensive attention to the growing of food than anyone else in the Western world.”
I was once in a kitchen where the chef was busy preparing Italian food. The dishwasher, who came from Italy, was peeling potatoes. Without looking up, the chef asked, “Do you think this dish should get ground pepper?” The room went silent for a moment, then the potato peeled answered, “I do not know. My matha she does not do that.”
And so I have learned over time with things Italian that I have my own favorite shape of pasta. It evolved over years of eating pasta in Italy, and noodles in France. I have long since learned that they are not the same thing. Any noodle dish the French prepare will more than likely be delicious, but not Italian. I have only ever had one French noodle dish that I thought might qualify for consideration as Italian in spirit.
Tonight I stood in front of my stove at home. I was hungry and wanted something quick, which is to say I knew there were leftover delicious things in the frigo. I decided I would finish the last of a sauce we’d made earlier in the week of backyard tomatoes. They were not San Marzano tomatoes, but local, and the last of the season. They’d been turned into a sauce and flavored additionally with pancetta, dry porcini mushrooms, and little bits of zucchini. The flavor was sweet from the tomatoes, deep from the porcini, meaty from the pancetta, and had a nice lightness from the vegetables that allowed the olive oil they were all cooked in to participate in the panoply of flavor. Simple, clean, satisfying.
I looked in the cabinet to see what sort of pasta was available. Normally I only have my favorite, but I am to be forgiven if from time to time I allow other pasta shapes in the door. There are orechetti, which I Iove with rapini, flavored with chile flake, moistened with the water they cook in, and anointed with olive oil.
I keep penne, the smaller ones, at all times. For although they are not my favorite pasta, I nevertheless love them sauced with cream, or bechamel parma, Gruyere and cracked pepper; or with a fresh tomato sauce and olive oil.
Tonight however, I reached for a box with large tubes, a shape I don’t think I’ve ever purchased apart from the box sitting on my shelf. It is not a candidate for my favorite pasta, But there it is, and it is from Italy. Italy on the label always lends, if not credence, then an expectation that they will be flavorful and good. I cooked them in salted water for the prescribed time noted on the box. I put the sauce in a small saucepan that I’d set on top of the pan of pasta water to help it come to a boil. The sauce warmed simultaneously.
When the pasta was done, I drained it, put it into a chipped handmade flat bowl for pasta from Italy. It has a beautiful parmesan cream color which displays the pasta to perfection. I drizzled the tubes with olive that gave off its perfume as soon as it coated the naked pasta in the bowl. I spooned sauce over the top, grabbed a glass of wine and sat down, wondering what I had done by not selecting my favorite pasta.
I tasted each tube coated with a little of the delicious sauce and complimented perfectly by the wine. I enjoyed each bite. Half way through I started to measure the sauce if I was going to have enough for the last bit of pasta. I could see the excellent olive oil pooling at the bottom of the bowl, so knew that even if I failed in managing the sauce till the end, I would be compensated by the olive oil. I got reckless.
With each forkful I wondered how it would have tasted with my favorite pasta shape. I found the pasta too thick, too chewy, the shape too big. But it was nevertheless compelling coated lightly with that tomato sauce, or augmented by the chew and flavor of the earthy mushroom, or pancetta. Each bite was a revelation, and left a question; how would this have been with my favorite pasta? I was haunted to the end. That’s how it is when you are not faithful to your favorite.
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