Why is pasta used in dishes

Learn more about Tori and The History Kitchen. Pasta is one of my great food weaknesses. In my world, there are few dishes that can compete with the yum-factor of angel hair pasta topped with creamy vodka sauce. Nearly every country has its own unique version of this popular, inexpensive staple.

In Germany and Hungary they have spaetzle. In Greeze, orzo. In Poland, they enjoy pocket-like pierogi. Ashkenazi Jewish families make kreplach dumplings. And in America, pasta is prepared and served similarly to the way it is found in Italy— with the exception of all-American spaghetti and meatballs. In fact, when many of us think of pasta we think of Italian food, and most people believe that it originated there. While pasta is traditionally Italian, it actually has a very ancient history that makes it almost impossible to know who came up with the dish first.

The history of pasta is difficult to trace for several reasons. This makes it hard to differentiate pasta from other ancient dishes made from the same ingredients. When we talk about pasta, we must first define the term.

The word pasta is generally used to describe traditional Italian noodles, which differentiates it from other types of noodles around the world. Pasta is made from unleavened dough consisting of ground durum wheat and water or eggs. The use of durum wheat sets pasta apart from other forms of noodles.

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Performance Performance. Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors. Italians all over the country opened "spaghetti houses" that served spaghetti and meatballs to blue-collar workers. By the end of the twenties Italian restaurants had become the most popular ethnic restaurants in American cities, a lead they now hold nationwide.

The Depression made spaghetti less an option than a necessity, and spaghetti and meatballs began appearing regularly on millions of American tables. Just when pasta was becoming almost as ordinary a meal in America as it had long been in Italy, one Italian was telling his countrymen to stop eating it.

In the early thirties Italy was appalled when F T. Marinetti, the founder of Futurist poetry and painting, published his Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine , which called for a ban on all pasta on the grounds that pasta was responsible for "the weakness, pessimism, inactivity, nostalgia, and neutralism" he saw all around him.

Italians, who should be thin, the better to ride in "ultralight aluminum trains," should eat only rice as a starch. Macaroni was a "symbol of oppressive dullness, plodding deliberation, and fat-bellied conceit. Dishes combining strange ingredients chosen for their color as well as their taste would sometimes be eaten and sometimes merely passed under the nose of the diner to excite his curiosity.

A cookbook put together by Marinetti and Luigi Fillia, an artist, and published in included dishes that today sound almost familiar: winter-cherry risotto; a spread of tuna fish, apples, olives, and Japanese peanuts, to be served on a cold egg-and-jam omelet; and an under-ripe date filled with cream cheese and liqueur, wrapped in raw ham and a lettuce leaf, and served with pickled chili pepper and small pieces of Parmesan cheese.

The Futurists presaged nouvelle cuisine. The Italians were not interested in the bizarre suggestions and were outraged at the idea of giving up pasta. Even Americans were alarmed. Mussolini did not ban pasta. Rather, he initiated the growing of durum wheat in central and northern Italy in an effort to make the country self-sufficient.

Factories in the north began making pasta in the s, and electric drying tunnels replaced sea and volcanic breezes. Naples became steadily less important in the manufacture of pasta, and today the province of Campania is only the sixth-largest producer of pasta in the country. I recently visited a number of pasta factories in Italy to learn how pasta is made and which brands are the best. Disappointingly, none of the factories I saw resembled the smokestack-crammed temples of the Industrial Revolution depicted on boxes.

Pasta factories today are anonymous and modern, and their proprietors generally do not welcome tours. The young man guiding me through Braibanti, a factory near Parma, stopped in his tracks when I asked to climb the stairs to one machine to look at the addition of water and eggs to dough for dried egg noodles—one of the few parts of the manufacturing process that makes a difference in quality from brand to brand.

Luckily, I was able to see the manufacturing process on a scale that made sense to me—at the small and delightful factory of Martelli, which many cognoscenti consider thebest exporter of pasta in Italy. The company's only peer's are tiny factories near Naples, whose products are hard to find even in Italy and are almost unknown here.

The factory is in four or five rooms of two medieval buildings in Lari, a Tuscan hill town twenty miles from Pisa. The buildings are in the shadow of a twelfth-century castle at the top of the hill.

The castle appears on the cheerful, bright-yellow packages, whose text is written in what looks like a very neat child's hand. I arrived on a Saturday afternoon to find Dino and Mario Martelli and their wives, Lucia and Valeria, packing maccheroni. The women wore yellow aprons that matched the packages. These four are the only employees. Dino and Mario's father and uncle started the business in by buying out a local pasta maker.

Today the brothers use the same equipment the company had in the s, before high-temperature drying tunnels became popular. The Martellis make only four shapes—spaghetti; spaghettini, or thin spaghetti; maccheroni; and penne, diagonally cut ridged tubes named for quill pens. The Martelli factory has only one "pasta line," as the machine that mixes, kneads, extrudes, and dries dough is called.

The one at Martelli is small—about eight feet high, seven feet wide, and eighteen feet long. The brothers mixed a batch of dough for spaghetti to show me the process.

They buy durum from Canada, the United States, and elsewhere and have it ground at a mill nearby, so that it will be fresh. Italian manufacturers are known for their skill at blending many durums to achieve the color and texture they seek. Americans are rarely as discriminating. This disparity, more than anything else, accounts for the superiority of Italian over American pasta.

Mixing and kneading take from thirty to forty minutes at Martelli, as opposed to the twenty usual in other factories; the Martellis say that long kneading improves flavor. The dough is forced at great pressure through holes in one of four dies, each of which is shaped like a big hockey puck; the choice of die determines the shape of the pasta as it is extruded.

If pins are suspended from wires in each hole the pasta will be hollow after it is forced through the die; the hole is bigger where the dough enters than where it leaves, so the two sides of the tube are joined as the dough streams out. If the holes are notched where the dough enters them, the pasta will be curved. The Martellis use only bronze dies, because the rough, porous surface these create makes for better sauce absorption.

Teflon-lined dies, which most manufacturers use today, produce pretty, polished surfaces that don't hold sauce well. The Martellis are careful not to apply too much pressure or to allow the temperature of the dough to rise too high during extrusion, lest the proteins in the semolina be denatured, making the cooked product soft.

How long and at what temperature pasta is dried are also important to the quality of cooked pasta. The Martellis use an automatic dryer only for the first stage of drying, which lasts about an hour. The pasta stays in the tunnel for several more hours to enable the humidity in the center and on the surface to equalize. The brothers then carry it on poles or screens to one of several drying closets, which have appealing doors of wood and glass.

Other manufacturers send the pasta through another and much longer tunnel for between six and twenty-eight hours, often at temperatures so high that they risk denaturing the protein. At Martelli the pasta stays in the closets, which have curved, tin-lined walls to distribute air from small fans at the top, for two days or more the pasta left to Naples winds could take as long as a week to dry.

The comparatively low temperatures greatly improve flavor, according to the Martellis, who claim to be the only manufacturers left who use drying closets. They doubtless are the only manufacturers to dry pasta in closets that have a view of miles of Tuscan hills and valleys interrupted only by grapevines and castles.

When the pasta is dry, it travels through what looks like a laundry chute to the adjacent building, where it is packed and crated. The Martellis don't cut the spaghetti and spaghettini; as a sign of their craftsmanship they leave it rounded where the strands have hung on the poles.

The shop's production is small, but the family claims to like it that way. My visits to other factories in Italy and the United States confirmed the differences that the Martellis had pointed out. The kneading was faster, the dies were Teflon, the drying tunnels were so long that the rooms holding them looked like sound stages. One factory I visited—the most determinedly high-tech—was Fini, which consists of a long, low white structure adjoining a sixteenth-century building that until housed the factory.

Originally a monastery, it is now the office building, and at the main entrance big sliding glass doors lead to a chapel, which has a carved Madonna in a niche, topped by a blue neon halo.

The new factory building is almost overwhelmingly luxurious. The floors are terra-cotta tile, the walls white stucco, and there are stainless-steel doors and counters everywhere. One storage room has wooden floor-to-ceiling shelves finished as carefully as library shelves and filled with wheels of Parmesan cheese. Modena, a city midway between Bologna and Milan, where Fini is situated, has the highest per capita income of any city in Italy, so perhaps the luxury isn't surprising.

In the center of the city Fini maintains two excellent food shops and a restaurant that is considered one of the best in the country for traditional Italian food. Fini makes only egg pasta. The dough is extruded in long sheets that are then either cut into long ribbons, which are sold dried, or punched into shapes that are filled and shipped frozen, to be sold either frozen or thawed. The fillings are made with the same quality of Parmesan cheese and meats that Fini sells separately the company opened at the turn of the century as a purveyor of cured meats and sausages.

The differences between Fini and Prince, one of the largest manufacturers in the United States, were instructive. The eggs, for example, are fresh at Fini and at every Italian factory I visited: my Italian guides made much of how frequently their eggs are delivered and how difficult it is to keep the storage tanks immaculate and at the right temperature.

The guide at Prince showed me blocks of frozen eggs and said that powdered eggs are frequently used; a woman in Prince's test laboratories told me that frozen and powdered eggs are the standard in America. The guide boasted about the speed of the Italian high-temperature drying tunnels that Prince had installed. The American factory seemed far more concerned with volume than with quality. Indulging a taste for Italian pasta might soon become more expensive than it is, if American pasta makers have their way.

The Italian manufacturers I visited assumed that I had come to discuss a nasty trade war taking place between the United States and the European Economic Community over Italian pasta. The controversy began in , when the EEC started subsidizing exports of pasta, in order, it said, to make up for the higher price that manufacturers pay the EEC for European durum. The "restitution," as the EEC called it, allowed Italians to compete with American makers on inexpensive pasta, not just fancy brands.

This was too much for American pasta makers, who could tolerate high-priced imports but not cheap ones. It accused importers of undercutting American manufacturers by as much as 25 percent on wholesale prices and 15 percent on retail. The group, which was founded in , was faced with the first hot political issue of its life. It met with little success.

Just two months later the office of the U. Trade Representative began looking for a way to retaliate against a tariff that the EEC had imposed on American citrus products in order to promote the Mediterranean citrus industry.

The White House announced that unless the United States could reach an agreement with the EEC on the citrus tariff, it would impose a 40 percent tariff on European pasta without egg and a 25 percent tariff on pasta with egg, to go into effect at the end of October.

The American tariff went into effect on schedule and has caused a furor in Italy, which sees itself as penalized for a problem the citrus tariff that it has nothing to do with. Manufacturers of expensive Italian pasta are especially upset that the tariff is calculated according to wholesale price rather than weight. This hurts their products more than it hurts the cheap imports that the American manufacturers set out to restrain. Today there is a standoff: the EEC has slapped tariffs on American lemons and walnuts which doesn't help Italy ; it continues to subsidize pasta; and it is unlikely to remove the tariff on American citrus soon.

The National Pasta Association plans to hang on to its rather skewed victory. As soon as the tariff went into effect, it mailed promotional literature accompanied by packages of domestic pasta to congressmen telling them to remember that American pasta must be protected.

Before the tariff was imposed, the NPA predicted that, unchecked, Italian pasta could claim a 20 percent market share by or —something extremely unlikely, given that it had only a 4. Prices of Italian pasta in stores have remained competitive, in part because of the EEC subsidy and in part because of discounting by importers. The volume of Italian pasta imported into the United States is as high as it was before the tariff, and American manufacturers are taking note.

Prince, for example, is already making a line of "President's Silver Award" pasta, priced at roughly double the price of its other pasta and packaged in a black box—this year's sign of an upscale product. Italian brands of pasta, whatever they cost, taste better, I think, than most American ones—they have a clean, slightly nutty flavor and above all a texture that stays firm until you finish eating. Taste and texture make all the difference in pasta, but judging by what most American restaurants and home cooks serve, they are unknown attributes of pasta in this country.

Many people are surprised to learn that dried pasta can have any flavor at all, let alone stay firm and taste lighter than what they are used to. I recently advised a woman who regularly served truffled omelets and caviar and blinis to her children while they were growing up to buy an imported Italian pasta, something she had never done.

The brand she found at her supermarket was Spigadoro, a commonly distributed import whose quality Italians rank solidly in the middle. Italians criticize Americans for adding soft flour to pasta, and with reason.

This, as one importer of Italian pasta put it, is like boasting about mixing diamonds with rocks. Pasta made with common flour, which is less expensive than semolina, leaves the cooking water white with starch, and quickly turns soggy on the plate, even if it is drained when it seems to be what Italians call al dente —literally, "to the tooth.

American manufacturers can add flour or not as they please, because there are no laws restricting them to semolina. Even so, many American manufacturers, such as Prince, Ronzoni, and Hershey Foods, which markets six brands of pasta, use only semolina. You can't tell from looking through the cellophane much about how dried pasta will cook or taste.

It should have an even buff color; gray could mean the presence of soft flour. Don't be alarmed if you see tiny black spots. Semolina is milled much more coarsely than ordinary flour, and flecks of bran usually show. A finely pitted, dull surface is far preferable to a glossy one. It suggests that the pasta was made with a bronze die and will hold sauce better. The regions in Italy famous for the quality of their dried pasta are Campania and Abruzzo.

Fortunately, these are also the two most widely distributed imports. Gerardo di Nola, made in Campania, is a cult brand that I've never been able to find. You should buy or order Martelli at least once, if only to have a standard against which to judge other dried pasta. If you can't find any of these brands locally, try any Italian brand available.

Besides Spigadoro, made in Umbria, a widely distributed standard Italian brand is Barilla, made in Emilia; Barilla is the world's largest pasta manufacturer. Gauging portion sizes trips up nearly everyone. The standard portion in Italy, and the size recommended on packages, is two ounces. This is fine for a first course to cut the appetite without killing it.

I find three ounces an ideal portion for a main course, but hungry people might prefer four. I use a scale, because 1 cannot judge by eye, and the trick of putting my thumb to my index finger doesn't work when measuring short pasta.

Neither does using liquid measures. A half-cup of farfalle, or bows farfalle means "butterflies" , is not the same as a half cup of ziti, or ridged tubes ziti means "bridegrooms" in southern Italy; the shape 'as traditionally served at weddings in Sicily.

To cook pasta you need a lot of water, so that it will come back to the boil soon after you add the pasta, so that there will be more than enough water for the pasta to absorb pasta usually doubles in volume when cooked , and so that the pasta will keep moving as it cooks and not stick together. Start with a gallon for the first quarter pound and add one quart for each additional quarter pound.

When the water reaches a rolling boil, add a tablespoon of salt for each gallon of water, which will season the pasta you can add lemon juice if you prefer to avoid salt. Cooks differ on whether or not to add oil to the water to prevent sticking. Italians think that it makes pasta absorb water unevenly. Harold McGee, the author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen , finds this unlikely, and also thinks that oil won't keep the pasta from sticking unless you add it to cooked pasta.

But he does say that oil reduces the foam on the surface and helps prevent water from boiling over. Barbara Kafka suggests in her book Food for Friends that you put several tablespoons of oil into the pot just before you drain it; this will discourage sticking without making the pasta so oily that the sauce slides off.

Add the pasta all at once. Bend long pasta into the water with a two-pronged cooking fork or a wooden spoon. Separate any kind of pasta, so that it doesn't stick, before the water comes back to the boil, and keep it moving as it cooks.

The water should be at an active, if not passionate, boil. Don't leave the room. Italians say never ever break long pasta as you add it—you should learn to eat it like a man. This means not twirling it against a spoon, a practice fit only for milquetoasts, but instead securing two or three strands with a fork and twirling them against the edge of a plate. This is accomplished more easily in the wide, shallow soup bowls in which Italians serve pasta, but it is quite possible to do on a flat plate.

There will be dangling ends. Accept them. Start timing when the water comes back to the boil. Test after three minutes for dried pasta with egg or five minutes for dried pasta without. The only sure way to test is by biting into a piece. If you wait until it sticks when thrown against a wall—a custom I had always assumed was Italian but can find no Italian to own up to—it will probably be overdone: Breaking a piece apart to examine the interior is also chancy. Pasta is done when the color is uniform, but since it continues to cook after you drain it, you need to know exactly how tiny a dot of uncooked dough should remain in the center before you drain.

I have never seen an Italian cook hold a piece of broken pasta up to the light. Everyone tastes the pasta he is making until it is slightly firmer than he wants it to be, and then drains it. Rather than drain pasta in a colander, Italian cooks usually lift it out of the pot with tongs or a strainer. In this way the pasta stays wet, so that as it finishes cooking out of the pot, it has water to absorb; otherwise it would stick to itself immediately. If you intend to make pasta with any frequency, look for a pot with a colander insert, which will enable you to lift all the pasta out at once.

Ignore instructions to add cold water to the pot to stop cooking, because the water left on the drained pasta won't be hot enough to evaporate and will make the pasta slimy. For the same reason it is a bad idea to rinse the pasta after it is cooked—a cardinal sin in Italy. If you use a colander, be sure that it is solidly placed in the sink, that there is nothing in the sink that you don't want bobbing near your pasta, and that you take your glasses off first.

After cooking, good pasta should look moist rather than gummy. All the pieces should be separate and have a uniform texture, but they won't if you undercook the pasta. The water should be clear. If it is floury, there was ordinary flour in the pasta. Save some of the water the pasta was cooked in.

Even if it looks clear it will have some starch, which can be useful for thinning a sauce and binding it at the same time. The cooking water can also be useful for adding to the pasta as it finishes cooking, in case you drained it too much. However you drain cooked pasta, transfer it right away to a warm bowl.

The plates should be hot too.