Carreño Carolynn - 100 ways to be pasta: perfect pasta recipes from Gangivecchio

It was on a summer afternoon over dinner at Gangivecchio that our agent, Janis Donnaud, suggested we write a third bookthis one about pasta. Theres nothing more Italian than pasta, she said. And this is true. Pasta is so basic for us that Mamma and I wondered if we had anything to tell people about pasta that they didnt already know. Janis and her partner, our editor Peter Gethers, assured us that based on what they had seen and tasted during the hundreds of meals we have prepared for them, we did. When they told us this, we became very enthusiastic.

We imagined that to write a book about pasta would be as natural as breathing. We know so much about this food, the most famous product of our country. We know its history and everything there is to know about cooking pasta. Inventing new ways to prepare pasta with an innate sense of what will work and what will notthis seems to be part of our genetic code as Sicilians and as Italians.

We know pasta so well that it is in our heads the way that every educated person carries simple mathematic formulas and uses them every day without knowing it. One liter of water for one hundred grams of pasta, five to ten grams of salt for every liter of water. Eighty grams of pasta for every person. We walk to the pasta drawers that are filled with so many different shapes of pasta, we choose the shape we want, weigh it on the antique scale that is central to our kitchen (and our cooking), salt the water, stir the pasta to prevent it from sticking together. We taste from time to time as it cooks because thirty seconds underdone and the pasta is tough and chewy. Boiled too long and it becomes gluey and worthless. Finally, we drain the pasta and toss it with a condimento. These actions are like a memory in our bodies. Writing this book, we had to think about these things for the first timeabout what exactly we were doing and whyso that we could pass this information on to our readers, who may not have pasta running through their blood as we do. In this book we have tried to reveal all the little tricks, gathered over the years, to help you make every pasta dish a perfect one. But the true and only trick is to cook with passion.

For us, pasta is more than just a food. It is part of our histories. This simple substance, boiled in water and salt, has managed to sustain entire populations in the darkest times of poverty. It is a good friend, a member of the family. It is something we love. While it nourishes the body, it also gives a unique sense of satisfaction and comfort that is so deep, Im afraid you might think I am crazy if I try to explain it. Though we have a diverse cuisine in Sicily, and all over Italy, it is pastain small shapes, like ditalinithat we are weaned on. It is pasta that we are fed when we are sick, and pasta that sustains us when we are old and have neither the teeth nor the digestion for anything else. When we are living well, it is over a plate of pasta that friendships are born and family ties are reinforced. As a matter of habit and history, pasta is what we reach for to comfort ourselves and our loved ones in the happiest of times and the saddest. It is the food we identify ourselves with as Italians and the food we miss most when we travel abroad.

When Italians offer a plate of pasta to friends or strangers, we are opening the doors of our homes and welcoming them inside in the most generous way. It is in that spirit that my mamma and I, who have had the good fortune to be accompanied all our lives by this most versatile of foods, these golden strands of nourishment, invite you through the tall, ancient wooden doors of Gangivecchio and offer up these recipes, these one hundred versions of the golden strands, the god, pasta, to you. So put the water on to boil. And buon appetito!