The democracy of pasta

The word pasta comes from the Greek and literally means "flour with sauce". I find this definition, however, a little limited: I almost consider it offensive. Because my way of interpreting pasta is more versatile, metamorphic. In fact, I enjoy moulding it, using it depending on the recipe and the sensation I want to create. Sometimes it’s a simple container, others it’s a texture, others yet it’s the main flavour in a dish. It can be a complement to a sauce, or without any sauce. It may be, in other words, that I consider and call “pasta” even what, in fact, I shouldn’t consider as such.

In this way, however, I can include in this great family even all that is not made with flour, like gnocchi. And in fact, on the occasion of Identità di Pasta, I will prepare some “heretical” gnocchi: with no flour and no eggs, but made with parsley, trying to give some respect to one of the most abused and mishandled herbs in the modern history of gastronomy.

In other cases, I simulate with a vegetal ingredient the result I would normally obtain from a binder of animal origin (i.e. eggs) and I get my hands on a very Italian egg-pasta without eggs, with the texture of a pasta thousands of km from my Piedmont: namely Japanese udon. Italian pasta intertwines with oriental pasta in a constant game. There’s also the traditional Southern dried pasta that meets my territory thanks to the exclusive use of corn-flour: pasta made from polenta that thus transforms a traditional hot, calorific dish and with a long preparation, into one you can make every day and for every palate.

Pasta is democracy: it’s the same, for the rich and the poor, it allows you to have high cuisine for a few cents. It’s like your dream partner because it’s like you wish it to be: al dente, more cooked, with or without sauce, hot, cold. I had a morbid relationship with pasta for many, many years. I ate it at all hours, even unwillingly. They used it to reward me when I went on my bike: "today you did great, so you deserve a double portion". But also to punish me: "today, with that number on the back, you looked like a kerbstone... no pasta".

It has also been my fuel for hundreds of thousands of kilometres. So much so that I began to think that my body wasn’t composed of 60% water, but pasta. Its roots were so deep inside me. Pasta, after all, is like Italy with all its contradictions, its differences, region by region. Copied, loved, eaten all over the world even if it’s not only an Italian history.