What a debt of gratitude we owe to the Italians for convincing the rest of the world of pasta's inherent qualities and practicalities. When living in Italy with very little money, it certainly sustained me, being just about the only wholesome meal I could afford on a daily basis!
Pasta has to be one of the most useful items in anybody's store cupboard. Versatile, economical, healthy - durum wheat pasta contains 16% protein, it's non-fattening - 33 calories per 25g | 1oz, as a carbohydrate it's stamina-boosting and it's also considered beneficial to the brain! What more could one ask for? A basic food without great flavour of its own, pasta has endless possibilities when used as a vehicle for other flavours.
While it used to be considered too 'ordinary' to serve to guests in your home - a dish for the less well-off, pasta has rightly emerged since the mid-eighties as a leader in fashionable restaurants and sophisticated delicatessen counters in this part of the world. Of course, the Italians have considered it the most important part of their culinary lives for centuries, almost a cult object in Italian cuisine, as important to them as rice to the Far Easterners or even dumplings, to the Germans. A story of astonishing success, pasta was being eaten by the Sicilians and Southern Italians long before it was documented after the invention of printing in the fifteenth century. 'Pasta Asciutto' (plain durum flour and water) was the staple diet of the poor, while the better-off could afford to stuff pasta - and then themselves - with meat. Nowadays, with seemingly endless varieties of pasta and ingredients available, we have a vast choice of how to use it.
There are two schools of thought on what is the best type of pasta to use: fresh, or dried. Perhaps a lot of chefs wouldn't agree, but I'm going to stick my neck out and recommend dried pasta. The best is made from durum (hard) wheat, as opposed to bread flour. Dried wholemeal pasta is also good, usually made from durum wheat flour and/or durum wheat semolina. While I would normally opt for anything fresh over dried, I have to say that I prefer dried pasta. When buying fresh pasta, I have often found the quality to be substandard, it has a short shelf-life (only 2 - 3 days) and it is infinitely more temperamental and difficult to cook than the dried variety. It goes from the perfect 'al dente' (with a bit of bite in the middle) to a mushy goo in a very short time if you take your mind off it for a moment. This is mainly because most of the fresh pasta available is made from a low-protein flour, and not the durum wheat flour which produces the 'bite' in the middle. This also means that fresh pasta is largely unsuitable for reheating or eating cold in salads.
It's quite likely that if you're adept at baking bread and handling dough, you would also be good at making your own pasta, given the right flour and equipment, but that's for another day. The recipes we'll look at here will involve dried pasta. It's important when cooking pasta to use plenty of lightly salted water and add a teaspoon of vegetable oil to stop it from sticking together and congealing. Use 1150ml | 2 pints of water and one teaspoon of salt per 100g | 4oz pasta. When the water is boiling, throw all the pasta in at once, and stir immediately with a wooden spoon. Each type of pasta takes a different time to reach the 'al dente' stage, so read the instructions on the packet with regard to the cooking time, but do check it periodically. The pasta should be poached in simmering water, rather than boiled. Immediately it is ready, drain the pasta in a colander, shake well and return to the saucepan. It should then be mixed well with the sauce over a low heat, to ensure that it's piping hot when it reaches the table.
As well as at least 100 different types and shapes of pasta, there are also coloured pastas. Ingredients used to colour them include spinach, tomato, beetroot, chilli, saffron, mushroom and squid ink but coloured pasta is more pleasing to the eye than to the tastebuds, unless cooked in an equivalent type of stock or with the colouring agent added to the water. Click here for a list of the most readily available types of dried pasta.
If, like me, you invariably cook too much pasta for the number of mouths requiring it, you may find the following rough guide useful:
For a starter: 60g | 2.5oz uncooked, dried pasta per person
For a main course: 100g | 4oz uncooked, dried pasta
As tomatoes and pasta are often twinned together, here's a recipe for a good, basic tomato sauce, to which you can add just about anything that falls out of your fridge. Pesto is another good Italian basic and a couple of teaspoons of this will enhance most pasta sauces. Spaghetti alla Carbonara is a classic Italian dish and one which everyone should have in their repertoire.
Here are some really quick and tasty pasta sauces, ideal for those 'just in the door and nothing to eat' moments! None of these takes more than ten minutes, and each recipe makes enough for six. Experiment by using different sizes and shapes of pasta; short spirals and shells are better in a chunky sauce; ribbon pasta, like tagliatelle, is better with a looser, runnier sauce.
Smoked Salmon and Lumpfish Roe Pasta
Cheese and Spring Onion Pasta
Creamy Mushroom Pasta
Everyone has their own variation on Spaghetti Bolognese. Here's a slightly different variation, along the lines of the quick and tasty theme - Chicken Bolognese. For a day when you have slightly more time you could try this classic Spaghetti in Salsa Napoletana, also known as Spaghetti Neapolitan.
Tommy FitzHerbert
