According to Corby Kummer, upper-class Americans also purchased pasta imported from Sicily, which then, as today, had more cachet than the domestic product. The information in the remainder of this article comes largely from Mr. As other pasta factories sprouted up, the cost of pasta became more affordable. By the time of the Civil War to , even the working classes could afford a pasta dinner. Cookbooks of the period indicate that the common way to prepare pasta was still baked with cheese and cream.
The huge wave of Italian immigration that began toward the end of the 19th century was ultimately responsible for pasta becoming an American staple. From to , more than five million Italians immigrated to America, three quarters of them from the regions south of Rome.
What became Italian-American cuisine was different from the old country cuisines for other reasons, too. There were fewer varieties of fruit, vegetables and cheeses available than in Italy, and much more meat which was cheap and plentiful in America. The iconic Italian-American dish, spaghetti and meatballs, is unknown in Italy.
It probably had its origin in several baked Neapolitan pasta dishes served at religious festivals such as Carnival and Christmas. Naples is the capital of Campania. But remembering that meat in Italy is costly, these dishes used meatballs the size of walnuts—unlike the American version that used meatballs the size of eggs—and also included other ingredients as ham and boiled eggs.
The large portions served, and heavy seasonings of garlic, oregano and hot pepper flakes, are American developments. 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. Now is the time to add some oil or butter if you are afraid that the pasta will be sticky. This is also the time to add hard grated cheese if you are using it, because it will melt evenly.
Don't use too much—a teaspoon or two per portion should suffice—and think twice before using any. Cheese is contraindicated for many sauces. When it is used, it is as a seasoning. The best is Parmesan, and the best Parmesan is Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Some cheese stores try to pass off Argentine cheese as the real thing, but it is salty and flat by comparison with the nutty, dry, mellow original. American Parmesan does not bear even a passing resemblance to Italian. Look for "Parmigiano-Reggiano" on the rind: it is stamped on every square centimeter. Buy small pieces with rind on—they will keep better—and grate only as much as you need.
It is difficult to find a good version of the other common grating cheese—pecorino Romano, which is made of sheep's milk. Add about two thirds of the sauce you intend to use and gently stir it in. Don't lift the pasta two feet over the bowl as you stir, or it will cool off.
And don't add too much sauce. It should just coat the pasta, with no excess at all. Pasta doused in sauce revolts Italians, who when they see it suddenly understand why Americans say that pasta is fattening. A recipe for baked ziti in Pastahhh , an NPA newsletter, calls for one and a half pounds of meat, one pound of ricotta, a half pound of mozzarella, and two cups of white sauce for one pound of pasta—American abundance carried to a perilous extreme.
Two tablespoons of a thick sauce or a quarter to a third of a cup of a liquid one should suffice per portion. Put the last spoonful on top of each serving, so that the diner can see what the sauce looks like and have something to do. Another way to mix sauce and pasta is to drain the pasta when it is harder than al dente and heat it for no more than a minute with the sauce.
This is helpful for fish-and-wine or stock-based sauces, which do not coat pasta readily: the pasta will absorb sauce as it finishes cooking. Don't waste a second trying to make the plate look any better. Pasta dishes should be served immediately and thus do not lend themselves to presentation, which may be one reason why the French came only recently to pasta.
For example, when you see a photograph like one that appears in The Joy of Pasta , showing spaghetti surrounded by a neat circle of carrot batons and slices of artichoke sprinkled with red pepper flakes, you can be sure that the dish tasted terrible.
It took too long to arrange. You need never worry about serving a beautifully composed plate of pasta—only about being served one. Most American books on pasta give plenty of good recipes for dried pasta but say outright that the really classy kind—the only kind fit for showing off the most luxurious and painstaking sauces—is fresh. Pasta shops and high-priced lines of fresh pasta have reinforced this idea.
Fresh pasta, however, is another kind of dish altogether and one that many discerning people don't prefer. The legions of Americans making pasta by hand may be the same people who made French bread fifteen years ago. Both practices are anomalous to Europeans. French housewives never make bread; they buy it.
And very few Italians make or even buy homemade pasta anymore. I asked a fashionable Milanese woman, Lucia Mistretta, about fresh pasta; not only is she an excellent cook but her husband, Giorgio, writes restaurant reviews and guides. Without missing a beat she gave me the authentic recipe for egg pasta as prepared in the region of Emilia, which is famous for it grams of flour to one egg , and cited regional variations and alterations for filled shapes.
She then explained that she always serves dried pasta, even at dinner parties, because it's what she thinks of as true Italian pasta, and that nearly everyone she knows, even in Emilia, considers fresh pasta a rare exception to the rule of dried.
Even after mastering fresh pasta, which takes patience, you might well decide that dried is more interesting to eat, besides being a great deal more varied and less time-consuming to prepare. Still, if you ever want a lasagna with the proper very long, thin, wide noodles, or a delicious filled pasta, or if you want to try sauces using wild mushrooms or game—examples of many that are traditional only with fresh pasta—you must learn to make your own.
Exotic fillings in bright-colored pastas are an area of fierce competition among chefs all over the country. For example, within a ten-minute walk of my house, in Boston, which is neither in nor near an Italian neighborhood and is distant from any center of gastronomic innovation , there is a traditional Tuscan restaurant, the Ristorante Toscano, where Vinicio Paoli makes tortelli filled with wild boar; a fresh-pasta shop, Pasta Pronto, where Richard Bosch makes lobster ravioli news a few years ago, now standard , and a nuova cucina restaurant, Michela's, where Todd English makes tomato agnolotti filled with goat cheese, wild leek, and porcini mushrooms.
I have responded to the challenge of having so many talented cooks in such close proximity by putting filled pastas to one of their most important tasks—using up leftovers. Even subjected to such an indignity, ravioli, say, or tortellini are always impressive. Once you have made pasta that is neither mushy nor rubbery and you have experimented with the ways different shapes and thicknesses combine with different sauces.
But only after you have succeeded in making fresh pasta will you be able to judge what's available commercially. I made pasta every night for a few weeks and became proficient. It was an uphill struggle.
I got myself into trouble by insisting on learning how to perform each step without the aid of a machine. The hardest thing to learn to do by hand was rolling out the dough. Marcella and Victor Hazan, in More Classic Italian Cooking , are so persuasive about the superiority of hand-rolled pasta that I was determined to experience for myself the small but crucial variations in thickness, and the enhanced absorption of sauce they promise.
Luckily, a master pasta maker agreed to let me watch him. At the end I came to a few conclusions about what should and should not be done by hand. Sandro Fioriti, a chef from Umbria who has made Sandro's, his delightful restaurant in New York City, famous for its pasta, spent four hours with me one Saturday afternoon and taught me more about making pasta than I thought there was to learn.
We mixed pasta by hand, in a processor, and in a mixer with a dough hook; kneaded pasta by hand, with dough hook, and in a rolling machine, the kind most people use at home; rolled pasta by hand and in a rolling machine; and cut pasta by hand and with a rolling machine. We also compared Italian with American flour. Fioriti was unfazed by so much work before a long night in his restaurant. He is a giant of a man with arms the size of a teenager's legs, and a dozen batches of pasta big ones—most of them contained a dozen eggs are nothing to him.
The results of the many comparisons we made pointed to the absolute necessity of doing one thing by hand—and to my joy, it wasn't rolling. It was cutting. Fioriti put two dishes of tagliatelle in front of me, one cut by machine and one cut by hand. They had both been rolled by machine.
He ladled a bit of tomato sauce over each. The sauce stayed where it was over the hand-cut noodles, which slowly but surely absorbed it when I mixed them. The sauce on the machine-cut noodles immediately slid to the bottom and wanted to stay there even as I tossed the noodles. I felt like I was watching Brand X in a paper-towel commercial. Fioriti explained. The rolling machine works like a wringer. Pasta dough is rolled between two steel cylinders that can be adjusted so that the sheet becomes progressively thinner.
The rollers have some play, in order to accept a thick ball at the beginning at the machine's widest setting it completes the job of kneading. The rollers do not compress the dough and make its surface slick, as many purists argue. What does do this, Fioriti explained, is using the machine's cutting attachment, because its serrated rollers have no play at all. All of the pasta at Sandro's is rolled by machine and cut by hand, and purists say they like it.
You can buy a rolling machine, then, with a clear conscience, if you promise never to use the cutting attachment. The brand with the best reputation is Imperia; Atlas is another good one.
Machines come with a removable crank and a C-clamp to anchor them to a counter. Electric extruding machines don't work the dough long enough, and the pasta they make is often gummy and unpleasant. At home I was able to reproduce the results that Fioriti had achieved. The pasta cut by hand, whether it was rolled by hand or by machine, absorbed sauce, and the pasta cut by machine repelled it.
I couldn't see much difference between the pasta stretched by hand and the pasta stretched by machine. Yes, there were variations in the thickness of the hand-rolled pasta and yes, they were noticeable. But I don't think they were worth the effort of stretching and swearing at the dough. The uneven edges and different widths that result from hand-cutting are artistry enough.
I pass on two pieces of advice for making homemade pasta: the first few times you try, have something else ready for dinner, and don't work in front of strangers.
Plotkin offers very good and largely authentic recipes, written for one or two portions, which I find a great convenience, and a running travelogue that could make anyone long for Italy. There are many variations, of course, to the basic pasta dough. Of the colored pastas, which are beginning to look like paint samples, I condone green, because you can taste the spinach in it. Red is suspect, on the grounds of being trendy, but Plotkin does have an appealing recipe for tomato-and-carrot dough in his book.
Anything else is out of the question. Don't be misled when you see beet pasta or squid-ink pasta on a menu. There will be beets or squid ink in the dough, all right, but only for the color. You won't be able to taste them at all, unless they also appear in the sauce yet both have flavors worth tasting, especially the briny, musky, rich flavor of squid ink. Handmade noodles come in three basic widths.
The widest measures about a quarter of an inch and is called tagliatelle tagliare means "to cut" in the north and fettucine from the word for "ribbon" or "band," the kind used for tying cartons in the south.
The next widest measures at most an eighth of an inch and is called tagliarini, tagliolini, or, incorrectly, linguine—the name properly refers only to dried pasta. Narrower cuts are rare because they're not easy to do by hand.
The finest of all is called capelli d'angeli or angel's hair. For whatever noodle you choose, allow five or six ounces a portion; fresh pasta contains much more liquid than dried and portions weigh more before cooking. The classic sauces for fresh pasta are cream and butter and cheese, or a simple tomato sauce, or any ragu. The idea is to display the noodles, and the usual way is with a rich sauce without sharp flavors or hard textures.
Fresh pasta cooks in anywhere from a few seconds after the water returns to a boil for thin noodles to ninety seconds for very wide ones. Several minutes more will be necessary for fresh pasta that you have allowed to dry by storing it, covered, out of the refrigerator. The noodles should not taste like raw dough and should have only a hint of a bite. Don't expect them to be al dente. The danger is letting them become soggy or having them outright fall apart. The central question of fresh pasta is, Is it worth it?
I ask myself that every time I sit down to another bowl of it, and the answer is that I don't like homemade noodles that much. There is a certain purity to eating fresh pasta, in biting into something uncoated and uncrusted yet distinct. I don't long for this sensation, but you can certainly feel proud of yourself for having achieved it. For perfectly acceptable dried egg noodles that you can lie about having made fresh, look for the Italian brands Fini or Dallari, or Al Dente, made in Michigan.
Avoid egg noodles from large American producers, who are required to put only 5. On the basis of most of the fresh pasta I have bought from pasta shops, I recommend going to them for cheese, anchovies, tomato paste, canned tomatoes, and dried pasta.
The best reason to make pasta at home is that doing so lets you choose your own fillings for ravioli, tortellini, and many other shapes. I'm always proud of myself when I bite into a filled pasta I have made. The tenderness of the pasta against the savory, sometimes chewy filling seems suave and satisfying.
Most filled pastas require no sauce at all, just a bit of melted butter and herbs. Plotkin gives helpful instructions on cutting and filling different shapes, an elementary procedure; so do Bugialli and Hazan. All images are copyrighted to their respective owners. Get all new posts by email: Go. Photo by Trutenka IST. Cafeterias became very popular in the s, and spaghetti and tomato sauce was a hot item. The Great Depression of the s made inexpensive food like spaghetti a necessity.
Spaghetti and meatballs began to appear regularly on millions of American tables. Today pasta is a completely versatile food: from school cafeteria to the most exclusive restaurant, from main course to side to dessert, it fills any need asked of it.
0コメント