Pasta: a Matter of Form

By Mimi Sheraton

Just as cheese is said to be milk's leap to immortality, so pasta represents the apotheosis of flour and water. Blended to form a simple paste (hence pasta), those humble ingredients achieve culinary brilliance and almost universal popularity. Pasta, it seems, is the perfect food for our time, prized by gourmands for reasons purely hedonistic and by nutritionists as a healthful source of energizing, low-fat, complex carbohydrates.

But if there is no doubt about the natural superiority of pasta, there are several questions that haunt the addict who dreams of little else. What pasta shapes go best with which sauces? Is the rich meatiness of a beef-and-tomato sauce better appreciated when wound into the long, sturdy strands of bucatini or when filling the cavities of the convoluted lumache, or snail shell? Have any shapes become so unfashionable that they are being phased out? What will the newly increased U.S. tariff (from less than 1% of value to 40%) do to the price of imported pasta? And, finally, how do they get the holes through the tubes of macaroni?

The best source for answers, and Mecca to a pasta devotee, is a pastificio, or pasta factory, such as Gerardo di Nola in Castellammare di Stabia, about a 40-minute drive south of Naples. One of Italy's largest producers of premium pasta, it is a bright and airy factory where the starchy aroma suggests tons of boiling pasta. The current president, Gerardo Ronza, is a grandnephew of Gerardo di Nola, who founded the company in 1870. A slender, precise man who lives in an antiques-filled apartment over the factory, Ronza savors the lore and history of his product. Everything made downstairs, he explains, comes under the heading of pasta ascuitta, the dried forms.

The process begins in huge vats, where water is mixed with the coarse- grained durum wheatmeal called semolina that gives Italian pasta its uniquely toothsome texture and flavor. The resultant crumbly paste is then extruded through bronze bar molds pierced with openings to produce the desired shape. For the long strands of pasta that have holes in the center (so they will cook more evenly), the paste is forced through ring-shaped openings around center cores that make the final product hollow.

Flat noodles like lasagne are forced between metal rollers that approximate the action of a rolling pin. Cut in proper lengths, pasta dries in warmers for seven hours and is then cooled before being packed in printed cellophane bags. The only additions to the basic semolina and water blend are vitamin enrichments required in certain states, including New York, California and Connecticut. (They are, in fact, added to all pasta shipped to the U.S.)

"For Italians, the meat or fish and the cheese we add are enrichment enough," Ronza says. "Spaghetti is still our No. 1 seller, but short pasta is becoming more popular. Some cooks still prefer to break long thick pasta such as ziti or the corkscrew fusilli into small pieces as they drop them into boiling salted water, but most people like them precut."

In Italy, Ronza notes, "you can get big arguments around any family dining table about the shapes of pasta that should go with different sauces." Large flowerets of broccoli, for example, do not work with long strands of linguine or spaghetti because it should be possible to pick up with a fork the solids in the sauce as well as the pasta. Big chunks of vegetables and meat are far better with the little ears (orecchiette) or penne. Finer ingredients, such as peas and minced prosciutto in a creamy sauce, are more suitable to delicate pastas that are twirled. That twirling is no longer done in Italy with fork against spoon but rather with fork against plate.

According to Angelo De Angelis, sales manager of Zia Dora, Gerardo di Nola's U.S. importer, the five most popular shapes are spaghetti, the ridged quill- shaped penne, linguine, the fine angel's hair capelli d'angelo and short, mixed pasta shapes used in minestrone.

What currently makes importers and retailers shudder is the tariff increase imposed by presidential proclamation last summer and instituted on Nov. 1. The American taste for Italian macaroni is on the rise; sales have grown from 10 million lbs. in 1975 to 110 million lbs. a year now. Even so, that accounts for only 4% of 2.3 billion lbs. of pasta eaten annually in this country. The tariff increase reflects U.S. resentment at the protective duty Europeans maintain on citrus imports from this country. This higher tariff means that consumers will pay 10% to 15% more than the current 70 cents to $1.10 per lb. of imported pasta. According to Max Busetti of the National Pasta Association, in Arlington, Va., it is the principle that counts. "Naturally, the Italians are incensed about the tariffs," Busetti says. "For them, it is such an emotional product, especially in the wake of recent strains. The increase was on the front pages of all Italian newspapers the day after there were pictures of Craxi and Reagan mending fences following the Achille Lauro affair."

Considering that there are 143 shapes available in the Gerardo di Nola catalog, it seems almost churlish to ask Ronza if others are ever made. His answer is to refer to the catalog of the Capitano company, manufacturers of the pasta dies, costing as much as $1,000 apiece, that are used in the industry. There for the ordering are 425 variations on the pasta theme, not only alternative sizes of current shapes, but vanished, not-quite-forgotten birds, animals, man-in-the-moon-profile crescents, tiny notched wheels that look like watch gears and a variety of other small shapes that would be lovely if dipped in gold and hung on charm bracelets. Most startling are the long noodles in the angular forms of triangles and diamonds, even a large curving quatrefoil. They are not made anymore because "they take too long to dry," Ronza explains, "especially those with corners." All of which seems a pity, for they would certainly appeal to postmodernist eaters. Basta pasta? Not yet.