Italian Food

– Episode 1 – Italian food by the (very few) numbers – SOURCE – “Pizza Dough,” Allrecipes, updated November 18, 2025, https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/23290/pizza-dough-iii/ – 

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones, the host of Different Shapes. Today I’m talking about Italian food.

I don’t know, and have never tried to learn, how to cook let’s call it fancy Italian food at home. I definitely have never made my own pasta dough, except for the pizza crust, which is a cinch. (See a simple recipe in the show notes.) But I’ve never fed pasta for, say, linguini through one of those cutting machines and ended up with the soft homemade stuff that everyone raves about, saying that it’s the essential beginning ingredient for any great pasta dish. I’ve only ever used the hard pasta that most of us buy in the grocery store.

But you know what? It tastes just fine. Or to put it more accurately: it turns out just fine, because it doesn’t really have much of a distinctive taste. It’s sort of like the white rice of Chinese cuisine: it’s meant to be the base for the meats and vegetables and spices and flavours that really make the dish into anything at all.

I can’t remember the context or the medium or the person now, but I once heard some authority say that the two most difficult cuisines to learn to prepare properly are French and Indian. Notice: not Italian. That’s because the whole idea of Italian food being a complex cuisine is a sham that we’ve put up with since Roman times. It’s not so much, and sorry for the cliché, that the emperor has no clothes, but he wears kind of the same clothes all the time, and they are clothes that even my own rudimentary sewing skills could stitch together myself at home.

Let’s start with the basics: one feature of the whole cuisine is that the pasta is the same ingredient but formed into different shapes. It’s like a trick or game you might play on kids to get them to eat their carrots: mash them up and then let them form them into a horse or something, and then maybe, just maybe, the kid will have some carrot.

Here’s only a partial list of the so-called “variety” of pasta. I asked ChatGPT to generate me a comprehensive list with brief descriptions of the shape. It did so, and also divided the whole thing into broad categories: long pasta, short pasta, shaped pasta, sheet pasta, and several more. There are the types we all expect. Again, this is just a selection of the long ones:

·        Spaghetti – Long, thin, round strands

·        Capellini (Angel Hair) – Very thin, delicate strands

·        Fettuccine – Long, flat ribbons

·        Linguine – Long, flat strands (narrower than fettuccine)

The thing that struck me is that there is not only spaghetti, but also ones that are variations on spaghetti, like the Roman chefs or the popes some time in the Renaissance had kind of run out of ideas:

·        Spaghettoni – Thicker spaghetti

·        Spaghettini – Thinner spaghetti

·        Vermicelli – Slightly thicker than spaghetti

·        Bucatini – Thick spaghetti with a hole through the center

·        Bigoli – Thick, rough spaghetti-like strands

And here are some short ones:

·        Penne – Short tubes with angled ends

·        Penne Rigate – Penne with ridges

·        Rigatoni – Large tubes with ridges and straight ends

·        Ziti – Long tubes, often broken

·        Zitoni – Larger ziti

·        Mezze Maniche – Short, wide tubes

·        Paccheri – Very large, wide tubes

·        Cannelloni – Large tubes for stuffing

·        Manicotti – Stuffed tubes, often ridged

So many tubes: it all sounds like something a house contractor might have on his list for the HVAC work. Okay, we’re going with rigatoni in the master bedroom, but in the basement it’s pretty rough and we’re going to need paccheri down there.

Oh, wait, but there’s more. Not different sizes of tubes, but pieces of pasta twisted into different shapes:

·        Fusilli – Corkscrew-shaped

·        Fusilli Lunghi – Long corkscrews

·        Rotini – Tight spiral twists

·        Cavatappi – Hollow corkscrew tubes

And on it goes. I wonder whether an al dente rotini could be used to uncork the wine in a pinch?

But as imaginatively lame as this all is – and remember that these all have effectively no taste, tube or no tube, twisty or not – the thing that really exposes Italian cuisine as a fraud is the very small number of ingredients that are added and cooked with the pasta in order to make it palatable. I know there may be some rare outliers that I’m forgetting, but it’s red or white sauce, cheese, and various meats. That’s it. That’s the entire cuisine. That’s the food that was given to us by the same country that gave us Renaissance art. On the one hand we have the Mona Lisa, and on the other hand, figuratively speaking, we have short tubes of pasta with angled ends, all covered in a white sauce.

The same trick is used as for the pasta. There are different kinds of cheese, different kinds of tomatoes. And so it amounts to the same story. It’s like a man who owns only one shirt but he tries hard to make it appear as if he has a full wardrobe. Roll the sleeves up in the summer. Turn it inside out when relaxing at home. Tuck it in. Let it hang. Until one day, when he’s at a friend’s house for a party, and everyone is sitting around the coffee table, perhaps everyone has had a little too much chianti, and he reaches out his long-sleeved arm for a piece of bruschetta, and the really intoxicated friend who doesn’t usually notice anything, notices the shirt this time. Hey, wait a minute …

And that’s all for today, episode 1 of the podcast. Thanks for listening and please join me again next Friday.