Pasta and Italy are synonymous. There is no other nation in the world whose typical dish is so loved as this dish is by the Italians. A dish (?)…

segue …originating in the south which quickly enough captured the collective imagination of an entire nation which lives, disputes, pontificates, and happily becomes plump on, pasta. The breadth of the subject is comparable only to Hindu mythology and like it, has resulted in sects, fundamentalism, private and regional cults. Pasta, even more so than pizza, which also enjoys its own particular history and fame, has utterly conquered the conqueror, invading restaurants worldwide and a worldwide market. A cuisine unknown to the founding fathers who did not foresee the use of pasta, but knew only a cuisine that was sad, empty often boring and repetitive, fatty, high calorie and gout producing. Pasta is healthy, prolongs life, is joyous and comforting, aphrodisiac and caressing. It is warm, and heat transforms this raw material from hard and inert into something soft and resistant at the same time. It quivers and is savory to the palate, intoxicating the taste with the thousands of sauces with which it can be served.
If you don't like pasta, change site immediately, now. Eat Eat Hurrah is not for you. You neither want it nor deserve it. However, if you love pasta, as I am sure you do, enter the meanders of its recipes (by the year's end, there will be at least 500), place a large pot on the stove, add a handful of coarse salt from Sicily to the boiling water and then… throw in the pasta. Drain it when it is just al dente.

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