The Meaning of Pasta

 

The Italian for a butterfly is a farfalla, and so the pasta that looks like a butterfly is called farfalle. One can think of this as beautiful, or one can think of a plate heaped high with dead butterflies. The choice is yours.

It's a lot better than thinking of linguine as a plateful of little tongues, which is rather horrid. Linguine is a diminutive, as is spaghetti. The Italian for string is spago; the diminutive form, the little string, is a spaghetto; and the plural is spaghetti. 

Vermicelli are little worms. Orrecchiette are severed ears (well, I assume they're severed, as otherwise there'd be a head on the plate). Fettuccine are pleasanter, they're little ribbons. 

Pasta, of course, is just a paste, a dough. It's the same paste that your find in pastels and pasties and impasto paintings. If you mash up a genre into a paste, you get a pastiche.

It can be rather fun to think of linguine al'arrabiata as little tongues in angry sauce, or it can put you right off your meal. As an Englishman, I feel that these Italian secrets should be kept in Italy; they might give me nightmares; so I shall stick to eating good British toad-in-the-hole. 

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears because I'm hungry.