Wednesday 17 March 2021

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.



4 comments:

  1. My personal fave is strozzapreti. Priest stranglers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My personal fave is strozzapreti. Priest stranglers.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Exalted star! the Worm replied
    And still the Moon was at its side
    And, little Butterfly! indeed
    And now, the strings whereon we feed.

    ReplyDelete
  4. My minds stuck, mired midway in pastease.

    ReplyDelete