You Need a Lot of Pasta Recipes!

Pappardelle Pasta with turkey meatballs, tomato sauce, and cheese-crumb topping.
I made the meatballs from scratch, and cooked the sauce with onions and garlic.

Monday we ate pancakes for dinner and I posted my simple all-purpose pancake recipe. Tuesday we ate pasta for dinner, and I was thinking about the huge number of pasta recipes that even a modest American cook would potentially follow. Spaghetti and meatballs -- baked with cheese, as in the photo or simply tossed together. Red lasagne. Pumpkin lasagne. Linguini with oil and garlic. Macaroni with home-made cheese sauce or even something as simple as Kraft Dinner. Lots more.

The Italians have so many types of pasta that there's a whole Encyclopedia of Pasta! From Abbotta Pezziende to Zizziridd' and Zugolotti and Zumari, pasta scholar Oretta Zanini de Vita documents 310 varieties of pasta from all over Italy. Some pasta shapes were native to small villages where tradition has died out and the pastas are no longer made. My Pappardelle (which in fact are from Trader Joe's) are number 174. They are identified as native to northern and central Italy, where they in fact figure in somewhat different preparations than the one I did. The subtleties of this collection are overwhelming.

The first two entries from the Encyclopedia of Pasta.

Each entry presents several categories of information titled: ingredients, how made, also known as, how served, where found, and remarks. Many entries include illustrations showing the shape of the pasta, and sometimes illustrating how it's made. The encyclopedia also includes several scholarly articles.