What's in your pantry? Pasta?

Supplies of many shelf-stable food have been in great demand during the current buying frenzy induced by the coronavirus pandemic. One commodity that's been in great demand is pasta. Obviously this makes sense -- everyone knows how to cook pasta! And it can be delicious if you have only a bit of olive oil and cheese and maybe garlic if you love garlic. Most people use a can or jar of ready-made pasta sauce or canned tomato products -- another commodity that's running low. Those of us who are ambitious look up more complicated recipes: there's no limit on the number of pasta recipes!

Like many people, here in Ann Arbor Len and I are definitely eating three meals a day at home during this emergency. So I've been thinking about food a lot, and I started looking at some of my more unusual books on pasta and its role in Italian food and history. Of course pasta is also popular in many other types of cuisine, such as many types of Asian noodles. Oh, and did Marco Polo bring pasta back from China? No, it was invented there long before his travels.

I have been looking in three books with three ways of looking at pasta. Pasta by Design presents mathematical equations and diagrams for the shapes. Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food by Serventi & Sabban is a scholarly history. The Encyclopedia of Pasta by Oretta Zanini de Vita is an alphabetical list of every type of pasta in Italy, even obsolete ones no longer made (blogged here).

So... there are many ways of looking at a noodle! Here are a few that I've thought about this week. When I blogged about beans earlier this week, I searched for recipes. This post approaches pasta in several entirely different ways.

Grocery Shelves

What the pasta section looked like before the hoarding started (my photo).

Pasta section of a supermarket in New York last week. Presumably the same
in many stores throughout the nation. (Photo: Washington Post)

Slowly, we are told, most food supplies will be returning to normal. Most shortages are a result of different demand as everyone switches to home cooking and wants to have emergency food on hand. Both shoppers and suppliers will adapt, or so they say. Pasta, according to what I've read, is one of the foods that will not remain scarce.

Looking at Cavatappi, an interesting pasta shape

Several pasta makers offer this interesting shape.

Here's a dish that I made with it last week: cavatappi with
ham, peas, herbs, and olive oil. 

The book Pasta by Design by George L. Legendre probably embodies the world's most unusual way of looking at pasta: the author derived mathematical equations to describe the shape of a number of noodle types. My family is full of mathematicians and experts at graphical programming. Last year, they introduced us to this book. I didn't understand the math very well, so I asked Len to make an animation of cavatappi based on the above page of the book.

You can see the rotating noodle in the video. 

Looking at Fusilli

Fusilli. I don't remember what was in this dish.

The beginning of the 3-page entry for Fusilli in the Encyclopedia of Pasta.

Fusilli page from Pasta by Design.

Of course I could think of other things to say about pasta, but you might get bored. Above all, I'm thinking of the current suffering of the Italian nation because of the enormous effect of the virus, and I'm hoping that the dire predictions about our own country will prove inaccurate.

This post and original photos by mae sander, © 2020 for mae food dot blogspot dot com.