50 Fun Facts About Pasta

Which pasta's name means 'little ribbons' in Italian?

Fettuccine means 'little ribbons', from fettuccia, a ribbon or strip; the flat egg-dough ribbons are cut from rolled sheets and are the pasta in Alfredo's butter-and-cheese dish.

Traditionally, dried pasta was made only from which type of wheat?

Durum wheat, whose name is Latin for 'hard', has the high-protein semolina that lets dried pasta hold its shape; it makes up only 5 to 8 percent of the world's wheat crop.

Roughly how many specific pasta shapes are known, under more than 1,300 documented names?

About 310 distinct shapes are recognised, but names for the same shape change from one Italian town to the next, which is how more than 1,300 names came to be documented.

Many historians think pasta in its modern form reached Italy through which island?

Sicily had dried string pasta by the 12th century: a 1154 geography written for its Norman king describes it being made near Palermo and shipped across the Mediterranean.

The story that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China is widely regarded as what?

A myth, food historians agree: Jane Grigson traced the tale to a 1920s or 30s advertisement for a Canadian spaghetti company, and dried pasta was documented in the Mediterranean more than a century before Polo's travels.

Which town's dried pasta exports did the geographer al-Idrisi describe for Roger II in 1154?

Trabia, east of Palermo, is where al-Idrisi's 1154 geography for Roger II records itriyya, a dried string pasta, being made in quantity and shipped across the Mediterranean.

Where was a licence for the first pasta factory issued in 1740?

Venice issued the licence for the first pasta factory in 1740; mechanical kneaders and presses then spread pasta-making through the Italian states over the following century.

The first written record of pasta with tomato sauce appears in a cookbook from which year?

Francesco Leonardi's 1790 cookbook L'Apicio Moderno holds the first written record of pasta with tomato sauce; tomatoes had reached Europe in the 16th century but took two hundred years to reach the pasta bowl.

Which country consumed the most pasta per person in 2015, at 23.5 kg each?

Italy led the world at 23.5 kg of pasta per person in 2015, ahead of Tunisia and Venezuela; its own wheat harvest cannot meet demand, so it imports wheat to keep up.

Which country was the world's largest total consumer of pasta in 2017, eating 2.7 million tons?

The United States ate 2.7 million tons of pasta in 2017, the largest national total, though per person Americans trail Italians by a wide margin.

The Italian phrase 'al dente' literally means what?

To the tooth is the literal sense of al dente: the pasta should offer slight resistance when bitten, and it has a lower glycemic index than pasta cooked soft.

Farfalle pasta is named after the Italian word for what?

Butterflies are farfalle in Italian, and the pinched shape earned the name; English speakers call it bow-tie pasta, and in Emilia-Romagna the same shape goes by strichetti.

Orecchiette, meaning 'little ears', is the signature pasta of which Italian region?

Apulia, the heel of the Italian boot, is orecchiette's home; the classic dish there is orecchiette alle cime di rapa, the little ears tossed with rapini, garlic, anchovy and chilli.

Which pasta shape's name means 'little thimbles' in Italian?

Ditalini means 'little thimbles', from ditale, a thimble; the short tubes are a classic addition to pasta e fagioli and minestrone.

Which pasta shape's name translates as 'priest strangler'?

Strozzapreti means 'priest stranglers': one legend says gluttonous priests ate the hand-rolled pasta so fast they choked, another that housewives cursed the clergy as they rolled it.

Vermicelli takes its name from the Italian for what?

Little worms is the literal meaning of vermicelli; confusingly, the strands are thinner than spaghetti in English-speaking countries but slightly thicker in Italian usage.

Linguine, meaning 'little tongues', originated in which city?

Genoa, the capital of Liguria, is linguine's home; there the flat strands are classically dressed with pesto, often cooked together with green beans and potatoes.

Spaghetti means 'little strings'; a thicker version is called what?

Spaghettoni is the augmentative, 'big spaghetti', the thickest of the family; spaghettini is the thinner form and capellini finer again.

Fusilli, the corkscrew pasta, is named after what?

A spindle, fuso in Italian, gives fusilli their name: traditionally the dough was wrapped around one to form the spiral, and in North America the shape is often sold as rotini.

Pappardelle takes its name from a Tuscan verb meaning what?

To gobble up, pappare in Tuscan dialect, is the verb behind pappardelle: the broad egg-pasta ribbons are traditionally served with rich game sauces such as wild boar ragù.

The pasta name rigatoni comes from the Italian word rigato, meaning what?

Ridged is what rigato means: the grooves down each tube hold sauce, and unlike penne, rigatoni are cut straight across rather than diagonally.

Cannelloni is Italian for what?

Large reeds is the literal sense of cannelloni, from canna, a reed or cane; the egg-pasta cylinders are stuffed, laid in a dish and baked under sauce.

Bucatini, the thick spaghetti with a hollow centre, takes its name from buco, meaning what?

Hole is buco in Italian, so bucatini are 'little holed ones', extruded through a die that leaves the hollow centre; in the south the same pasta is called perciatelli, 'pierced'.

Academic consensus traces the word 'macaroni' to a Greek word meaning what?

Blessed is the sense of Greek makarios: makaria, a barley broth served at funerals for the 'blessed dead', is the word thought to have passed into Italian as maccheroni.

Gnocchi may take their name from nocchio, the Italian word for what?

A knot in wood is nocchio, one proposed root of gnocchi; the other is nocca, 'knuckle'. Potato only joined the dumpling after the tuber's arrival from the Americas; earlier versions used flour, bread or semolina.

Carbonara is traditionally made with pecorino romano and which cured pork?

Guanciale, cured pork jowl, is the traditional fat for carbonara: its rendered fat is tossed with egg, pecorino romano and black pepper, and pancetta is the common stand-in elsewhere.

Cacio e pepe, the Roman pecorino and pepper dish, is popularly said to have been created by whom?

Shepherds of the Roman countryside are the popular origin story: pecorino, dried pasta and peppercorns keep well in a pack, and the grated cheese binds with starchy cooking water into the sauce.

The name pesto comes from a Genoese verb meaning what?

To pound is pestare in Italian, pestâ in Genoese: the sauce is named for being pounded in a mortar, and the same Latin root gives English 'pestle'; basil only joined the recipe in the 19th century.

Which two cities both claim to be the birthplace of tortellini?

Bologna and Modena both claim tortellini; a legend set at an inn between them says the shape copies the navel of Venus, glimpsed by the innkeeper through a keyhole.

The word lasagna may derive from a Greek word meaning what?

Chamber pot is one sense of Greek lasanon, which became Latin lasanum, a cooking pot, and then the dish cooked in it; another theory points to laganon, a flat sheet of dough.

In Bologna, ragù alla bolognese is customarily served with which pasta rather than spaghetti?

Tagliatelle, the egg ribbons, are the Bolognese pairing: Pellegrino Artusi printed the first 'bolognese' ragù recipe in 1891, and the Italian Academy of Cuisine registered an official version in 1982.

Amatriciana sauce is named after a town in which Italian region?

Lazio is home to Amatrice, in the province of Rieti, the town that gives the sauce its name; it developed from pasta alla gricia, the same dish without tomato.

Spaghetti alla puttanesca, with olives, capers and tomato, is usually traced to which city?

Naples is the usual claim: restaurateur Sandro Petti said he improvised it on Ischia in the 1950s, and the earliest known mention is in Raffaele La Capria's 1961 Neapolitan novel Ferito a morte.

Fettuccine Alfredo was created in the early 1900s by a restaurateur in which city?

Alfredo di Lelio reportedly made it to coax his wife into eating after childbirth; in Italy it is rarely called 'Alfredo' outside Rome.

Which Hollywood couple's 1920s visit led Alfredo to serve his fettuccine with a golden fork and spoon?

Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, on a 1920s visit, presented Alfredo di Lelio with gold cutlery inscribed 'To Alfredo the King of the noodles', and the restaurant served the dish with it thereafter.

Spaghetti and meatballs as we know it was developed by Italian immigrants where?

New York is where Italian immigrants are credited with assembling the dish in the early 20th century: southern Italian peasant cooking evolved once cheap meat was abundant, and the meatballs grew accordingly.

Barilla was founded in 1877 as a bread and pasta shop in which city?

Parma is where Pietro Barilla opened a bread and pasta shop in 1877; the family company, headquartered in the city, grew into the world's largest pasta maker with factories on several continents.

Kraft Dinner (Kraft Mac & Cheese) began being marketed in Canada in which year?

1937 is the year Kraft launched the boxed macaroni-and-cheese dinner in Canada, pitched as a meal for four in nine minutes; Canadians went on to eat 55 percent more boxes per person than Americans.

A Depression-era salesman first sold macaroni and cheese together by attaching cheese to pasta boxes with what?

A rubber band held a packet of grated cheese to each box of pasta: St. Louis salesman Grant Leslie's idea, which Kraft then packaged as a single boxed dinner.

Chef Boyardee was founded in 1928 by an Italian immigrant chef in which US city?

Cleveland is where Ettore Boiardi ran his restaurant and began bottling his spaghetti sauce in old milk bottles for customers in the 1920s; the company later moved production to Milton, Pennsylvania.

SpaghettiOs, the ring-shaped canned pasta, were introduced in 1965 by which company?

Campbell Soup launched SpaghettiOs in 1965 under its Franco-American label; marketing manager Donald Goerke, nicknamed 'the Daddy-O of SpaghettiOs', wanted a pasta that children could eat with a spoon.

Gragnano, the town famed for its protected dried pasta, is in which Italian region?

Campania is home to Gragnano, a town in the Lattari mountains that has dried pasta in its streets for centuries; Pasta di Gragnano was granted protected IGP status in 2013.

On April Fools' Day 1957 the BBC's Panorama showed a Swiss family harvesting spaghetti from what?

Trees were the crop: narrator Richard Dimbleby credited a mild winter and the near-disappearance of the spaghetti weevil, viewers rang the BBC asking how to grow their own, and CNN called it the biggest hoax a reputable news outlet pulled.

Instant noodles were invented in 1958 by Momofuku Ando under which brand name?

Chikin Ramen, Nissin's chicken-flavoured fried-and-dried noodle block, went on sale in 1958 as the first instant noodle; Cup Noodles, the first sold in a cup, followed in 1971.

Ramen's origins are traced to the Chinatown of which Japanese city?

Yokohama's Chinatown, where Chinese immigrants sold wheat noodles in soup in the late 19th century, is the usual starting point; ramen only spread nationwide after World War II, when rice shortages and imported wheat favoured noodles.

Couscous, the North African semolina staple, was added to which UNESCO list in 2020?

Intangible Cultural Heritage is the list UNESCO added couscous to in December 2020, on a joint nomination by Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia covering the knowledge and practices around the dish.

Fideuà, a paella-like dish made with noodles, comes from the coast of which Spanish region?

Valencia is the region and Gandia the coastal town that claims fideuà: legend says a ship's cook swapped noodles for rice so the captain, who loved paella, would leave some for the crew.

Which French-trained chef created the modern form of pastitsio, the Greek baked pasta with béchamel?

Nikolaos Tselementes, the French-trained chef whose early-20th-century cookbook shaped modern Greek cooking, added the béchamel topping; the word comes from the Italian pasticcio, which also means 'a mess'.

Semolina, the coarse flour used for dried pasta, is what colour?

Pale yellow is semolina's colour, from the carotenoid pigments in the hard wheat it is milled from; the coarse grind is what gives dried pasta its firm bite.

Ravioli appear under the name 'rauioles' in which 14th-century English cookbook?

The Forme of Cury, compiled about 1390 by the master cooks of King Richard II, includes 'rauioles' among its roughly 200 recipes.