Ed Cumming The pasta de résistance

What is the second-most googled pasta in the UK? According to a report by Hellofresh, the omnipresent food-box delivery firm, lasagne comes in at number one, but the silver medal goes not to spaghetti, as you might have thought. Penne and rigatoni and tagliatelle and macaroni and ravioli lag behind. No, the second-mostsearched pasta in the UK is orzo.

I found this surprising. Orzo, the tiny grainlike variety (the name comes from the Italian for barley), which also goes by risoni, is not one of the pastas that trips easily off the British tongue. There is no ‘orz bol’ on café menus. British children do not routinely demand orz’n’ cheese. It does not come canned by Heinz.

A search with Google’s Ngram, which scans the incidence of words in English going back 100 years or more, backs up the idea that orzo is not a traditional British pasta. It lags miles behind those named above, and is neck and neck with tagliatelle. Orzo was virtually unknown here until 1980, which sounds about right, before it really got going around 2005. Since then it has been on quite a run. If there is a pasta equivalent of a word-of-mouth hit – I suppose all successful foods are word-ofmouth hits – this is it.

You can understand the burgeoning interest in orzo. It is conveniently small, versatile, easy and fast to cook. Because of its shape, I think of it as a competitor to other grains-with-airs, such as giant couscous, bulgur and quinoa. At the risk of sacrilege, you can more or less use it wherever you would use rice, except in much less time. An orzo-risotto (rizorzo?) can be yours in a third of the time of a rice one. It is perfect weaning food, filling but not big enough to choke on. Giving babies farfalle is a faff.

The problem is that British pasta culture has not caught up with orzo. Hardly a surprise, given that it took us 50 years with spaghetti. Cooks do not feel confident with it as they do with their traditional pastas, which may explain its high search ranking: we’re buying it and then working out what to do with it. We don’t have the same experience with it in soups or salads or as a side dish.

It’s less common on restaurant menus than other types. It is not chic, like pappardelle or pici, or too hard to make at home, like agnolotti. Nobody knows about trofie or garganelli. The pasterati elite might have orzo recipes committed to memory, but the rest of us do not. In the wrong hands it sticks to the pan. The great orzo dishes are still up for grabs, although there are some popular entries: Ottolenghi’s prawn and feta dish, a pandemic hit. Nigella’s idiot-proof roast chicken, swimming in orzo where you might otherwise have rice, or Molly Baz’s lemony Parmesan number. Our own Diana Henry has a glorious Greek chicken surrounded by burnished orzo (and she celebrates pasta on page 37).

The real surprise is not that Britain has taken so long to come round to orzo, but that we have put up with such lacklustre options for so long: dreary spaghetti and rubbery lasagne. The Italians have been fobbing us off and getting away with it. Orzo they thought.

Small but perfectly formed: why orzo is on the up