Joy of eating a plate of pasta

Rachel Roddy’s new cookbook looks at 50 shapes to have in your repertoire

Rachel Roddy is very aware that pasta is a deliciously sprawling, emotionally rich, historical labyrinth of a topic. Trying to distil that down into words on a page is not to be considered lightly.

“I never dreamed I’d write a book about pasta, because, I mean, that would be crazy,” says food writer Roddy, incredulous on the phone from Rome, where she has lived since 2008. And yet, she has. Her new yolk-yellow cookbook, An A-Z Of Pasta, comprises 50 stories about 50 pasta shapes – a mere fraction of the 1,300 shapes identified by one of Roddy’s inspirations, Oretta Zanini De Vita, author of the Encyclopedia Of Pasta.

Fifty shapes is still a gargantuan project when you consider that chronicling pasta is, in a sense, a chronicling of Italy. “Every day, I would panic at the immensity of this task,” recalls Roddy. “And then every day, I would remember that I was only doing a little jigsaw of the shapes, and that it was alright.”

She traces the ancient importance of macaroni and vermicelli, and of course includes the “greatest hits”, the corners of her jigsaw: penne, spaghetti, tagliatelle, fusilli. Fortunately, Roddy already eats pasta pretty much every day – “I would happily not,” she muses, but, “Vincenzo [her partner] would like it every day, without making him into a comedy Italian!” – so lunch happily doubled as research.

When it comes to her favourite pasta shapes, understandably, she has a lot (“I mean, it’s a bit ridiculous”) with rigatoni – the tubes – sidling slightly ahead of the pack. If she could only eat one pasta dish every single day forever more though, after much deliberation, the Britishborn columnist says it’d be a tangle of seafood pasta. Although pasta with boileduntil-tender veg that’s then “squished around a pan” with oil and chilli, or anchovies, maybe cheese, maybe a handful of capers, comes a very close second. “We eat that all the time,” she says – broccoli being the usual culprit, or turnip tops.

Roddy doesn’t wage war on any particular shapes though. She has come to appreciate the very thin strands of capelli d’angelo or tagliolini and admits to preferring the bigger versions of fusilli and penne – fusilloni and pennoni – to the classic small versions, which, served sauce-less, have blighted many a childhood.

She does, however, very much understand the suspicion and mistrust around farfalle – the bows that never cook evenly, their hard core seemingly resistant to boiling water. Hence why she introduces them in the book wittily with an agony uncle (Vincenzo!) letter. Following much research and investigating into classic agony aunt letters and columns, she hilariously found “you could literally replace any sexual problem with a pasta shape every single time!

“I mean, they got filthy by the end of it,” she says with a laugh, noting her publisher had to stop her from getting carried away and writing the whole book in agony letter form.

While there are many beautiful photos and pasta shape doodles in An A-Z Of Pasta, there are also recipes that don’t feature an accompanying image at all. “I think some books have so many images, we stop reading. That’s why I like cookery books without pictures,” says Roddy, “because actually, you have to be transported by the words and you do paint your own picture, and then you enter a different realm, don’t you?”

Roddy’s aim, also, is to give us meaningful, truly helpful advice, not just step-by-step instructions. “You want someone to say to you, ‘Look, really dice the tomato small, be really generous with the oil, plenty of salt and then really toss it, you just add a tiny bit of pasta cooking water so it’s a bit swishy’ – those bits of advice where you think, ‘Ahh, ok’,” she explains.

Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes by Rachel Roddy is published by Fig Tree, priced £25. Photography by Jonathan Lovekin. Available now.