Fuel, Water, and Pasta
As a historian, I’ve always been puzzled by the instructions for cooking pasta. Bring 4 to 6 quarts of water to a rolling boil . . . and so on. You know.
Well, until very recently (like the arrival of water and gas in pipes, say a hundred years ago in Europe for the first, and much more recently for the second, except in cities with coal gas) this is quite outrageous. Bringing water to the boil and then making soup that you eat is one thing making good use of liquid and fuel. Bringing it to the boil to cook spaghetti for a small family and then throwing it out is plain silly.
There is something terribly, terribly wrong with the idea that ordinary Italian families would have made pasta like this. Or perhaps they didn’t make it at all. We know that dry pasta and tomato sauce is the product of the Industrial Revolution and did not become widely available in Italy until the late nineteenth century. And that it remained a luxury for many Italians until well after World War II–that is at most a couple of generations ago–by which time most of Italy would have had running water and (perhaps) cheap fuel.
In Mexico many villages have no water. A truck (“una pipa from its shape”) and people line up with buckets and bowls to get their water. Many people look for or buy firewood to cook, expensive and time consuming.
So the Mexican (and older European) method of cooking pasta by first frying it in a little oil and then cooking it in a small amount of water until the water has been absorbed makes much more sense in terms of domestic economy.
Or don’t even fry it. For years, decades actually, I have happily disregarded the instructions about huge clumsy pots of boiling water and cooked pasta in the smallest amount of water I can get away with. I have never found any problem. And the leftover water is easily used up in soup. I’m obviously not Italian and haven’t grown up with strong beliefs about exactly how pasta should turn out. But it’s always seemed fine to me, family and guests.
And now along comes Harold McGee to give his blessing to the minimum water method. I’m delighted.
Yeah, me too. I’m delighted too, because it’s satisfying when the science people back up things that seem to make common sense.
I haven’t cooked pasta in tons of water for years either – probably not since I lived on a 36′ sailboat (a long time ago) where the water had to be carried on by hand then poured into the place where you’d let it out in the least bits possible because every bit of water used meant another five gallon container of water hauled down that dock sooner rather than later.
I cook pasta in smallish amounts of water too. It never made sense to me to use so much water.
I cook pasta in as much water as possible (my biggest pot), the water is far too salty to use for anything else. This would be the case for the Italians that I know as well Few things are worst then under-salted pasta or clumpy pasta.
There have been a few well meaning attempts at making pasta more fuel efficient by pre-soaking the pasta overnight etc, the result isn’t very good or not to the taste of pasta eaters that I know of.
Another question would be who on earth settles a village that has no water supply? Madness.
I’ve never seen any figures for pasta consumption over time, but I would guess that it would have gone up quite dramatically from the end of the 19th century due to the increased sales and use of dried pasta. Prior to this the people that actually ate pasta where likely to have been relatively well off. Even in Naples where there is a well documented history of pasta been eaten by the poor, a lot of this was cooked by vendors and sold to people on the street. So I’m not sure that fuel cost have ever been a big issue. Either the poor didn’t cook it or it was cheap enough to make.
Adam, Margaret and all,
Amazing how many people out there do ignore huge amounds of water instructions.
Who on earth settles a village without water? Well, one answer is that they settle the village and the water disappears for some reason. This has frequently happened in Mexico. Either the population exploded or a damn prevented the water flowing or the cutting down of trees meant higher and quicker run off. These kinds of things must happen in Australia too.
And I think the point about street food is critical. Lots of water like lots of oil was not possible for an individual poor family.
In reference to McGee’s original article “It’s true, though, that no matter what temperature you start with, this method requires more attention. That’s a disadvantage when you’re cooking several things at once.”
I’m not sure that making something more difficult to cook is a solution? The main problem I have had with the cold water method is loss in gradation of texture, as also observed in the article.
I’ve never started with cold water for pasta. But less water in general, yes.
Several other things have an effect on how the pasta turns out that McGee didn’t mention in the article. Not unusual for they’re not often mentioned. It’s always the lots of water and salt in the water and timing that gets the attention.
The size of the pot makes a difference in terms of how much water you put in. The material the pot is made out of makes a difference in terms of heat diffusion and holding and recovery. And the type of heat source makes a difference. A strong gas flame vs. a weak pitiful electric burner can make an immense difference in choosing how much water to use, simply due to heat recovery time.
Yes, and I have a pitiful weak burner and a pitiful weak water supply from a garafon–holding the pot underneath it is difficult.
From an Alain Ducasse column in the NYT, Mar 13, 2002, “Pasta from the Italian Riviera:
“I PREFER dry pasta, macaroni, to fresh noodles. One of my favorites is a short twisted kind called strozzapreti. And I like to cook it the way I learned from the farm families who have mills for pressing olives for oil in rural Liguria on the Italian Riviera. They cook pasta like a risotto. I’ve been doing it for years now, and I would not cook macaroni any other way.”
Interesting. And I love the word ‘strozzapreti’. Always have!
Leaving Italy for India I seem to remember an Indian friend who used orzo as if it were short grain rice in the same manner as a risotto. . . and if there were no orzo, broken noodles of any sort would do.
Ducasse is talking about pasta cooking style that was/is called fideos, fideus, fides, alfideus etc etc, the geographic range of the dish was Spain, North Africa, Arab world, Jewish world, Southern France (up to Grenoble), Mexico, Sardinia and Northern Italy, especially Liguria. I’m surprised that Ducasse didn’t know of the technique from French regional cooking.
What is interesting as the Fideos technique is widely used, but relatively unknown, due to the dominance of the “Boil pasta in a large amount of water and drain” model. Would be interesting to know when the later became more popular.
“Strozzapreti” (pasta, no dumplings) are from Emilia-Romagna and usually fresh, made from soft wheat flour, not dried durum wheat pasta, the technique refered to by Ducasse will not work with fresh.
Rachel, your comment about the problems of water availability in Mexico is the case in much of the non-industralized areas of the world. When you have to lug water by the bucket, then cooking methods are suited to this style of water use.
Question: historically, was pasta in italy cooked in less water in areas where water had to be collected in this way?
“These kinds of things must happen in Australia too.”
Yes, which is why we have abandoned settlements. Which isn’t a joke. Some, areas were settled for a few years or a decade, then abandoned because the conditions changed and crops faied etc. Also the English tradionally need a huge water supply for the boiling of vegetables, so any viable settlement needs to be a large lake or river.
Yes, Abandoning settlements is always a possibility. I can only speculate why it’s not done more often in Mexico. Exploding population? No money to move on? What often happens is that these villages have water to sustain them much of the year, and then run out at some point before the rains begin.
I’m wondering too about that huge water supply for boiling vegetables in English cooking. This is really just a question because I am not sure. Much of our vegetable water went into gravy or into soups. Was that traditional? Or was it the result of World War II? I really don’t know. Boiling is a fuel-efficient way of cooking things so perhaps that’s why it was so popular in England where fuel was very tight for several hundred years and water was abundant, even if laborious to carrry.
Great food for thought Rachel.
Perhaps historically smaller types of pasta were made as it took less water,less ingredients and less time to cook in a small amount of water.
I think that the root of large amounts of water for boiling pasta comes from the more widespread use of dried durum wheat pasta in the late 19th/early 20th century. In discussion Neapolitan macaroni Artusi says;
“Quanto ai maccheroni, insegnano di farli bollire in un recipiente largo, con molt’acqua, e di non cuocerli troppo.”
(As for the maccheroni, they [Neapolitans] instuct to make them to boil in a wide container, with a lot of water, and not to cook them too much.)
Since Artusi was from Emilia-Romagna, a great centre of fresh pasta making, it would seem odd that he would mention the instructions for boiling Southern pasta if it wasn’t note worthy.
But what was to Artusi ‘a lot of water’ may not be what to us is ‘a lot of water’. (?)
I think that “a wide vessel, with a lot of water” is most simply interperated as a wide vessel with a lot of water.
This site (http://fxcuisine.com/Default.asp?language=2&Display=98&resolution=high) has images to the pasta type in question. As you can see it is not possible to cook it in a small pot.
There is an egullet discussion/put down of the McGee article. One of the people there contacted me to point out an Elizabeth David quote from “Italian Food” where she points out that here preferred method for cooking pasta is modified absorption method she found on a side of a box of Agnesi pasta bought in the early 1970s.
I thought that it was an interesting enough departure from the “traditional” method for cooking pasta that I looked into Agnesi pasta. It turns out that Agnesi was the first industrial producer of pasta and they are based in Genoa (Liguria). So perhaps there cooking method is a modified version of the Ligurian method that has been discussed here?
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