Ever since I read Bill Buford’s excellent book Heat there has been something I’ve wanted to clear up. (The book, by the way, is an entertaining account of Buford’s time working in Mario Batali’s restaurant kitchen in New York, and then as an apprentice for Dario Cecchini, celebrity butcher of Panzano in Chianti.) I enjoyed the book, and thought Buford, a former New Yorker editor and writer, gave a lot of insight into both Italian cooking and the Tuscan mentality.
However, I wanted to correct one error in the book: the word pastasciutta does not mean dried pasta, it means any kind of pasta that is boiled, sauced, and served on a plate. The opposite of pastasciutta is pasta in brodo (pasta in broth), not pasta fresca (fresh pasta). It’s very easy to understand this mistake, because semantically, the word means dried pasta, but that’s not what it actually means. It goes back to the early days of pasta when it was most often served floating in broth. Nowadays you rarely see pasta served this way, though it is still popular in Emilia-Romagna, especially in winter. And so pastasciutta just means a plain old plate of pasta with sauce, or as my Zingarelli dictionary puts it:
pastasciutta: pasta alimentare di varie fogge [types], cotto in acqua bollente e variemente condita, tipica della cucina italiana.
