Pasta

Introduction

My earliest pasta memory was a dish called milk spaghetti, a gooey, unnatural brick-orange tangle of pasta, Campbell s tomato soup, Cracker Barrel Cheddar cheese, butter, and milk baked in the oven, cut into squares, and scooped out of a casserole dish with a spatula. It was passed down to my mother from my grandmother Mildred, a woman with a fairly limited stash of culinary provocations.

Needless to say, as a Jewish kid from Connecticut raised in a kosher home, I wasn t exactly reared on carbonara. It was milk spaghetti and, when we went out to our local Italian spots, fettuccine Alfredo, stuffed shells, and the stray cheese-filled ravioli. But my heart belonged to baked ziti. On the weekends, we were regulars at Leon s, a real Saturday night kind of place with white tablecloths and those ubiquitous garnet-colored Venetian candles that give so many red-sauce joints their Dick Tracy luster. The ziti, topped with about a pound of mozzarella baked to golden perfection, would come careening through the dining room on giant platters. On weeknights, we d do the same thing at Bimonte s, a pizzeria with psych-ward lighting, red-leather booths, and scuffed linoleum floors. I d wash down my ziti with a Foxon Park white birch soda, the local soft drink of choice, while my father tackled a meatball sub and a Pepsi. We d order a pizza on the side.

By the time I was flirting with adolescence, we d taken to buying fresh pasta at a place called Connie s Macaroni, one of many Italian American pastifici in the New Haven area. A jewel box of a shop, it teemed with Italians: mamas picking up red sauce on the way home from Mass; a constant gaggle of older men there only to loiter. We d load up on linguine and fettuccine.

Eventually, we got around to making our own pasta. By then I d cultivated a fascination, hitching along on my mother s trips to the market just to park myself in the dried goods aisle, obsessively scanning the boxes of pasta to try

Missy Robbins is the James Beard Award winning chef/owner of acclaimed Lilia and Misi restaurants; the co-founder of MP, a pasta and specialty foods brand; and co-founder of Grovehouse, a hospitality company. Over the course of her decades-long career, she has been profiled in a range of publications, from Vanity Fair to InStyle to the New York Times. She lives, makes pasta, and cooks in Brooklyn.
 
Talia Baiocchi is the founder and editor in chief of PUNCH, the author of Sherry and Spritz, and a food and drink writer who lives, and works, in Brooklyn.

With a 45-page section on various shapes alone, Robbins and Baoicchi answer every question you could possibly have about Italy s most famous carb. If you ve ever wanted to make espresso-flavored pasta dough or concoct a dreamy tortellini en brodo (both thoughts I ve personally had), this book is for you. Food & Wine
 
. a commanding volume on one of the world s best-loved foods. Bloomberg

Missy Robbins s immensely talented hands and mind imbue her cookbook with an amazing artistry. I can think of no other chef that is Missy s equal. She has managed the impossible to craft an extremely user-friendly pasta encyclopedia. Any cook, be they professional or passionate amateur, will be well equipped to navigate the prolific world of pasta guided by this beautiful cookbook. It will sit by my pasta pot, ready for action. Jonathan Waxman, chef and author of The Barbuto Cookbook
 
This book is an honest, passionate, and pure ode to pasta in its most celebrated, simplistic, and delicious form a reminder of how two humble ingredients can rock your world and your palate. Pasta will transport you to every region of Italy. More important, it will teach you to trust each of your senses and to instinctually feel your way through pasta making. Athena Calderone, author of the James Beard Award winning Cook Beautiful
 
I ve long admired Missy and her ability to create beautiful, thoughtful, and simply delicious technique-driven dishes with ease. This book is an immersion in the love of craft, storytelling, and dedication to all of that. Kristen Kish, chef, TV personality, and author of Kristen Kish Cooking

In Italy, pasta is more than a food. It is a religion. I was raised with a mother and grandmother in the kitchen rolling out egg pasta dough every day. Flipping through this book, I was reminded of their gestures and loving hands as they worked the dough into multiple shapes and forms. Missy and