Scilatelle for World Pasta Day, October 25

When I first learned about World Pasta Day and was asked to help publicize it on my blog, I tried to remember the best pasta I had ever eaten. It didn't take me long to settle on scilatelle, a Calabrese dish handmade by my cousin at her kitchen table in Isca sullo Ionio in Southern Italy.

It's made by rolling pasta dough by hand around a reed (from a plant that grows in the area) to create a noodle with a tiny hole running through it. This is a delicate, time-consuming process, and that's part of its charm--scilatelle is not a pasta you would make on a weeknight after a long day of work. It's a pasta you start preparing early in the morning on the day of a big family gathering, with a pot of gravy simmering on the stove. I dug out an old notebook I kept during a visit to Italy in May, 2000 and found this description of the task:


Lidia is making the pasta for lunch today, and it is hypnotizing to watch her roll each strand by hand...She rolls out a long piece of dough made with farina di grano, then breaks off small, inch-long pieces. She presses each piece around a thin reed and rolls it against the table with her hand until it spreads out around the reed and becomes about six inches long. She then slides it off the reed and sets it on a dish towel, lined up with the others, to dry before cooking.

This pasta seems particularly well suited to World Pasta Day--which this year will be celebrated at the IV World Pasta Congress in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil--and to the work of one of my favorite local food organizations, Oldways, which advocates the Mediterranean Diet and traditional methods of food preparation like the one I described above. The purpose of the event is to promote the consumption of pasta as part of a healthy diet. And that is a mission I can definitely get behind.

If you don't want to spend the better part of a day making scilatelle (though I have to wonder what's wrong with you), my sister recommends buying a box of De Cecco brand perciatelli (from the word "perciato," which means pierced) for your World Pasta Day dinner.