"It's a Pasta Avalanche!"

By Michael Demarest

Italy's love food becomes an all-American passion

Spaghetti can be eaten most successfully if you inhale it like a vacuum cleaner.

--Sophia Loren

A few years ago, the ultrachic restaurants of America were almost exclusively French. Today, on the smart streets of Manhattan, Washington, Chicago and Beverly Hills, three-star cafes are filled with the pungent aromas of Naples and Bologna. Pasta vincit ora/na/Not only the familiar, plebeian spaghetti, macaroni and ravioli, but more than 150 forms of Mediterranean batter, from agnolotti to ziti, have landed in fancy dress on elegant menus. Indeed, just about everywhere, restaurants and cooking schools dedicated to those al dente squares and rounds and ribbons of pearly paste are subverting meat-and-taters America. Exclaims Master Cook James Beard: "It's a pasta avalanche!"

Americans last year inhaled 2 billion Ibs. of pasta, about 9 Ibs. per person, propelling the U.S. to second place in the world as a pasta consumer; Italians down some 60 Ibs. each annually. Virtually every city of any size has specialty stores selling freshly made pasta, as well as hard durum wheat flour for knead-it-yourselfers, and imported cheeses, sauces, oils, olives and herbs to anoint each dish. A sophisticated caterer can offer whole pasta dinners, starting with pisarei e fasoi (bean soup with gnocchi and prosciutto) through bigoli all'anitra (Venetian wheat pasta with poached duck) and baked spaghetti pie with cinnamon-flavored cream and eggs for dessert. Pasta cookbooks are churned out with dizzying regularity. Mostly written by Italians, they are generally excellent; for instance, Sicilian-descended Carlo Middione's new Pasta! Cooking It, Loving It (Irena Chalmers Cookbooks). Accessories for making pasta proliferate: drying machines, ravioli crimpers, cutting wheels, rolling pins, tomato presses, electric cheese graters and dies to make dozens of special shapes like creste di galli (cockscombs) and capelli di preti (small priests' hats).

For the home pasta master, the greatest thing since tomatoes* has been the pasta machine, manual (around $40) or electric ($250). American Best Coffee, Inc., which added a single pasta machine to its line of espresso machines in 1977, now sells 24 models, ranging in price from $500 to $70,000. Still, many purists prefer the ritual of making pasta fresca, fatt'a mano (freshly made by hand). At classes like the one taught by Arlene Battifarano at Manhattan's New School, flour-smeared students happily echo, "Fold, push, press, turn! Fold, push, press, turn!" as they attack alps of dough. Says Expert Marcella Hazan: "The warmth of the hand makes for elasticity and body more than any kind of machine."

The health boom has undoubtedly helped to popularize the Italian national dish. Some nutritionists consider it a diet food. Despite the Italian maxim Quel che non ammazza ingrassa (What doesn't kill you fattens you), plain pasta contains no more calories than rice or potatoes. It has protein, phosphorus, calcium, niacin, thiamine, riboflavin, iron and potassium, but is low in sodium and fat.

It was that ubiquitous gastronome Thomas Jefferson who first brought pasta to prominence in the U.S. After visiting Naples in the late 18th century, he ordered home four crates of "maccarony." Like the European grapevines he brought back to Virginia, however, pasta alia

Tommaso got nowhere, except to decorate Yankee Doodle's hat. Pasta languished in Italian neighborhoods, to be consumed, over red-check tablecloths with raw chianti, by young people out on a cheap date. (Those neighborhood restaurants today often serve very good food.) What most Americans did not appreciate was pasta's infinite variety. One New York City restaurateur, Naples-born Tony May (the Rainbow Room), insists, "There's no reason why you should eat the same type of pasta with the same sauce more than once in your whole lifetime."

Nadine Kalachnikoff, who opened a chic carry-out and catering service called Pasta Inc. two years ago in Washington's Georgetown section, sells more than 1,000 Ibs. of pasta weekly, in five different widths and in a spectrum of ten flavors that include curry, dill, sesame and choco late. The White House occasionally sends out for green and white agnolotti and nut meg sauce. At Prego in San Francisco, Owner Larry Mindel says, "There's not one pasta on the menu that any of our customers had ever heard of a year ago."

In fact, for an aficionado, pasta is fine any time. Actor James Coco (Only When I Laugh), who has waged a heroic battle to shed more than 100 Ibs., observes, "When I'm really happy, I have to have pasta. When I am really depressed, I have to have pasta. Even when I'm dieting, I have to have pasta."

Mangia! Mangia!

--By Michael Demarest. Reported by Frances Fiorino/New York and Michael Moritz/San Francisco

* Pasta and tomatoes did not meet up until the 18th century, but ground wheat was made into pasta as early as Etruscan times. Contrary to popular belief, Marco Polo did not bring pasta back from China in the 13th century, but described the noodles of Cathay, "which are like ours."

With reporting by Frances Fiorino/New York, Michael Moritz/San Francisco

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