23 October 1996

Surrealistic Pasta

Cooking pasta is generally straightforward: you boil it until it's done. If you don't cook it enough it will be unpleasantly chewy; boil it too long and it turns to mush.

Those rules don't apply to Chirico pasta. I don't know if Luciano is I any way related to Giorgio, but he definitely manufactures some strange food. No matter what I do or how carefully I monitor the cooking process, the pasta is either overdone or underdone.

There must be some point at which it is cooked properly, but there's not. With enough wine and garlic, though, even surreal pasta can be pleasant.