Pairing Sauce With Pasta - Under The Tuscan Gun

Pairing Sauce With Pasta

If you live in Italy, the best way to get the neighbors to gossip about you is by serving pasta with the wrong sauce.?Sure, there are over 600 different types of Italian pasta, but without the sauce nobody will want to eat the dish. While food naturally pairs better with certain wines, so too certain pastas pair better with certain sauces. Pici wants rag?, for example and that?s how Italians see it. Basta.

So how can you know which sauce goes with what pasta?

First, A Little History

A sauce is a liquid or semi-liquid food meant to make other foods look, smell and taste better. Sauces have probably been around since the beginning of Western civilization. In particular, during the days when refrigeration wasn?t available, sauces hid the flavors of old or spoiled foods.

Going all the way back to Roman times, the most commonly used sauce was liquamen, a very strong fish stock made with anchovies. Among the Romans, liquamen was so popular that it was factory-produced in many towns of the Empire. Another sauce that likely existed since ancient Greek times was pesto?fresh herbs, garlic and olive oil pounded together in a mortar.

Spaghetti and Tomato Sauce

The pairing of spaghetti with tomato sauce probably didn?t happen until about the 17^th century. Tomatoes were originally a product of the Andes and didn?t arrive to Italy until the 15^th century. The earliest recipe found for tomato sauce by itself is Antonio Latini?s 1692 cookbook from Naples, Lo scalco alla moderna. Then, one hundred years later, Francesco Leonardi published L?Apicio Modern in which he gave a recipe for pasta with tomato sauce.

In the United States, this combination didn?t happen until the 1920?s when it became commonplace in restaurants. Since then, an explosion of innovation has increased the number of sauces for pasta.

Types of Sauces

In my favorite Italian book, Pasta: Passione e Fantasia, chefs Antonio Chiodi Latini and Mario Busso identify six main sauces that pair with pasta:

Tomato sauce:?Tomato pulp usually simmered with garlic, onion and basil. Their additional advice is to add a half teaspoon of sugar to take away the acidic taste.

Cheese sauce: Made from butter, flour, milk and a variety of cheeses ranging from gorgonzola and gruyere to fontina and parmesan, the longer fresh pastas, such as fettuccini, go well with these sauces.

Meat sauce (or rag?): The most important part of these sauces are all kinds of ground meat, although for flavor they are usually simmered with vegetables, such as onions, carrots and celery. Long and thick fettuccini works well with rag??sauces.

Vegetable sauce:?Diverse types of cut vegetables can be made into a sauce with fresh herbs sprinkled over the top. Italians like to keep their vegetables crunchy and this sauce is usually prepared with what?s in season. The fresh long tagliolini pasta work especially well for these sauces.

Fish sauce: Fish sauces today can use calamari, mussels, shrimp, salmon or trout. Simmered together with onions, garlic, celery, tomatoes and herbs, these are far fresher and less smellier than the ancient liquamen. Long types of bavette (a narrower version of tagliatelle) go well with these sauces.

Herb sauce: Basically a warmed butter sauce sprinkled with fresh herbs of any kind, these sauces go with any fresh or dry pasta.

The Pairings

The number of sauce variations from these six are endless, so it?s hard to keep up. But fear not, Chow?has developed a cheat sheet for those who?d like to get their pasta and sauce pairings just right. And for those who want to avoid the gossip, but have trouble keeping it all straight: when in doubt, penne or the classic spaghetti goes well with just about every sauce.

Source: http://underthetuscangun.com/food/pasta/pairing-sauce-with-pasta/

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