Italian Is the Other One

I wrote recently that fish sits on a short list of foods people order rather than make, and that the list has nothing to do with difficulty.

Italian is the other one on that list, and it's the stranger case by far.

Fish at least has a real excuse. It's expensive, the window is narrow, and most people have overcooked a piece and remembered it. Fine.

Pasta is flour and eggs. The sauce is onions, garlic and a tin of tomatoes. There is no equipment, no technique that takes years, and no ingredient that costs anything. And we have collectively decided it belongs to restaurants.

How that happened

I think it's that the good version and the ordinary version are so far apart.

Dried pasta from a box with a jar of sauce is fine. It's dinner, nobody complains. And it is so completely different from fresh pasta finished in a sauce made that afternoon that people assume the gap must be skill, or a grandmother, or a stone kitchen in Emilia-Romagna.

It isn't. The gap is two ingredients and ninety minutes, most of which is the dough resting while you do something else.

What you're actually buying

A restaurant plate of pasta is somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-two dollars. The ingredients on it cost about three.

What you're paying for is that somebody made the noodles that morning and somebody else made the sauce yesterday, and both of those are things you can do. Not approximately. Actually, in your kitchen, with the same result, because unlike a thirty-hour stock or a wood-fired oven there is nothing in fresh pasta that a home kitchen can't produce.

It's one of the very few restaurant dishes where that's completely true.

The ratio is the thing

A hundred grams of flour to one egg.

That's it, and once you know it you never need a recipe again. Four people is four hundred grams and four eggs. You can decide to make pasta on the way home and buy what you need without looking anything up.

The sauce is the same. Onion, garlic, good tomatoes, forty minutes. The only decision that matters is buying real San Marzanos, and that's about four dollars rather than a skill.

Two things to remember and you've replaced the dish you'd have paid thirty dollars for.

The part that isn't about money

Making pasta is one of the genuinely pleasant things to do with your hands.

There's a point about six minutes into kneading where the dough stops being shaggy and goes smooth, and it happens all at once, and you can feel it. Rolling it out is satisfying in a way that very little cooking is. Cutting it and shaking out the nests takes two minutes and looks like something.

It's also the most sociable cooking I know. Two people and a pasta machine is a conversation, not a task, and children are very good at the cutting.

That's worth more than the thirty dollars, and it's the part the restaurant can't sell you.

So make it

Flour, eggs, a tin of tomatoes and an onion.

The first time will be slightly worse than the restaurant. The third time won't be, and by then you'll be doing it from memory on a Tuesday, which is the whole point of writing any of this down.