Pasta ‘slumping with jellyfish languor’: the al dente question.

Of course, I would never dream of serving pasta any other way than al dente. Social ostracism might ensue, if you’ll pardon the sarcasm.

I was standing by the pot, watching the steam rising frantically in baroque curlicues; little parallel curves like a Don Martin cartoon in a magazine circa 1968. I turned it down to ‘simmer’ and wondered how generations of Italians managed to instantaneously transport themselves from the threshing fields, the horse and plough, the FIAT production line, or the corner garage at the very moment nonna drained the cooked-to-the-second yellow strands. Maybe they did, but it seems unlikely.

Forgive me, padre, for I have sinned (SFX: jiggle of rosary beads—use uncooked rigatoni if unavailable: shaken, they sound uncannily like chunky wooden beads). The sin: I once broke the al dente mantra, enthusing on this weblog about well-cooked pasta—in that instance a thick, muscular, robust bucatini paired with a meat ragu made from the leftover semi-solid fluids from a tomato-based beef stew—that, far from being al dente, was actually … slurpy. 

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I found this each-way bet on the al dente question in the ‘Tables for Two’ column of an old (Mar.18, 2024) copy of the New Yorker:

There is artistry, too, of course, in the act of cooking pasta; Robbins might boil a dried, extruded noodle so that it still has a filament of hardness running through it, whereas she’ll let her hand-cut specimens slump with jellyfish languor.

The artistry might be in the writing as well as the kitchen; after all, hand-cut pasta is already soft. And by the way, how do you get that filament of hardness running through the middle of bucatini? It’s hollow.