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Note Do not get coriander—also known as cilantro—and Italian parsley mixed up. The leaves of the former are rounded at their tips, whereas parsley’s come to sharp points. The aroma of coriander, which harmonizes so agreeably with Oriental and Mexican cooking, is jarring to the palate when forced into an Italian context.

PASTA

The shapes Italian pasta takes are varied beyond counting, but the categories an Italian cook works with are basically two: Factory-made, dried, flour and water macaroni pasta, and homemade, so-called “fresh,” egg and flour pasta. There is not the slightest justification for preferring homemade pasta to the factory-made. Those who do deprive themselves of some of the most flavorful dishes in the Italian repertory. One pasta is not better than the other, they are simply different; different in the way they are made, in their texture and consistency, in the shapes to which they lend themselves, in the sauces with which they are most compatible. They are seldom interchangeable, but in terms of absolute quality, they are fully equal.

Factory-made macaroni pasta That most familiar of all pasta shapes, spaghetti, is in this category, along with fusilli, penne, conchiglie, rigatoni, and a few dozen others. The dough for factory pasta is composed of semolina—the golden yellow flour of hard wheat—and water. The shapes the dough is made into are obtained by extruding the dough through perforated dies. Once shaped, the pasta must be fully dried before it can be packaged. Aside from the quality of both the flour and the water, which is critically important to that of the finished product, the general factor that sets off exceptionally fine factory-made pasta from more common varieties is the speed at which it is produced. Great factory pasta is made slowly: The dough is kneaded at length; once kneaded, it is extruded through slow bronze dies rather than slippery, fast Teflon-coated ones. It is then dried gradually at an unforced pace. Such pasta is necessarily limited to small quantities; it is made only by a few artisan pasta makers in Italy, and it costs more than the industrial product of major brands.

Good-quality factory pasta should have a faintly rough surface, and an exceptionally compact body that maintains its firmness in cooking while swelling considerably in size. By and large, it is better suited than homemade “fresh” pasta to those sauces that have olive oil as their vehicle, such as seafood sauces and the broad variety of light, vegetable sauces. But, as some of the recipes bear out, there are also several butter-based sauces that marry well with factory pasta.

Homemade pasta Italians have fascinating ways of manipulating pasta dough at home: In Apulia, pinching it with the thumb to make orecchiette; on the Riviera, rolling it in the palm of the hand to make trofie; in Sicily, twisting it around a knitting needle to make fusilli. And there are many others. But the homemade pasta that enjoys uncontested recognition as Italy’s finest is that of Emilia-Romagna, the birthplace of tagliatelle, tagliolini—also known as capelli d’angelo or angel hair, cappelletti, tortellini, tortelli, tortelloni, and lasagne.

The basic dough for homemade pasta in the Bolognese style consists of eggs and soft-wheat flour. The only other ingredient used is spinach or Swiss chard, required for making green pasta. No salt, no olive oil, no water are added. Salt does nothing for the dough, since it will be present in the sauce; olive oil imparts slickness, flawing its texture; water makes it gummy.

In the home kitchens of Emilia-Romagna, the dough is rolled out into a transparently thin circular sheet by hand, using a long, narrow hardwood pin. Girls used to begin to try their hand at it at the age of six or seven. Now that many have grown up without mastering their mothers’ skill, they use the hand-cranked machine to reach comparable, if not equivalent, results. Instructions for both the rolling pin and the machine method appear