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Italian). Tradition pairs pesto with a long pasta like linguine, chunky meat sauces with tubular pastas like rigatoni, and so on. If you’d like to learn more about this, by all means buy a good Italian cookbook. But guess what: Rigatoni with pesto and linguine with meat sauce are fabulous, too, so stock up on the shapes and types you like, and experiment. If you cook any kind of pasta well and add the right amount of something tasty to it, you can’t go wrong.

QUANTITIES

Four ounces (¼ pound) of dry pasta per person is a basic formula to remember, and the recipes in this chapter are based on that amount. If you and whomever you’re cooking for have smallish appetites—or if you’re making a dish with a lot of other ingredients—you may find that those 4 ounces are more than you need per person. But with pasta, it’s better to err on the side of too much, rather than too little—you won’t add much expense, and you’ll end up with tasty leftovers. You don’t need to actually weigh the pasta; just eyeball based on the weight of the full package. For spaghetti, a bundle about the size of a quarter (as in the coin) is about 4 ounces.

When it comes to quantities of sauce and other ingredients, remember, pasta is forgiving. A little more, a little less…it all tends to work out in the end. In other words, if a recipe calls for a 24-ounce jar of sauce and you’ve got a 26-ounce jar, go ahead and use it all.

OLIVE OIL

Buy two kinds: one that’s relatively inexpensive, which you can use for sautéing things and for dressing pasta in general, and one high-quality extra-virgin oil that has a lot of flavor (and usually a higher price tag), which you can use in combination with the cheaper oil. Here’s the rub: The less you cook the oil, the more you’ll be able to tell the difference a good extra-virgin will make. So use it sparingly, in pastas (and other dishes) in which it’s added toward the end of cooking, or drizzled on as a garnish.

GET THIS PASTA SHAPES

Familiar favorites

Spaghetti

Linguine

Fettuccine

Rigatoni

Macaroni

Penne

Angel hair

Lasagna noodles

And a few less common ones to check out

Orecchiette (“little ears”—great with chunky sauces)

Gemelli (“twins”—double-helix spirals with great texture)

Orzo (looks like grains of rice; add to soups or toss with feta)

Campanelle (aka trombette: ruffle-edged trumpets—fun shape, lots of texture, great with roasted vegetables)

GET THIS PASTA STAPLES TO STOCK

Jarred tomato sauce (marinara, roasted vegetable, mushroom, etc.)

Canned tomatoes (sauté with garlic and onion to make a quick sauce)

Tomato paste in a tube (stores almost indefinitely in the refrigerator; unlike a can, the tube lets you use as much as you like and reseal the rest)

Parmesan cheese (buy a chunk and grate as needed for best flavor)

Really good olive oil (extra-virgin is usually the best bet), for drizzling as a finishing touch

Capers (toss into all kinds of pastas for a salty, tangy hit of flavor)

Olives (buy pitted ones, or smash them with the heel of your hand to extract the pit; use as you would capers)

Anchovies or anchovy paste. (Don’t be squeamish—a hint adds lots of flavor and most people who “hate anchovies” turn out not to when they don’t know they’re there. Case in point: Caesar salad. And, of course, strict vegetarians can just read on.)

Red pepper flakes (use both in cooking and for sprinkling at the table)

Garlic (if you’re not into mincing, invest in a garlic press)

Frozen peas (surprisingly good in all kinds of pastas)

TIMING AND COOKING

If you’re planning to have pasta for dinner, it’s usually a good idea to put the pot of water on the stove to heat before you do anything else, because it takes a while to come to a boil. And since a watched pot never boils, once it’s on the stove, you can get busy preparing the sauce or ingredients you’ll be using to dress the pasta.

Traditional methods call for using plenty of water—a few quarts for a half-pound of pasta to allow the noodles to swim around freely. (Current discussion in the food world, based on experiments