There are thousands of names for pasta, but before all came those joyful, humble lumps of dough known as gnocchi. How do you like yours?
“In the beginning was the gnocco.” When I first read that line by Corrado Barberis, president of Italy’s National Institute of Rural Sociology, I got slightly hysterical. Let me explain: it was last summer, inordinately hot, and I was holed up in a dark room writing a book about pasta, or rather 50 stories about 50 shapes, and things were not going well. In fact, they were going very badly, and I hated the book, myself and everyone I could hear having what sounded like the time of their lives in the piazza below.
After looking for the answer on social media, then feeling even worse, I picked up the masterpiece that is Oretta Zanini de Vita’s Encyclopedia Of Pasta. Now, I should add that at the time we were working our way through The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings double trilogy at home, so I may have been influenced by that when I opened it looking for a sign.
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