America and the World Discover Pasta Water

In the 2020s and in some cases, earlier, we in the U.S. and others worldwide have been experiencing yet a third wave of Pasta blunders and proto-blunders rooted in our new discovery of very old, common-sense practices which we are, unsurprisingly, overdoing and pushing to extremes at which they become proto-blunders.

All three developments have their origin in the long-standing, everyday Italian practice of using a few spoonsful of the pasta-cooking water —- instead of cooler, unsalted tap-water or [seldom at-hand AND suitably-flavored] stock —- to thin out, deglaze, or liquify/emulsify an effectively un-saucy [usually ‘dry’ ingredients and a little olive oil, butter, or rendered pancetta or guanciale] or other, cheese-based pasta dressing to allow it to disperse throughout the pasta when it is tossed.

This was the normal practice in home cooking. Pasta was tossed traditionally in a large bowl or — off the heat and somewhat cooled by the elapsed pasta draining time —- in the large sauce-pot, the better to avoid sauce splatter.

Over the last four decades, pasta water has come to be used widely in restaurants when pasta is tossed in the sauce pan, over heat. It became instantly popular in the 1980s and ‘90s when open kitchens were in vogue. It remains popular in contemporary restaurants and in some homes; particularly in those influenced by restaurant trends or by TV or social media food videos, where it reigns as absolute orthodoxy.

Plain Old Customary Common Sense

Using a splash of pasta water in the traditional manner was just plain old customary common sense. In Italy, it is at the very least as old as the early 19th century, when dry pasta production machinery made previously expensive pasta available and inexpensive beyond the areas around Naples, where it had been commercially hand-produced since the later seventeenth century by many small producers. It is probably as old as in-house stoves [as opposed to hearths] and probably older.

Like so many of the developments throughout history, it almost certainly began in many separate homes around the same time, as many cooks, unknown to us and to the written records, eventually realized that if the family bowl of pasta needed thinning out, then the water in which it had just been boiled was the easiest, most accessible, and hottest/perfectly-salted thing at hand.

And during the many centuries before pasta became an affordable option for the vast majority of poor Italian families, cooks were using cold, unsalted, non-starch-containing water to thin out their daily gruel/porridge of local grain, beans, chestnuts, acorns, stale bread, and later, corn [polenta] with a few garden or root vegetables, cabbages, wild greens, or in better times, some salted pork or pork fat and rare bits of slaughtered, caught, or often illegally hunted meat of locally caught fish.

From These Humble Origins…….

From these or similar humble origins, the practice of adding pasta water has soared to the canonical heights of the cooking-tainment universe to the point that it is now a required incantation on every cooking show, contest, video, class, or cookbook that involves pasta. Happily, this particular incantation happens to make sense, unlike many other such recited mantras such as the many current variations on “More (garlic, cheese, bacon, or sugar) can only make it better".

It happens to make sense, that is, when it is done for its original purposes of thinning or re-hydrating a too thick sauce or for creating a quick oil or other fat emulsion ‘sauce’ from a pan of relatively ‘dry’ ingredients. Unfortunately, it has been taken to extremes now by some in the cooking media who are striving attain an unnecessary, usually textural, perfection.

[In Part 4 of this series, I’ll discuss the present-day, perfectionist phase of third-wave pasta blunders — more kindly and better understood in this case, perhaps, as scarcely-necessary overreaches.]

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