Overview
An in-depth investigation of a beloved food, a celebration of the complexity of simple pleasures, and a delight for everyone who eats pasta.
Everyone loves pasta, but despite myriad cookbooks no one has ever seen the world’s favorite food presented like this. Created by a team of obsessive designers, this unique book reveals the hidden mathematical beauty that cooks across the globe have taken for granted since Marco Polo.
Pasta’s wonderful, sometimes whimsical, geometrical shapes and surfaces are designed to hold certain sauces or accompaniments, to be beautiful yet functional. Here are over ninety forms of pasta, each shown through especially commissioned photographs, mathematical formulae that accurately describe each shape, and drawings that reveal the hidden genius of our everyday food. Brief texts describe the special attributes of each form of pasta, along with advice on specific uses in cooking.
Synopsis
This is not a cookbook; it is a totally fresh and idiosyncratic look at pasta.
The pasta family tree reveals unexpected relationships between pasta shapes, their usage and common DNA. Architect George L. Legendre has profiled 92 different kinds of pasta, classifying them into types using 'phylogeny' (the study of relatedness among natural forms).
Each spread is devoted to a single pasta, and explains its geographical origin, its process of manufacture and its etymology - alongside suggestions for minute-perfect preparation. Next the shape is rendered as an equation and as a diagram that shows every distinctive scrunch, ridge and crimp with loving precision. Superb photographs by Stefano Graziani show all the elegant contours.
Finally, a multi-page foldout features a 'Pasta Family Reunion' diagram, reassembling all the pasta types and grouping them by their mathematical and geometric properties!