Maccheroni

Maccheroni is a vocabulary problem before it is a pasta. The word appears in Italian by the fourteenth century, when Boccaccio's Decameron imagines a land where a mountain of grated Parmigiano is used to make maccheroni and ravioli, and for centuries it simply meant pasta. Only with nineteenth-century industrialisation did catalogues start assigning names to individual shapes, and maccherone ended up attached to different objects in different regions.

On Italian shelves today it usually means a short semolina tube, smooth or ridged, three to four centimetres long and seven to ten millimetres wide, cut square. In Naples the word keeps its older, wider meaning and covers dried semolina pasta in general, especially the long hollow formats: ziti and candele, snapped by hand before they go into the pot. In Abruzzo, maccheroni alla chitarra are long, solid, square-section egg strands, the exact opposite of a short tube. In Molise, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily, maccheroni al ferretto are hollow tubes twisted by hand around an iron rod. In Sardinia the same gesture around a reed stem produces maccarrones de busa.

Underneath the confusion there is one consistent logic, and it is about sauce. Each regional maccherone is engineered for its local condiment. The Neapolitan hollow tube exists because Sunday ragù is a long-cooked whole-cut meat sauce that leaves a dense gravy, and the tube takes it in. The chitarra strand has sharp square edges and a porous egg dough because Abruzzese ragù contains pallottine, meatballs the size of a hazelnut that wedge between the strands. The ferretto tube is hollow because the mutton and goat sauces of the Apennines are thin and intensely savoury. And the American elbow is small and curved because macaroni cheese is a cheese béchamel that needs trapping both inside the tube and in the bend.

The name changes from valley to valley. The principle does not: the shape is designed around the sauce.

The short semolina tube tastes the way good dried pasta tastes, nutty and faintly sweet with a chalky centre when properly al dente, and eats in a compact, satisfying way, with sauce arriving from inside the tube as well as outside.

Maccheroni alla chitarra is a different sensation entirely. The egg dough is porous and slightly rough, and the square section means four flat faces and four hard edges against your tongue, so it feels denser and grabbier than round spaghetti. It is chewier than it looks and absorbs more sauce than any extruded strand.

The hand-rolled ferretto version is the most rustic of the three: uneven wall thickness means parts go soft while the seam stays firm, and the twist gives you sauce in bursts. If you have only eaten industrial pasta, this is the one that will taste unfamiliar.

The semolina tube cooks in 9 to 13 minutes, fresh chitarra in 2 to 4, fresh ferretto in 5 to 8. Plenty of salted water in every case.

Drain two minutes short of the box time and finish in the pan with a ladle of pasta water. On any hollow shape this is the step where sauce actually enters the tube; skip it and half the sauce stays in the bowl.

Match the sauce to the version. The short tube wants ragù napoletano, whole cuts of beef and pork simmered three or four hours in tomato, with the sauce dressing the pasta and the meat served afterwards as a second course, or genovese, the Neapolitan slow-cooked onion and beef sauce, or ricotta loosened with pasta water.

The chitarra wants Abruzzese ragù with pallottine, tiny beef and pork meatballs that lodge between the square strands, or a lamb and pepper sauce.

The ferretto version wants thin, powerful mutton, goat or pork sauces that run into the channel.

What fails everywhere is a thin sauce with no body: it runs through the tube, out the other end, and sits at the bottom of the bowl.

Sealed in a cupboard away from light, heat and damp, dry maccheroni run to the date on the pack, commonly two or three years out; that date is the maker's reference, and what you notice over time is the smell of wheat thinning. Once the bag is open, tip it into an airtight jar, mostly because open packs in a warm kitchen are where pantry moths arrive in summer. Dry egg pasta takes up moisture faster than plain semolina and needs the tighter seal: strands that once snapped clean start to bend instead once they have picked up humidity.

Fresh chitarra keeps about two days in the fridge, coiled into nests on a tray dusted with semolina and covered with a cloth. To freeze it, spread the nests apart until firm, then bag them: two months, cooked straight from frozen. Fresh ferretto behaves the same and also air-dries at home, two days on a cloth somewhere dry and airy, after which it keeps for months as dry pasta. Cooked and dressed, one day in the fridge, brought back in a pan with a spoonful of water.

Start with the word, because in English macaroni means one thing, the small curved elbow of macaroni cheese, while in Italy maccheroni covers several. There is the plain dry tube; there is maccheroni alla chitarra, not a tube at all but a square-section egg strand from Abruzzo; and maccheroni al ferretto, rolled by hand around an iron rod in the south. Read the picture and the region on the pack before the name. Elbows sit at the bottom of the price list in foreign supermarkets, and the other two rarely appear outside an Italian deli.

On dry tubes the usual marks apply: a matt, faintly floury surface rather than a shiny one, mouths cut clean and circular, a wall of at least a millimetre, white semolina dust in the bottom of the bag, protein above 13 percent and a cooking time of 9 to 13 minutes. On packaged chitarra, check the section is genuinely square, since extruded copies have rounded corners and lose the point of the shape. On ferretto the proof is irregularity: uneven lengths, the hollow visible at the ends, the seam where the dough closed on itself.

In the US, De Cecco and Barilla short tubes are in every supermarket at $1.50 to $3 a pound; Rummo, Garofalo and Mancini at $4 to $6; bronze-cut Gragnano IGP and southern artisan producers (Faella, Setaro, Gentile, Afeltra, Rustichella d'Abruzzo) at $7 to $14 through Eataly, Gustiamo and Market Hall Foods. Dried maccheroni alla chitarra is stocked by Abruzzo-focused importers at $7 to $16 a pound; hand-rolled ferretto pasta is rarer still, $9 to $20.

In the UK, supermarkets carry short tubes at £4 to £9 per kilo, and Natoora, Vorrei and Vallebona ship artisan Gragnano and Abruzzese egg pasta at £8 to £24 per kilo. Italian prices are €1.10 to €2.20 a kilo for supermarket brands, €6 to €14 for artisan, and €8 to €18 for hand-rolled.

One warning about labels: American and British shelves sometimes print 'macaroni' on elbows and 'maccheroni' on straight tubes from the same importer. Look at the picture, not the word.

Naples, where Sunday maccheroni al ragù is still a family ritual before it is a restaurant dish. The trattorie of the Sanità, the Quartieri Spagnoli and the Vomero serve it with hand-snapped ziti. Gragnano, half an hour away, is where the pasta itself comes from: the historic factories along Via Roma run tours and sell direct, and the town holds a pasta festival in September.

Abruzzo for the chitarra. The most faithful versions are in the Teramo area, where the pallottine are tiny and the ragù mixes beef, pork and sometimes lamb. Summer village festivals between Teramo and Atri are the best place to eat it.

In inland Molise, Basilicata and Calabria, maccheroni al ferretto appear on patron saint festival menus with mutton or goat ragù. In Sicily, in the Madonie and Nebrodi mountains, hand-rolled maccarruni come with pork sauce and grated ricotta salata.