"It's a Pasta Avalanche!"

Italy's love food becomes an all-American passion

Spaghetti can be eaten most successfully if you inhale it like a vacuum cleaner.

—Sophia Loren

A few years ago, the ultrachic restaurants of America were almost exclusively French. Today, on the smart streets of Manhattan, Washington, Chicago and Beverly Hills, three-star cafes are filled with the pungent aromas of Naples and Bologna. Pasta vincit ora/na/Not only the familiar, plebeian spaghetti, macaroni and ravioli, but more than 150 forms of Mediterranean batter, from agnolotti to ziti, have landed in fancy dress on elegant menus. Indeed, just about everywhere, restaurants and cooking schools dedicated to those al dente squares and rounds and ribbons of pearly paste are subverting meat-and-taters America. Exclaims Master Cook James Beard: "It's a pasta avalanche!"

Americans last year inhaled 2 billion Ibs. of pasta, about 9 Ibs. per person, propelling the U.S. to second place in the world as a pasta consumer; Italians down some 60 Ibs. each annually. Virtually every city of any size has specialty stores selling freshly made pasta, as well as hard durum wheat flour for knead-it-yourselfers, and imported cheeses, sauces, oils, olives and herbs to anoint each dish. A sophisticated caterer can offer whole pasta dinners, starting with pisarei e fasoi (bean soup with gnocchi and prosciutto) through bigoli all'anitra (Venetian wheat pasta with poached duck) and baked spaghetti pie with cinnamon-flavored cream and eggs for dessert. Pasta cookbooks are churned out with dizzying regularity. Mostly written by Italians, they are generally excellent; for instance, Sicilian-descended Carlo Middione's new Pasta! Cooking It, Loving It (Irena Chalmers Cookbooks). Accessories for making pasta proliferate: drying machines, ravioli crimpers, cutting wheels, rolling pins, tomato presses, electric cheese graters and dies to make dozens of special shapes like creste di galli (cockscombs) and capelli di preti (small priests' hats).

For the home pasta master, the greatest thing since tomatoes* has been the pasta machine, manual (around $40) or electric ($250). American Best Coffee, Inc., which added a single pasta machine to its line of espresso machines in 1977, now sells 24 models, ranging in price from $500 to $70,000. Still, many purists prefer the ritual of making pasta fresca, fatt'a mano (freshly made by hand). At classes like the one taught by Arlene Battifarano at Manhattan's New School, flour-smeared students happily echo, "Fold, push, press, turn! Fold, push, press, turn!" as they attack alps of dough. Says Expert Marcella Hazan: "The warmth of the hand makes for elasticity and body more than any kind of machine."

The health boom has undoubtedly helped to popularize the Italian national dish. Some nutritionists consider it a diet food. Despite the Italian maxim Quel che non ammazza ingrassa (What doesn't kill you fattens you), plain pasta contains no more calories than rice or potatoes. It has protein, phosphorus, calcium, niacin, thiamine, riboflavin, iron and potassium, but is low in sodium and fat.