While well-cooked pasta is good for teeth, well-designed pasta is food for thought. When I was living in a small Italian town, I cooked pasta and contemplated upon their forms in idle evenings.

What a fantastic medium to capture tomato sauce indeed!

Spaghetti often isn’t sauce enough, and Rigatoni sometimes has too much. Variations of Fusilli (spiral-shape), Farfalle (butterfly-shaped), and Casarecce (has a nice twist) are lovely, practical, well-engineered solutions.

But my favourite is Canalini: it is like Linguini but with a “canal” in the middle, into which the perfect amount of sauce flows. It is an intellectual pasta.

Because of these witty, elegant, and high-carb inventions, life is good.

— 2005. 11. 11