The word fusilli was first recorded in English around 1925-30 and comes from fusillo (“little spindle”) in the southern Italian dialect. It’s a more simple affair in Italy, typically served as just the noodles with butter and fresh Parmesan. The most common dish that uses fettuccine in the US is fettuccine Alfredo made with flour, cream, and milk that’s topped with shrimp or chicken. Dishes with fettuccine evolved and were popularized in the early 1900s. fettuccineįettuccine is pasta cut into flat and narrow strips-and indeed, the word fettuccine comes from fetta, which means “slice” or “ribbon” in Italian. Explore some other plural words we seldom hear in their singular form. We hear spaghetti in the plural so often that the singular spaghetto just sounds wrong. If you’re talking about one strand, the singular version is spaghetto. Spaghetti comes from the Italian word spago, which means “thin rope.” Fun fact: spaghetti is the plural form. You might even use spaghetti as shorthand for all Italian pasta shapes, but it actually refers to only one type: white, starchy pasta that’s in long strings and served with any variety of meat, tomato, or other sauces. There’s a good chance you know spaghetti through and through if you’re even the slightest bit familiar with Italian pasta. This type of pasta dates back to the 1500s in the northern Italian regions of Emilia-Romagna and Lombardia. Farfalle translates to “butterflies” in Italian, which is tied to the shape rather than any fancy colors. The word in Italian has nothing to do with fancy wear, however. The bow tie-wearing shape of the pasta world, farfalle is a rectangle with a pinched middle and zigzag edges. Now let’s take a look at the more traditional pasta shapes you’re likely to see at your table. Its availability was very limited in the US, but Sfoglini plans to distribute it more widely now. The new shape vesuvio, meant to resemble a volcano, takes its name from Mount Vesuvius and looks something like a twirling ribbon that is unraveling at one end. In Italy, the shape is known as cinque buchi (“five holes”).

It resembles four small tubes joined together as a square. Quattrotini is a new Sfoglini pasta developed by Pashman and based on a unique shape served only once a year in a small region in Sicily. After the viral success of cascatelli, Pashman teamed up with Sfoglini again to bring two other specialty shapes to the market: quattrotini and vesuvio. The goal for creating cascatelli was to produce a noodle that holds as much sauce as possible, is easy to pick up with a fork, and has a satisfying bite. The pasta, which took three years to develop in collaboration with the pasta company Sfoglini, has a half tube in the middle, features ruffles on both edges, and is somewhat like the shape of a caterpillar that’s half curled up. The name -coined specially for the new shape- means “waterfalls” in Italian (properly cascatelle ). You’ll learn which pastas are named after butterflies and which take after thin ropes, and the next time someone refers to farfalle as “the bow tie pasta” (the nerve!), you can get a little saucy! cascatelliĬascatelli was created by Dan Pashman, a James Beard Award winner and the host of The Sporkful podcast. So grab your fork and take a bite out of what these pasta names really mean. Think you know it all? We’ll go beyond spaghetti and penne and even serve up three new shapes: cascatelli, quattrotini, and vesuvio. Each noodle shape has a name that might seem random if you’re not caught up on your Italian, but with a little help on the translation, it will all start to make more sense. The world of pasta is filled with endless pastabilities thanks to a vast variety of shapes and sizes.

Shapes names