World Pasta Day

What the day is

World Pasta Day is observed on October 25. It dates from a World Pasta Congress held in Rome in 1995, where producers and industry bodies from a number of countries agreed to promote pasta internationally, and it has been marked annually since.

It is separate from National Pasta Day, the American observance kept on October 17. The two are frequently confused and have different origins.

Origin and background

The day is explicitly a trade promotion, which is worth stating, though the case it makes is not unreasonable. Dried pasta is cheap, keeps for years without refrigeration, cooks in minutes and carries protein and complex carbohydrates, which makes it genuinely useful food security as well as a commercial product.

Italy dominates both production and consumption, with annual per-person consumption several times that of most other countries, but pasta is eaten almost everywhere and the largest producers now include several countries outside Europe.

Two persistent myths deserve retiring. Marco Polo did not bring pasta from China; noodles developed independently in several places and pasta was already documented in Italy before his travels. And breaking spaghetti to fit the pan is treated as sacrilege mainly for texture reasons rather than tradition: short broken lengths do not twirl and hold sauce the way full strands do.

On nutrition, the glycemic response to pasta is lower than that of many other refined starches, largely because of its dense protein structure, and cooking it al dente lowers it further.

How to take part

• Cook it al dente and taste a strand rather than trusting the packet timing.
• Salt the water generously; it is the only opportunity to season the pasta itself.
• Save a cup of the cooking water before draining and use it to loosen and bind the sauce.
• Finish the pasta in the pan with the sauce for the last minute rather than pouring sauce on top.
• Cook a regional dish you have never made instead of the one you always make.