Mar 26, 2021 4 min read

There’s a new noodle in town.

It’s called cascatelli, the invention of a man who apparently became just as bored as the rest of us this past year and decided to make something. The pasta is chunky and curly and looks a lot like the front of a ruffly blouse I have. This noodle is an especially useful addition to the pasta canon because it’s curvy enough to hold a lot of sauce. Also, it’s the first pasta shape that has a right angle.

Not that we needed another pasta shape.

It’s no coincidence that the same day of the cascatelli’s coming out party, social media was serving up a meme that says, “By your thirties, you should have a pasta shape you despise for no particular reason.”

Mine is the wagon wheel. Although the Italian word, rotelle, sounds a bit more elegant, there’s no getting around how clunky those wheels feel in the mouth. When cooked al dente, as all noodles should be, a wagon wheel lands on the tongue like a zip tie that’s tangled in a knot. Buttered wheels (overcooked) were a treat when I was a child – back when wheels tasted better than elbows, ordinary spaghetti was pronounced “skabetty” and was for Tuesday nights, bow ties were for special occasions and lasagna was saved for company.

Which brings us to bucatini. Mid-summer there came reports that the stringy, tube-shaped pasta had disappeared from store shelves. Just as the country was emerging from the toilet paper shortage, we were having to go without bucatini.

Until that moment, I’d never eaten bucatini, much less cooked it. Newspaper articles went on for long, delicious paragraphs referring to the noodle’s tender but firm bite, its slurpy hollow center that draws in the sauce, delivering a hefty but silky experience. Hyperbole? Perhaps, but after reading a couple of those articles I joined the panic and went looking to get me some bucatini.

The local supermarkets were out of the pasta – not that Giant Eagle ever carried it to begin with. Amazon was on long back order, unless you were willing to buy in bulk.

And that is how, on a chilly October day, the dark-blue Prime van drove up and the driver delivered to my door a heavy box of pasta. Inside were 12 one-pound packages of bucatini noodles. I looked at that stack of carbohydrates, thought “pandemic pounds” and stowed the thing in the pantry.

And there it waits, still wrapped tight in plastic.

I have cooked dozens of meals since then, a few of them noodldy. For those I used penne, rotini, orzo, and farfalle.

Somewhere in the back of the cabinet is the box of orecchiette I bought because I saw a recipe that mixed those “little ears” with sautéed kale. It was a wholly aspirational and impulsive purchase.

As was this truckload of bucatini. According to the articles, true pasta aficionados prefer it to any other pasta shape; it has better mouth feel, holds the sauce better, has a nicer bite.

So why haven’t I tried it? Those noodles feel like the expensive shirt that hangs in the closet, waiting for an event special enough to wear it. Of course, when that event comes, the shirt will be out of style or will no longer fit. I may not be cook enough to deserve such special noodles.

The bucatini shortage of 2020 has passed, of course. You can buy single boxes on Amazon again. Soon they’ll be selling the newfangled cascatelli, too, but order yours now. It will be selling fast. They say it really holds the sauce.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.