Pasta all'Uovo

The eggs are used raw, so they must be fresh and properly stored. Wash your hands and the work surface before starting. Anyone pregnant or immunocompromised should use pasteurised eggs.

Weigh the flour, do not measure it in cups: the difference between a heaped cup and a level one changes the whole dough. Type 00 gives a smooth, elastic sheet.

Tip the flour onto a wooden board and spread it into a ring, with a wide hole in the middle and high walls. Wood beats marble here: it is porous, and the sheet grips it as you roll.

Three medium eggs, about 55-60 g each, for 300 g of flour. Break each egg into a small bowl first and then pour it in: one bad egg ruins the entire dough.

Beat the eggs in the centre with a fork, taking in a little flour from the inner edge at a time. If the wall breaks the egg escapes across the board — it happens to everyone the first time.

Once the dough holds together, work it with the heel of your palm, pushing forward and folding back, for at least ten minutes. It must become smooth and firm, not sticky: this is where the gluten forms that will later hold the sheet.

Shape it into a ball, wrap it in film and leave it for half an hour at room temperature. Without the rest the sheet shrinks back under the pin and you will never get it thin.

Flatten the ball and always run the pin from the centre outward, turning the dough a little each time to keep it round.

Wrap the sheet around the rolling pin and run it back and forth, pushing outward with your palms. This is the movement that actually widens the sheet, far more than simple pressure.

Roll down to about 1 mm or less. The test is this: put your hand under the sheet and see its shadow through it. Flour very sparingly, only if it sticks.

Leave it spread on the board for a quarter of an hour, until it is no longer damp to the touch but still flexible. Too damp and it glues together when cut, too dry and it cracks.

Roll the sheet loosely onto itself and cut slices about 7 mm wide with a broad knife. Cooked, they swell to the 8 mm of the measure registered in Bologna.

Unroll the tagliatelle straight away, dust with a very little semolina and form loose nests on a rack or a cloth.

One litre of water per 100 g of pasta, 10 g of coarse salt per litre, at a full boil. Fresh pasta cooks in 2-3 minutes: taste it, do not watch the clock. No oil goes in the water.

Drain the tagliatelle and toss them in the pan with the sauce, adding a little of the cooking water. The starch in that water binds the sauce to the pasta — it is the difference between dressed and drowned.

Two Italies, two different pastas. In the North pasta is made with soft wheat flour and eggs, in the South with durum semolina and water alone. This is not parochialism: it is what grew. Durum wheat wants the heat and drought of the South, soft wheat prefers the climate of the Po valley. In the North the egg also provides structure, because soft wheat on its own lacks the strength of durum. These are two food technologies born of two agricultures, not two versions of the same thing.

The measurement of tagliatelle genuinely exists. In 1972 the Accademia Italiana della Cucina deposited the official width of Bolognese tagliatelle with the Bologna Chamber of Commerce: 8 mm wide when cooked. That is why they are cut at 7 mm raw — they swell in the pot. It is a rule made half in fun and half in earnest, but the proportion it describes is real.

Why the rest is not optional. Kneading builds the gluten network, and freshly built it is under tension: the dough pulls back like an elastic band. Half an hour of rest lets that network relax, and the sheet then allows itself to be rolled thin without shrinking. Skipping the rest does not save time, it just moves the work onto the rolling pin.

Two things you often hear that are not true. Oil in the cooking water does not stop pasta sticking: it floats on the surface, and the only thing it achieves is making the pasta slippery so the sauce will not cling afterwards. And salt does not go into the dough: it stiffens the gluten and makes the sheet harder to roll. The salt belongs in the water.

On origins. The legend that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China is a twentieth-century advertising story. Dried pasta was already documented in Sicily in the twelfth century, before Marco Polo was born. For egg pasta the medieval and Renaissance documentation is rich; the notion that tagliatelle were invented in honour of Lucrezia Borgia's hair, by contrast, is an invention of 1931, and should be told as such.