On Food and Cooking

drowning in it or dispersed in a soup or stew.
With its ideal climate for drying raw noodles,
a tricky process that took one to four weeks,
Naples became the center of durum pasta
manufacturing.
Thanks to the mechanization of dough
kneading and extrusion, by the 18th century
durum pasta had become street food in
Naples, and common in much of Italy.
Perhaps because street vendors minimized
cooking and open-air consumers enjoyed
chewing on something substantial, it was in
Naples that people began to prefer pasta
cooked for minutes rather than hours, so that
it retains some firmness. This practice spread
to the rest of the country in the late 19th
century, and the term al dente, or cooked “to
the tooth,” appeared after World War I.
Subsequent decades brought effective
artificial drying and the machinery and
understanding necessary to turn pasta making
from a batch-by-batch process to a continuous