How to Make: Spaghetti


For most of the 20th century, Americans didn't know spaghetti from pasta. Spaghetti was used as a catchall term for wheat noodles of all shapes, and tomato sauce was the default adornment — so much so that it came to be known by the alias "spaghetti sauce." These were dark times. As Corby Kummer recounts in his masterful 1986 Atlantic magazine history of pasta in America,


Mocking the processed culinary horrors of yesteryear is like shooting fish in a barrel, so I won't do too much of it here. In fact, I'll note that canned tomato soup, while not exactly sugo di pomodoro, possesses a texture somewhat reminiscent of Italian tomato sauce, which is traditionally pur??ed in a food mill to make it smooth.

This is relevant because around the same time Kummer was schooling Atlantic subscribers in the meaning of al dente, food psychologist Howard Moscowitz was expanding "spaghetti sauce" horizons. According to a TED Talk by Malcolm Gladwell with the quintessentially Gladwellian title "Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce," Moskowitz discovered in the early 1980s that approximately one-third of Americans like their tomato sauce "extra-chunky." Following this discovery, Prego "completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce and came out with a line of extra-chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti-sauce business in this country."


If, like me, you are among the ostensible thirtysomething percent of Americans who like a tomato sauce with a coarse texture, you should not be serving it on top of spaghetti. That's because chunky tomato sauce doesn't cling to spaghetti the way classic smooth Italian tomato sauce does; the tomato pieces evade your twirling fork and end up at the bottom of your bowl. (If you're a chunky-tomato-sauce person, you should be serving your sauce with a short pasta like fusilli or penne, so you can stab hunks of tomato and pieces of pasta onto a single forkful.)


You need olive oil, basically.

Italians have known this since before the tomato made its way to the Old World in the Columbian Exchange: Long pasta all'aglio e olio, with garlic and oil, is one of the simplest, fastest and most delicious pasta preparations imaginable. You mince garlic (and perhaps a hot chili) into morsels small enough to stick easily to spaghetti, and then you brown them lightly in olive oil. Combined with piping hot spaghetti and a few splashes of the starchy water you cooked the spaghetti in, the garlicky oil becomes a rich, flavorful, perfectly textured sauce. Chopped parsley is sometimes tossed in at the end for a little green pizzazz; I also like to throw in some arugula for its garlic-complementing bitterness.



Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Time: 20 minutes


1 pound spaghetti

1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil

8 garlic cloves, minced

1 medium bird's eye chili or other hot fresh red chili, seeded and minced

Black pepper

1 small bunch parsley, chopped, thick stems discarded

2 cups arugula leaves, roughly chopped if large


2. Meanwhile, put the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When it's hot, add the garlic and chili and season with salt and black pepper. Cook, stirring frequently, until the garlic is lightly browned, about 5 minutes.
