pasta

We have reached the most critical point. What is this? But, of course, the binding of the sauce with the pasta.

So, let´s see what we have in front of us:

a) A liquid and greasy sauce,

b) A completely smooth material (pasta), which is dry and cannot be swallowed. It is looking for something that will help it become pleasant.

So what do we have to do?

To let the greasy sauce slip and end up at the bottom of the plate?

Or to imitate prison and military camp cooks, putting grated cheese on top of the pasta to stop the “downhill” of the liquids, sacrificing, at the same time, the original taste and producing a dominant taste of the cheese?

Neither.

Mantecare, in the beautiful Italian language, means mixing different ingredients in order to form a new creamy product. The same root is being used in Spanish and Catalan languages, where mantequilla and mantega mean butter. So, when we “mantecate”, we intend to make an homogenized cream, an emulsion, which, unlike the greasy sauce, will stick to the pasta and will not dive at the bottom of the plate.

Let’s look back at the entry of sauces.

What are we reading?

That the initially liquid sauces must, somehow, bind with something, so that they can then stick to the main material. And the most common means of binding is what, in the case of pasta, we have plenty in front of us:

THE STARCH

Guessing …………

(excerpt from the lemma Pasta of the DG book)