[Sca-cooks] pasta water as a binder

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Dec 17, 2007, at 8:14 PM, Christine Seelye-King wrote:

> A question came up at work today we could not answer, and Google  
> couldn't
> seem to help us much either.  There is a technique wherein you take  
> the
> starchy water left over from cooking pasta and use it as a binder  
> for a
> sauce or whatever.  There should be an Italian name for this, but we
> couldn't come up with it.
>
> Anyone? Anyone?

Well, the problem is (or might be) that since the standard rule for  
boiling most pastas is usually four quarts of boiling water per pound,  
it's not supposed to get real starchy, so you'd have to reduce it (and  
its salt content) quite a lot for it to have much effect as a thickener.

UNLESS...

and this is a big unless...

...you mean using the oh-so-slightly-starchy water for emulsifying in  
something like butter and cheese. As in modern Fettucine Alfredo, say,  
whose "sauce" (grrr, don't get me started or we can listen to me rant  
all day about Nonexistent Caesar Salad Dressing next, or Au Jus Gravy,  
or, or, or...) consists of a little of that water (and it's the water  
that actually does the work, not really the starch), plus butter,  
cheese, and pepper. This probably covers some medieval techniques  
where the pasta is cooked in fatty broth, then butter and cheese added.

The name for it?

No clue... there are probably some very vague, generic terms  
pertaining to binding or "taking up the fat" or some such, and it all  
gets a little dicey when you start translating back and forth, anyway.

But yes, the technique is real, and it appears to be period, too.

Adamantius