Exquisitely designed beautifully written and featuring mouthwatering photography this gorgeous tome makes the perfect gift for the pasta lover in your lifeGuardian columnist and awardwinning food writer Rachel Roddy condenses everything she has learned about Italys favourite food in a practical easytouse and mouthwatering collection of 100 essential pasta and pasta sauce recipes.Along with the recipes are short essays that weave together the history culture and the everyday life of pasta shapes from the tip to the toe of Italy. There is pasta made with water and pasta with egg shapes made by hand and those rolled a by machine the long and the short the rolled and the stretched the twisted and the stuffed the fresh and the dried. The AZ of Pasta tells you how to match pasta shapes with sauces and how to serve them. The recipes range from the familiar pesto rag and carbonara to the unfamiliar but thrilling.This is glorious celebration of pasta from one of the best food writers of our time.SHORTLISTED FOR THE ANDRE SIMONS FOOD amp DRINK BOOK AWARDSI love this book. Every story is a little gem a beautiful hymn to each curl twist and ribbon of pasta. Nigel SlaterRachel Roddy describing how to boil potatoes would inspire me. There are very very few who possess such a supremely uncluttered culinary voice as hers just now Simon HopkinsonRachel Roddys writing is as absorbing as any novel Russell Norman author of PolpoRoddy is a gifted storyteller and a masterful hand with simple ingredients Guardian Cook