Excerpt from Rachel Roddy’s latest cookbook An A - Z of Pasta:

Raffaella's movement reminds me of sanding. As she rubs, she is stretching and lengthening the strip of flour and water dough between her palm and the wooden board into a rope, a picio. In the corner of the board is a pile of pici, sleeping snakes in yolk-yellow sand.

Raffaella's movement reminds me of sanding. As she rubs, she is stretching and lengthening the strip of flour and water dough between her palm and the wooden board into a rope, a picio. In the corner of the board is a pile of pici, sleeping snakes in yolk-yellow sand.

We are south of Florence, just up from Grosseto in Val d'Orcia in Tuscany, an aorta of good food and even better wine. Raffaella's house sits on top of a hill and her kitchen window looks out over the valley. Through the veil of spring drizzle, the olive groves look like heads of unruly silver hair, while the neat vines are like tramlines on a skinhead. This is land shaped by the fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Tuscan merchants who transformed this part of Tuscany into a model of rural development and beauty, a reason for so much Tuscan pride and fodder for sunburnt novels and, ahem, narrative cookbooks. Much earlier were the Etruscans. Some local historians have tried to trace pici back to the Etruscans, a theory they evidence with the murals on the walls of a tomb in Cerveteri.

In Cerveteri, Umbria and parts of Lazio similar rope-like pasta are called lombrichelli, earthworms, also umbricelli, which makes me think of umbilical cords. In other parts of Tuscany much shorter lengths are called strozzapreti, priest stranglers, gastronomic humour that comes from a time when priests were seen as the greedy and interfering lackeys of the papal state. Raffaella calls them pici. The name surely comes from pinching walnut-sized bits from a ball of dough, which is a common way to make them, as is rolling the dough between your palms as if rubbing a stick into a rock trying to spark fire. Raffalla shows us her way, rolling some of the dough into a circle, cutting that into centimetre-wide strips ready to be rubbed.

Later at a sagra, a festival dedicated to the making and consuming of their local shape, a woman tells me that pici are the most primitive of shapes, that there is no right or wrong way, that anyone can do it if they have patience, all the while making pici with such speed and skill, I can barely follow what she is doing. I choose to believe her though, rather than others who would have us believe that there is only one way to do things and that has to be passed on from your mother like an heirloom.

The irregularity is part of the charm of pici, as well as the texture imparted by hands, board and the rough flours traditionally used, a texture which is now achieved by using both soft and hard wheat (semola) flours. The substance and texture of pici means it is satisfying even with very little sauce. Traditionally 'poor folks' food', pici were served with poor sauces (inevitably the best-tasting ones), olive oil and garlic, cubes of crisp pancetta and even crisper breadcrumbs. Richer sauces (for richer folks) were meat, giblets or a mahogany-coloured duck and wine ragù known as nana.

Raffaella treats us richly like poor folk, making one sauce with olive oil, tomatoes and a gigantic and mild local garlic called aglione (or kissing or elephant garlic), then tossing the rest of the pici in the pan with a rubble of salty fried breadcrumbs. We eat and drink, and as we do it rains, and rains, so much so that we are reluctant to leave, so sit back and drink some more.

To make pici

While they are normally made with plain 00 flour, a percentage of semolina flour gives strength to the dough. The general rule is half the quantity of flour in water, so 200g of 00, 200g of semola and 200ml of warm water, but because all flour is different, and climatic conditions play a part, you do need to ( … )