De Cecco

The story begins with flour, not pasta. In 1831, in a village at the foot of the Majella massif, Nicola Antonio De Cecco took over the communal mill at Fara San Martino and spent forty years grinding what the surrounding countryside agreed was the best flour for miles. His sons kept the mill, and in 1886 one of them, Filippo Giovanni, opened a pastificio beside it. Three years later he built the thing the house is really known for: a machine that dried pasta with moving air rather than sunshine. Until then, dried pasta was hostage to the weather, and to the coastal towns whose sea breezes made it possible. Filippo Giovanni's box of trays and fans meant a pastificio could stand inland, in the mountains, and make pasta in any season. In 1893 he shipped it to the Chicago World's Fair and came home with a gold medal; by 1904 De Cecco was crossing the Atlantic on a schedule. The Second World War took the Fara San Martino works apart, and the family started again in 1944 on a single machine assembled from salvage. It is now the third-largest pasta maker in the world, still headquartered in the same mountain village, still held by the De Cecco family across three branches and something like two dozen heirs. One small thing tells you how the house thinks about itself: the box used to say 1886, the year of the pasta. It now says 1831, the year of the mill.

What De Cecco calls the Metodo De Cecco is a chain of four unglamorous choices, and it starts before the dough exists. The company mills its own semolina and grinds it coarse — a finer grind is faster and cheaper, and it shreds the gluten structure that gives cooked pasta its spine. That semolina is kneaded with cold spring water off the Majella, held below 15°C, because warm water starts the gluten working too early. The dough is pushed through bronze drawplates, which drag against it and leave a chalky, porous surface for sauce to catch on, rather than the slick teflon extrusion that comes out faster and looks prettier in the box. Then it dries — slowly, at low temperature, for something on the order of eighteen hours for a strand, and longer for the thick shapes. The whole sequence descends from Filippo Giovanni's 1889 machine, and De Cecco has never quietly modernized away from it. The most interesting choice, though, is one the company prints on the box and most of its rivals would rather not mention: De Cecco buys durum from Italy and from abroad, selected each year on protein and gluten quality rather than on passport. Wheat is a crop, and crops vary. Choosing the grain to suit the pasta, instead of the other way around, is why a box of De Cecco tastes the same in a bad wheat year as a good one.

It is the blue box, and it has been since long before blue meant anything. The trademark is a young woman in Abruzzese dress with two bundles of wheat in her arms, adopted in 1908. Every shape carries a number — Spaghetti is 12, Bucatini 15, Fettuccine 6 — and once you know a few of them you can read the shelf faster than you can read the labels. American boxes list added B vitamins and iron alongside the semolina, which is a US enrichment convention and not a different pasta; the Italian box lists semolina alone. On the stove, treat the printed time as a ceiling rather than a target. De Cecco holds a firmer bite than the everyday supermarket box, which makes it forgiving if you are finishing the pasta in the pan with its sauce, and slightly punishing if you walk away from the pot. It sits a clear step above the cheap shelf and a clear step below the artisan houses in both price and ambition, and it is on nearly every American supermarket shelf. That combination makes it the easiest place in the country to find out what bronze-die texture actually feels like against a fork.

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