The Geometry of Pasta

I haven't tried any of the recipes from this yet, but it's a gorgeous looking book. It is organised by shape of pasta, with each shape getting a short description, a beautiful black-and-white graphic, and a couple of recipes for a sauce which would go particularly well with the shape.

I bought this last year but picked it off the shelf after a visit to an Italian restaurant where I was puzzled by one of the descriptions of "slap" pasta (paccheri). I found out not only that "The name derives from paccaria, the Neapolitan term for a 'slap or smack'", but also that it had been invented specifically to enable the smuggling of Italian garlic into Prussia (who'd banned the stuff as a way of supporting Prussian garlic-growers).

Exhibiting an early example of Italian disregard for the law, local pasta barons invented the pacchero - a tube of dried pasta just the right size to hide a ducat's worth of Italian garlic cloves (about four or five). Paccheri stuffed with garlic were sent north to sate the Prussian appetite, and the trade was thus illicitly saved. The Prussian government never uncovered the deception, and in the early 19th century their garlic industry folded.

After that, well, I had to read the whole book, and I wasn't disappointed. (I also had the paccheri on my next trip to the restaurant, and they were good too). I have at least a dozen recipe pages folded over to try....