There are more than 600 pasta shapes world wide.

The word pasta comes from the Italian word for paste, meaning a combination of flour and water and includes many forms of spaghetti, macaroni and egg noodles. The term pasta has always been used on Italian restaurant menus to include all the various pasta offerings.

Cooked al dente literally means to the tooth, which is how to test pasta to see if it is properly cooked. The pasta should be a bit firm, offering some resistance to the tooth, but tender.

The Pope set quality standards for pasta in the 13th century.

Thomas Jefferson is credited with introducing macaroni to the United States. It seems that he fell in love with a certain dish he sampled in Naples while serving as the U.S. Minister to France from 1785 to 1789. In fact, he promptly ordered crates of maccheroni, along with a pasta-making machine, sent back to the States.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, actor Leonardo diCaprios favorite food is said to be pasta.

On record, the Chinese have eaten pasta as early as 5 000 B.C.

According to legend, noodles were first made by German bakers in the 13th century. They molded dough into symbolic shapes, such as stars, swords and birds, which they then baked and served as bread.

Top quality pasta is made from durum wheat. According to the North Dakota Agricultural Statistics Service, about 73 % of the durum wheat grown in the United States is actually grown in North Dakota. American grown durum wheat is considered among the best in the world.

Tripolini ("little bows") were named to honor the Italian conquest of Tripoli in Libya.

According to Harry Balzer (NPD Group, Chicago), consumers enjoy pasta for dinner more than 40 times a year approximately once a week.

Pasta existed for thousands of years before anybody ever thought of putting tomato sauce on it. Cortez, a Spanish explorer, brought tomatoes back to Europe from Mexico in 1519. Even then, nearly 200 years passed before spaghetti served with tomato sauce made its way into Italian kitchens.

Spaghetti and meatballs: the Italians only ate meat a few times a month. So, when they came to America, where meat was plentiful, they incorporated meat into their cooking more often, making meatballs an American invention.

The first American pasta factory was opened in Brooklyn, New York, in 1848, by a Frenchman named Antoine Zerega. Mr. Zerega managed the entire operation with just one horse in his basement to power the machinery. To dry his spaghetti, he placed strands of the pasta on the roof in the sunshine.

Pasta is one of the foods kids most frequently eat at home, according to research conducted by Land OLakes. Seventeen percent eat spaghetti while 16 percent eat macaroni and cheese. Statistics from the NPD Group, a custom research group, show that kids eat 62 pounds of pasta each yearmore than any other age group.

Christopher Columbus, one of Italys most famous pastaphiles, was born in October, which is now National Pasta Month.

During the 1980s, macaroni, which was traditionally considered a blue-collar down-home meal, was transformed into the more upscale pasta. As more and more people began to have fun with pasta and romanticize it throughout the 1960s and 1970s, its image began to change along with its name.

"Life is a combination of magic and pasta."
Frederico Fellini