Poor pasta. It suffers gravely in the hands of home cooks. It is simmered in tepid water until mush. It is rinsed. It is drowned in sweet sauces and buried in pre-ground cheese. The result is ignominious fodder, no more important to a buffet than the iceberg lettuce used to feebly decorate the borders. It is a sad fate considering a spaghetto's potential. In that single, brittle strand are only two ingredients—water and wheat—but vast application. Let’s disembarrass ourselves of poor technique, and get at it.

In theory, quality dry pasta can come from anywhere. In reality, the best comes from Gragnano in Campania, Italy. This is my least favorite aspect of pasta; I prefer the accessible and familiar to the rare and mythical. But I won’t begrudge those artisanal pastificios their monopoly; they just make better dry pasta than anyone else, anywhere. They do so with durum wheat, a high-protein cultivar, and low-calcium mountain spring water. The dough is slowly extruded through bronze dies, which roughens the surface of the shapes, and then dried at low temperatures. The results are as yellow as country butter but with a powdery, textured appearance that transforms a pot of boiling water into the crucial, starchy nectar required for later assembly.

If an average home cook is under the impression boiling pasta is easy, then something, or more likely, several things are wrong. The most difficult aspect of making a pasta meal well is the boiling. I begin by determining dinner time. An hour or more before the appointed time I fill my largest stock pot, an unwieldy and battered thing that holds eighteen quarts, with about ten or twelve quarts of water drawn from a tap that has been permitted to first run for at least a minute. I wrestle the pot to my most dependable hob, put a lid on it, and blast it with the highest heat my stove can manage. This is a good time to get cleaned up and changed for dinner. When the water is rapidly boiling… give some thought to what you’d like to dress the pasta with.

I have made or had made for me enough plates of pasta to feel comfortable in saying the most successful combinations feature no more than three or possibly four ingredients. For example: chili flakes, garlic and cherry tomatoes. Or: pecorino, black pepper and parsley. Complex tomato-based sauces that have been cooking for impossibly long periods of time, while rarely offensive, are almost universally muted. Besides, the best rich and long-cooked pasta sauce is the cooking liquor from a braised piece of meat. No—in my experience, dry pasta is an exercise in minimalism and economy. Have some mortadella that needs to be used? A radichio? An onion? Perfect. Thinly slice all three, and beginning with the meat, fry in olive oil. Is it a sauce? No: it is a dressing—an austere enhancement to the magnificence of the pasta. You wouldn’t try and improve upon the beauty of a Vermeer by submerging it in a gaudy frame, would you?

Part two will deal with boiling, draining, the theory of doneness and the heart-stopping few moments of marrying pasta and dressing.