The Dilemma: The recipe calls for penne, but all you have is rigatoni. Mama mia!

People You Can Impress: men in the “sanitation business” or women who pinch your cheeks and tell you you’re too skinny

The Quick Trick: Who cares? Mange!

The Explanation:
Let’s start with the word pasta. It’s so commonplace that you generally don’t even think about the word itself. But pasta is simply Italian for “paste,” the flour-and-water dough from which pasta is made. The fancy culinary term is “alimentary paste.” Now you may be thinking, Uncooked pasta’s not a paste. It’s hard until I boil it. That’s only because Americans mostly buy dried pasta in boxes. Fresh pasta is actually soft.

Today culinary scientists estimate that there are roughly one bazillion kinds of pasta, or so we’ve heard. A lot of them are so similar, it makes you wonder why they ever came up with them (can anyone explain why we needed two corkscrew pastas: fusilli and rotini? And don’t get us started on spiralini). But obviously, a food so central to the Italian lifestyle is going to have lots of variations.

All four of these pastas are tubular, which is why people get them confused. Like most pastas, they’re named after what they look like.

We’ll start with the most basic. Ziti are smooth, short tubes. The name comes from the now obsolete word in the Tuscan dialect, citta, meaning “girl” or “bride.” Some stories claim the pasta got its name because it was often served at weddings. Others say it was named after the masculine version, citto (“bridegroom”), because it looks a bit phallic.

Rigatoni, on the other hand, are basically ziti with ridges (from the Italian rigate). The theory is that ridged pasta holds on to the sauce better. If your tubes are slightly curved and ridged, however, they’re tortiglioni. If the tubes are straight but the ridges are spiral, enjoy your elicoidali, paesan.

Now on to the diagonal tubes. Much like the ridge innovation, the diagonal cuts to the ends of these pastas are meant to be better for scooping up sauce. If a diagonally cut tube is smooth, that’s mostaccioli, meaning “little mustache,” because at some point little mustaches must have looked more like this. Penne are like mostaccioli, but slightly longer and thinner. As for their meaning, penne means “quill pens,” the tips of which penne resemble.

Of course, your tubular choices don’t exactly end there. You might also enjoy paccheri, maltagliati, canneroni, cannolicchi, reginelle, and pasta al ceppo. And when all else fails, you can’t go wrong with elbow macaroni.

Cooking 101
Add a pinch of salt to cooking pasta to keep it firm. Oh, and should you combine different types of pasta in one dish, be sure to use similarly shaped varieties, so that they cook in the same amount of time.