no, I never wondered

This article in the Times food section yesterday cracked me up. A fellow known as Harold McGee, who refers to himself as "The Curious Cook," prattled on and on about whether we really need to use so much water when we cook pasta. He earnestly suggested that using less water than the typical 4 to 6 quarts per pot of pasta would save several trillion BTUs at the stovetop, which translates to a half a million barrels of oil. Give or take. Now I'm already not buying his obviously drunken cocktail napkin math, mostly because it sounds ridiculous and improbable. And because he sounds way too much like Andy Rooney whining, "Didja ever wonder why we use so much water to cook our noodles?" If this article was 60 Minutes, I'd have already clicked away to a MacGyver rerun. (Didja ever wonder why they won't sack that miserable goober Andy Rooney already?)

Anyhow, I decided to keep reading, primarily because Mr. McGee indicated he was going to pester the Big Mama Mias of Italian cooking, Marcella Hazan and Lidia Bastianich, about his little egghead theory and I reckoned Lidia would smack him upside the head for me. Instead, both Lidia and Marcella agreed to experiment with using less water, even though you and I both know they had much better things to do. Upshot? Marcella reported that yes, you can do it, but you have to spend all your time stirring the pasta so it doesn't stick, so you're using less water but expending more effort. And Lidia said, "Yeah, sure, I guess you can do it. Now beat it, buster." Hardly ringing endorsements of his brainy less-pasta-water technique.

Bottom line: When we saved Italy's bacon in WWII we were promised we could use all the cool, clean water we want to cook those piles of tasty pasta we brought home with us. And if God wanted us to use less water to cook our spaghetti, He wouldn't have given us those awesome pots the nice kids at Williams Sonoma will sell you. One of those babies can cook three pounds of pasta at a time, you know! This is America. More is better. And less is almost always, well, less.