Raise your hand if you've never indulged in a plate of very creamy oven-baked pasta, full of ingredients, au gratin under a mountain of grated cheese.
Or in a good old pasta salad, mixed with canned tuna, vegetables, and a generous portion of mayonnaise.
On October 25th, International pasta Day, it is quite likely that a good portion of Brazilians will celebrate it in this way – without any al dente cooked pasta or authentic Italian sauce.
Introduced to the popular masses by immigrants, Brazilians have created recipes so national that it is difficult to find any Italian accent in them.
This is the case of the countless variations of oven-baked pasta, which over here bears the status of fancy food.
There is the pasta prepared in a roasting pan, which mixes ingredients such as cottage cheese, shredded chicken, and chopped ham, and even the pasta cooked in a pressure cooker.
The habit of buying long, darker spaghetti, which comes packaged in paper, has also lived on.
The strings are about 50cm long and do not fit in any pot, which helps to explain another ingrained habit among Brazilians and despised by Italians, that of breaking pasta before cooking it.
Translated by Cassy Dias